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The more enthusiastic the fans and the press got, the worse they behaved. They also tended to get worse the more famous a fighter was, and Nick had a lot of fans.

With Nick himself, however, the biggest risk was probably that he’d shoot his mouth off in ways that would piss Farlucci off. He had a tendency to be sarcastic and flippant, including about the fight industry itself. Of course, he’d had his days where it was tempting to do more than make sarcastic remarks. Some of these humans had no fucking filter whatsoever between their brains and their mouths, maybe especially when they viewed Nick as more “thing” than “person.”

In practical, everyday terms, Nick’s Farlucci-appointed bodyguards mostly served as deterrents to any members of the media who might try to talk to him after a big fight like this one, or even try to enter the fight pit itself to harass him for an interview.

Nick tended to be a popular target for those sorts of ambushes, which baffled him, frankly. It wasn’t like he did a lot of talking, even when they did manage to get him alone. He had to be the most boring fucking interview subject in the entire circuit. No matter how much they prodded him, he had no interest in playing the taunting game with his opponents, or even the “aw, shucks” false modesty some of the fighters employed.

He asked Wynter once, how he came off in interviews.

“Like a cop,” she said without hesitation.

He’d snorted. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means you sound like a cop,” she’d said, smiling. “You sound like you’re giving some kind of situation report. Usually you list out the fight sequence, blow by blow, like you’re documenting a crime scene.”

Nick thought about that, snorted. “Great.”

“It’s cute.”

He’d given her a disbelieving look. “How could thatpossiblybe cute?”

She wrapped her arms around his neck. “I don’t know,” she’d said, still smiling as she shrugged. “But it is. It’s fucking adorable.”

He’d smiled back, then wanted to laugh when he realized something else.

“It’s cute when you say ‘fuck,’ principal-lady,” he’d murmured in her ear.

He hadn’t even been lying.

He couldn’t help but find it adorable when she swore.

It sounded so strange coming out of her mouth, and not only because she was the principal of a super-swanky boarding school, and, unlike him, he’d never once heard her swear at work, at least not where she might be overheard.

Cops swore constantly, unnecessarily.

They were as bad as the military.

The thought made him wince a little again, even as he refocused on Farlucci’s face.

It hit him that his fight manager had been gushing about the fight that whole time, that familiar light in his eyes that told Nick he’d made a lot of money for his boss that night.

“––fucking unreal, that thing you did where you whipped him around!” Farlucci burst out in a delighted laugh. “I thought you were going to break the fuckingwall!And how, in the dark shadowed underworld of thevert,did you break his nose through that mask? I’ve never seen thatdonebefore. That blood probably gave us an extra point share in ratings, if not three––”

Nick smiled politely.

As he didn’t seem to be required to answer, he didn’t.

Farlucci moved on a few minutes later, after clapping him cheerfully on the shoulder, only to pull his hand away and wipe it with a small towel one of the two human bodyguards handed him. He jogged happily in the direction of his office, still grinning, and now apparently speaking to someone in his headset, although he didn’t bother to switch it to sub-vocals but simply continued to brag loudly about the fight to whoever listened on the other end.

Nick sighed.

The sigh was just for show, of course, since he didn’t breathe, but it still expressed something emotionally.

Once he couldn’t hear Farlucci anymore, he continued his interrupted trip to the showers.

* * *

Nick’s headsetbeeped right as he fitted it back to his ear.