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“Will you two quit?” I hiss, irritated with both of them. “I’m a grown-ass woman. I don’t need protection from either one of you.”

Carmen and Raf exchange a look that says, quite plainly, that I do.

I clench my jaw. This is what’s so infuriating about being a human with a shifter brother. I’ve been immersed in pack life since before I could walk, surrounded by powerful wolves. My friends were shifters. I dated shifters. And yet, I was never one of them.

That fact became brutally apparent the night Carmen’s ex-boyfriend came to pick us up from a party after throwing back one too many shots himself. He took a left turn after the light turned red, and a truck crossing the intersection T-boned our car.

Shifters are notoriously hard to kill, and AJ walked away without a scratch. Carmen broke her arm in the crash, but it healed in a matter of days. I was diagnosed with an epidural hematoma — bleeding around the brain. I’d also sustained a fractured collarbone and dislocated my shoulder.

Even for humans, bones and muscles heal relatively fast. The brain takes longer, and sometimes it never fully recovers.

Carmen opens her mouth, but before she can sayanything, music blares over the loudspeakers, and the crowd goes wild. A spotlight beams down near the back of the arena, and I see the next fighter and his team walking out.

I’d been so caught up in this little family reunion, I’d almost forgotten there were more fights on the card. The walkout song is Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” and the fighter —

The man’s tall frame looms over the crowd, and my stomach drops to the floor.

If I was surprised to see Raf here, it’s nothing compared to the gut punch I feel when I see the fighter cutting through the crowd. He’s got to be six three, six four at least, with a strong, sharp jaw and short dark hair.

My breath catches in my throat, and Carmen makes a surprised sound of recognition. “Is that . . .Jake?”

“Yep,” says Raf, following my gaze to his best friend and our former next-door neighbor. I hear the disapproval in his voice.

I haven’t seen or heard from Jake Carson in six years. The messed-up part is that I’ve thought about him plenty.

“I told him he should quit taking fights,” says Raf. “But he doesn’t listen to me.”

I’m not surprised. When we were kids, Jake was always getting into scuffles with the rougher kids in the neighborhood. It wasn’t until he took up boxing at the Y that he stopped getting into trouble. When he turned eighteen, he started training mixed-martial arts and joined the shifter fight league.

As I watch Jake climb the steps leading into the octagon, a little shiver rolls through me. Jake moves with a predatory grace that only shifters have.

He steps into the cage, and another song blares over the loudspeaker as his opponent struts in. Every head turns to look at the dark-skinned mountain-lion shifter heading for the cage, but I’m still too busy watching Jake.

His face looks the same as it did when I was a teenager, but his shoulders and chest are broader — his whole body more filled out.

Even so, the man doesn’t have a scrap of fat on him. His biceps look as though they might have been carved from a block of marble, and he’s got a set of killer washboard abs. His fight shorts hang low on his narrow hips, revealing a thin line of dark hair that disappears beneath his waistline.

I lick my lips, which suddenly feel much too dry.

“Talk about a blast from the past,” Carmen mutters.

I nod, though I don’t take my eyes off the man in the cage.

Jake bounces from one foot to the other to keep his muscles warm as he waits for his opponent. This is the closest I’ve been to him in six years, and yet the thirty feet separating us might as well be thirty-thousand miles. So much has happened since I knew him.

The referee says something to the fighters, and Jake reaches out to bump his gloved fist against his opponent’s in a show of good sportsmanship.

The mountain lion ignores the gesture.

They move back to get some distance from one another, and Jake tilts his head toward his left shoulder — a tell he’s had since we were kids that I know means he’s nervous.

As I watch, his gaze drifts out to the crowd to find Rafael. Then his eyes latch onto mine.

CHAPTER TWO

JAKE

Elena.