My stomach is so unsettled I feel like I’m going to toss out my intestines. I want Nora to be safe, but I desperately need Rem back in the hotel, where I’m sure I could try to appease him with sex. If he wants to break me into submission, then by god I’ll let the man believe anything he wants, just to get him calm and easy again. I’m not afraid of him. I won’t be. He’s still my Remy, only in a bad fucking mood.

But at five a.m. he’s still not back. I’m checking the internet like crazy and have the local news playing on TV, fearing the worst. I hear a door and raise my head, my heart pulsing in my throat when I see Riley. Instantly I jump from the couch to my feet. “Remy? Where is he? What did he do?”

Riley won’t look at my face, just walks directly into the master bedroom and searches the closet. “He’s at the ER.”

An awful tension stretches from one end of my spine to the other, and suddenly I feel whipped in the tail and charge determinedly after him. “What did he do? Let me go get my things. I need to see him.”

Riley grabs his toothbrush, his razor, and tosses everything into a small leather bag. “It’s better if you wait here. It’s just some stitches.” He then gets his boxing shoes and outfit for the match. “They’re not disqualified. Neither one of them are telling. The fight goes on tonight, or shall we say? Continues. Tonight.”

The acids in my stomach start to bubble uncomfortably. I really lack the testosterone for all this. It used to be sexy in movies when a guy fights for a girl but this is my guy, fighting because of me, and I feel about as awful as possible and more than a little desperate to go and nurture and protect him.

“What ER is he in?” Following him through the bedroom, I snatch up a pair of jeans and slide them under Remy’s black t-shirt—the one I sometimes sleep with.

Pivoting on his heel when he reaches the door, he stays me back with both hands. “Please don’t, for the love of god, show up, B. Neither Pete nor I want him to see you. Please, Brooke. Just listen to me.”

“But how is he…” I blink at him, my eyes blurring as my voice breaks. “Just tell me how he is.”

“He’s pissed off. They sedated him at the hospital. Honestly, I don’t know how we can expect him to fight tonight. But at least he’s angry.”

I scowl at the slamming door and am left staring after him. I feel angry too, but I also feel eaten inside. The urge to see him is acute, but I don’t know if I would help or hinder him, I just don’t know anything about this. Using his laptop, I Google bipolarism and come into tons of articles describing a manic episode as the person being in either an extremely happy or an extremely irritable mood; who also engages in an excess of pleasurable activities, sex, gambling, alcohol and sometimes experiences hallucinations; feeling rested after zero or no sleep, acting recklessly or violent; and such episode is often followed by a depressive episode when the person can barely get out of bed. I’m sure Remy is manic right now, and I’d already seen he was speedy all these nights of hard sex. I remember him telling me the night he told me about being bipolar how I’m going to leave if it gets steep, and I’m doubly resolved not to be a chicken shit and stick it out with him.

But I wonder how he’s coping right now, after he tussled with that damned reptile man.

God, please, please, don’t let me ruin his fight tonight.

That’s all I think of as I grab my sneakers, my knee brace, and head into the hotel gym, grab a treadmill and pound it for two hours. I focus on planning what to do when I see him. I want to say I’m sorry that I felt it necessary not to tell him about me visiting my sister, but I had to talk to her and didn’t want to worry him. I want to kiss him and forget all this ever went down, but unfortunately, the morning goes by, and I don’t see him at noon, or even at one, or at two, or at three.

I don’t see him until the fight.

And by then, I’m absolutely, positively, a mass of quaking nerves. I haven’t seen Pete in all this time either, only Coach and Riley, who both ushered me to my seat when I tried winding my way backstage to see him. “Please just let him get into the zone,” Riley says.

All I can do is nod, and I’m assaulted by a sick yearning as I take my seat and wait and wait endlessly. There’s only one fight tonight. Only Remington and Scorpion will face each other, and this one match will last for hours. It’s already felt like an eternity by the time I hear his name tear through the speakers, and my heart rises in my chest at the same time the spectators fly to their feet to cheer for him.

“And nowwww, ladies and gentlemen, the moment we’ve all been waiting for. Our reigning champion, the defender, the one and only, Remington RIPTIDE Tate!”

The crowd goes wild, and I’m suddenly buoyant as my eyes see a flash of red at the beginning of the tunnel.

He comes out trotting to the ring, and the butterflies explode inside me. My eyes burn with the urge to see him up close. He hops into the ring and stretches out his arms, and Riley pulls off his red hood and sets it easily aside.

My eyes rake down his body, and a cold, hard shock holds me immobile for several long, disbelieving heartbeats. Bruises color purple all the way up his torso. There are gashes on his lips, and several stitches run across his right eyebrow.

Forcing myself to sit down, I anxiously wait for Remington’s usual turn. But he doesn’t make it. The crowd screams his name in a chant, and I notice the Underground is packed with more fans of his than Scorpion’s. But tonight Remington isn’t his cocky self, and he doesn’t turn and smile at them. He doesn’t turn and smile at me.

My spirits sink, and suddenly I realize I have never, ever, ached for someone’s smile as badly as his.

I’ve never felt so painfully invisible until I feel the lack of his eyes on me tonight.

When the presenter calls out, “And nooow, ladies and gentlemen, the nightmare you’ve all been dreading to come alive is here. Watch out for Benny the Blaaaaaack Scorpion!”

A nauseating sinking sense of despair hits me when Remy still won’t bring his blue/black eyes to mine as he watches Scorpion come slowly down the tunnel with both his middle fingers stretched out high in a bold, obvious, “Yeah, fuck you, Remington Tate, and fuck the public too!”

Icy dread spreads through my stomach as I study Remy’s proud, hard profile as he waits by his corner, and the lack of his cocky response to Scorpion’s outward bravado becomes painfully obvious to me. Suddenly I wonder if he’s too proud to forgive me. Will he never kiss me? Make love to me? Love me back like I love him? Because I kissed his enemy? I’m twisting inside with the need to talk to him, to explain, to say good luck and smile at him.

But he doesn’t glance in my direction and I’m filled with the suspicion he’s doing his damnedest to glance anywhere but at me as Scorpion hops on the ring.

I watch as Scorpion’s black cape is removed and notice he looks bad too. His face is pounded purple at the exact place where his tattoo used to be, and now a scarred area with at least a dozen stitches lay where his black crawling insect used to crawl. Scorpion’s yellow eyes land instantly on Remington, and a familiar, satanic smile spreads across his thin lips, a smile which already seems victorious compared to the somber, quiet intensity I see in Remington’s face.

Heart twisting in anxious fear, I look for Nora among the crowd and try to locate her among Scorpion’s goons, but she’s nowhere in sight. My dread doubles when I wonder if all this I caused, all this … was for nothing?

Ting ting.

The bell rings, and all the atoms in my body hone in on Remington as both fighters go to center and toe to toe. Scorpion lands a punch in Remy’s ribs, then quickly slams his jaw back in an awful one-two punch that I can hear striking flesh and bone. Remington holds his ground, but shudders as he recovers and continues going toe to toe with Scorpion, his arms folded low at his sides.

My eyebrows draw together in confusion. In every fight I’ve seen him participate, and in the time I tussled in the ring with him and learned some boxing moves from him, Remy has never kept his guard this low. An awful premonition sinks its awful claws into my stomach, and I glance up to try to read the dark frowns on Riley and Coach’s faces. The grim lines etched on both their features only confirm my suspicions.

Remington’s guard is completely down. His thick, muscled arms hang relaxed and idle at his sides, and now he’s just bouncing on his calves as if waiting for the next hit to come. His eyebrows are drawn, his eyes narrowed fiercely, but he looks almost … hungry for it, in a raging, reckless way.

Scorpion rams a punch into his gut, then follows it with an uppercut on the jaw that Remington takes too easily, straightening almost right away and glaring back at Scorpion as though begging for another one.

He almost seems … suicidal.

The next three punches, Remington takes in the body again, two in the chest, one in the ribcage, and he still hasn’t landed a single punch on Scorpion. His guard won’t come up, but all you can see of Remington’s spirit is in his eyes. Which blaze fire into Scorpion as he quickly recovers from each blow and steps back up as though daring him to hit him again.

I’m speechless.

There’s no way to still my erratic pulse, or my mind from spinning. I can’t stop fretting over whether his ribs can take any more blows, and I’m wildly trying to determine what other injuries he sustained during the night when they fought privately. What if he’s not punching because he’s unable to stretch his arms out to punch?

He is. Not. Punching. At all.

My heartbeat won’t calm and that alarming premonition of something awful happening has seized me in its grip. I want to go up there and hug my guy and pull him out of there!

Scorpion swings out with his left hand and lands one in the jaw, then lands a straight punch in the face that knocks Remington to his knees. My throat goes raw with unuttered shouts and protests as the public begins booing.

“Boooo! Booo!!”

“Kill the bastard, Riptide! KILL HIM!”

The fight continues, endless, gray as night.

In all of Remington’s fights, I would feel all kinds of twisting nerves as well as excitement, but now it is only anguish and pain roiling inside me as blow after blow, Remington takes it.

Every punch breaks me inside. I can feel the ache in my bones as if his bones were mine. I’m so wounded by the sixth round, I need to take him away in my head, where he will play me a song. I need to take him to a run, where he will look at me and smile with shining blue eyes. I need to take our bed, where we’re warm and happy and peaceful. I need to take him somewhere, anywhere, where he can tell me what … the fuck … is wrong!

I sit here and watch the man I love getting beat to death, and when he falls to his knees after taking an awful set of punches on his abs, he still won’t give up. Panting for breath and with his forehead and mouth dripping in blood, he delights the public by jumping back to his feet and angrily spitting blood on Scorpion’s face, rebellious as he takes a stance once more.

“Remy, fight him!” I suddenly hear myself scream, and I’m screaming at the top of my lungs in a way I have never in my life screamed before. “REMY, FIGHT HIM! FOR ME! FOR ME!”