Arden grunted, our hands parted, and the gun fell from his grip, cascading down the cliff and bouncing high in the air as it hit a rock. Spinning silently, it dropped out of sight, no longer a part of Arden’s arsenal.

“Fuck,” he muttered, completely monotone.

“Why didn’t you just fucking shoot me?” I snapped.

“Still jammed,” he replied.

“I thought you were a fucking gun expert,” I challenged. “You telling me you can’t unjam a gun?”

“Not with one hand,” he replied in the same tone.

One hand…did he lose a fucking arm in the avalanche? It was possible, and I hoped it was true. In this cold, bleeding to death would take quite some time, but having him end that way sounded pretty good to me.

I shifted my shoulders against the snow behind me, trying to create a little wiggle room. I was only mildly successful, but it gave me just enough space to be able to turn and see him.

Evan Arden was lying on his side, facing me, with one arm not just below him but completely buried under rocks and snow. Unlike my icy tomb, Arden’s was made of more rocks than ice, and he was definitely pinned down. He had one leg trapped as well.

I let out a short laugh.

“Well, you’re fucked,” I said simply. I went back to digging at the snow around my lower half. If I could get out, I could finish him off without a lot of resistance.

A half hour later, I was panting, sweating, freezing, and still completely unable to dig myself out. I dropped my head back into the snow behind me and watched my breath rise in puffs around my mask and over my head.

I turned my head to see Arden’s stoic face as he laid his head against a rock and stared out over the cliff. There were a lot of marks in the snow where he had obviously tried to free his arm, but the rocks and ice were too thick there. He’d need a fucking bulldozer or at least some help, which I wasn’t about to offer.

His gaze shifted to me.

“This is supposed to be my fucking retirement,” Arden mumbled.

“Ha!” I snorted. “Mine, too.”

“Oh yeah?” He shifted his head lower to rest it on the snow and sighed again. “What are you doing here, then?”

“Killing your ass is the plan,” I answered simply.

“I’ve heard that before,” he replied. “Everyone who ever said it is floating in the Chicago river.”

“Everyone I’ve ever said it to is six feet under.”

He moved his eyes to me and gave me a slight nod.

“So I’ve heard,” he said, “but you’ve been out of the games for a long time.”

I didn’t comment. My leg was starting to throb, and I was convinced it was broken. Conversation was distracting, pointless, and pissing me off. I needed to get myself out of this and kill the guy beside me. Even then, my chances of getting back down the mountainside with a busted up leg were growing slimmer by the minute.

I was cold. Really fucking cold.

I closed my eyes and tried to think of Raine, hoping thoughts of her waiting for me would give me a little more motivation and maybe even warm me a little. Thinking just made the back of my head throb, and I reached up to rub at it. There was a good knot back there, and touching it made me dizzy.

Fucking fabulous.

I set my head back against the snow bank to catch my breath. I needed energy, so I dug down a little by my side until I could reach the pocket with the tubes of nutritional goo. I sucked it down my throat and then ate a few nuts to get rid of the taste of the overly processed shit in a tube.

“Why did you agree to play?” Arden asked. “If you’re supposed to be retired, why come back now? This is all about the Chicago war, not Seattle.”

“It wasn’t exactly by choice,” I said with a sigh. I was too tired to yell at him, and wasting energy was a bad idea anyway. “Why are you here? You were never a tournament player before.”

“Nope, never was,” he confirmed.

“So, why?”

“Rinaldo asked me to do it,” he said simply.

“You always do what he asks?”

“Pretty much,” Arden confirmed.

“Why you?”

“I killed the guy who would have otherwise done it,” Arden replied as he stared up into the sky.

“You killed one of your boss’s men?”

He moved his eyes slowly to mine. He didn’t need to respond verbally.

“You got balls,” I muttered.

“He was an asshole,” Arden said.

“There are plenty of those around. You can’t kill them all.”

“Maybe.” He kept looking at me, and his cold eyes reminded me a bit of Landon’s. They were the wrong color—much too dark. In fact, they were pretty close to the shade of blue in my eyes. “So why are you here?”

I ignored him. The last thing I wanted to do was have him thinking that I had someone out there to make me vulnerable. Not that it mattered at this point—only one of us was going to get out of this alive.

If even that.

Closing my eyes, I tried to find my focus again. Getting free was paramount, but my body was exhausted and half frozen. I licked my lips, and it felt like the cold was freezing the saliva to my mouth. I needed more focus to stop myself from giving in to the temptation to just give up and lie back in the snow.

Incentive.

Struggling a little due to my mitten-covered hands, I reached under my parka and into my breast pocket to pull out the drawing Alex had made. I unfolded it carefully and stared at the figures in the picture. I traced the bottom of the picture where Alex had drawn his feet in blue tennis shoes and long, crazy laces and then brushed the edge of Raine’s face with my thumb.

When I glanced back over my shoulder, Arden was still looking at me. From his vantage point, he would have seen the picture clearly. For a moment, I felt a touch of panic because every one of the people watching over the closed circuit had just seen it, too.

But Arden’s head was free of his goggles as well. We had both lost the cameras used to broadcast back to Resolute. There was no beacon being transmitted from our location at all. They didn’t know where we were or what we were doing. Their last images would have been the avalanche taking us both down the side of the mountain.

We were fucked—completely and totally. It didn’t matter what he knew now.

“They got my girl,” I said quietly. As the words came out of my mouth, something inside me flipped. It was over. There was no way I was going to be able to get out of this without help, and as much as I didn’t want to admit it, I was done. I couldn’t move. My leg was broken. This was going to be an all losers tournament.

Arden didn’t respond, and I looked over to him. He was staring blankly into the snow in front of his face with his jaw tight.

“You’re never going to see her again,” he said, “not the kid, either.”

My muscles tightened at his words. As much as I wanted to deny it, I knew he was right. I’d come to the exact same conclusion. I wasn’t about to admit it out loud, though.

“Fuck you,” I growled. “I’m getting out of this, fucking you over, and going home to them.”

“No, you aren’t,” Arden said. “You know it, too. You just figured it out.”

“How do you know that?” I snapped back at him.

He shrugged with his one free arm.

“Your posture just changed,” he said. “You slumped down, and your eyes dropped. There’s no way to dig yourself out, and we aren’t going to help each other, so there will be no winner for this tournament. You were looking at that crayon drawing when you realized you’d never see her or your kid again.”

I couldn’t hide the shock I felt.

“Wha…?”

He moved his shoulder up and down again.

“I’m pretty perceptive,” he said numbly.

I mentally gathered myself together.

“Well, it’s bullshit,” I said, trying to convince myself of the words. “I’m just giving myself a little break before I haul my ass out of this snow bank, beat you to death, and head back home. All I have to do is make it down that mountainside, and then I’m done for good.”

“You’ll fight again,” Arden said. “Well, you will if you ever get out of this, which you won’t. If you did, this still wouldn’t be your last tournament.”

“Fuck you,” I said with a snarl. “I don’t quit in the middle of a fight. This is my last tournament, and it ends in victory just like my first fight and every one of them in between.”

“It never ends,” Arden said. “Franks won’t let you go any more than Rinaldo will let me go. Once they got you, they got you. You never get away from them completely, even when they tell you that you can.”

I might not have been as perceptive as he was, but I still knew he wasn’t talking about me anymore. He was talking about himself.

“Landon isn’t going to fuck me over,” I said. Everything Arden was saying rang true, aligning with my own thoughts, but I refused to agree with him. “I know him. He told me this was it, and he wouldn’t go back on his word. He’s like my fucking father.”

Arden chuckled.

“Yeah, I got one of those, too. He’s the reason I’m here, retirement or not.”

Arden pulled his arm across his chest and placed his hand under his head to get it off the snow. He looked into my eyes again. For a second, he didn’t look quite as emotionless as he had before. His eyes tightened a bit, and his jaw flexed as he spoke.

“We’re too good for them to just let us go,” Arden continued. “Even if they really want to, they’re always going to need us for something one last time.”

I stared at him as the words sank in, and I knew deep inside that he was right. If I did get out of this, Franks and Landon would let me off on my own for a while, but eventually there would be something else—just one more thing they needed for me to do. One more favor. One more fight.