Assuming he didn’t already have one: That murder in Mississippi worried her—but it was, like all of his other stuff, something for the proper authorities to deal with. As his defense attorney, she had to try to get him to stay and face the music on his current charges. It was the right thing for society—the right thing for him as well.

And if she couldn’t get him to see the light? Then she was going to resign from the case and tell the authorities everything she knew about him. Including the guns and the details of that security system. She wasn’t going to become an accessory to crime in her pursuit of doing the right thing—

She froze as she saw her client, her hand coming up to the base of her throat.

Isaac Rothe was standing alone in the far corner, and though the chain links of the cage separated them, there was no mistaking who it was . . . and no diminishing the effect of him: He was a menace, his size and the hard expression on his face turning the other men into little boys. And whereas she’d been struck by his politeness back at the jail, now she got a true picture of who he was.

The man was a killer.

Her heart beat fast, but she didn’t falter. She was here to do a job of sorts, and damn it, she was going to talk with him.

Just as she stepped forward, some smarmy guy with gold teeth monkeyed up one side of the cage. “And now . . . what you’re waitin’ for!”

Isaac took off his sweatshirt and his combats, leaving them on the floor, and then he prowled the ring, his chin down, his eyes glaring out from under his brows. His shirt stretched tightly across his pecs, and his arms were carved with power even as they hung loosely at his sides. Heading into the fight, he was all muscle and bone and vein, his shoulders so wide he looked like he could bench-press the damn building.

As he clawed up the cage and landed on bare feet inside, the roar of the crowd rang her head like a bell and turned her spine into an adrenaline conductor. In the glow of the eight camping lanterns that hung off the support poles, her client was part gladiator, part animal, a deadly package ready to do what he’d clearly been trained for.

Unfortunately, the opponent who swung over the top and landed across from him was nearly a mirror image of him: same brutal build, same height, same deadly look—even dressed the same way, his muscle shirt showing plenty of the snake tattoo that wound its way around his shoulders and neck. And while the audience hollered and closed in, the two circled each other, looking for an opportunity, arms and chests and thighs tensed.