I wasn’t a sharer by nature.

I preferred to keep to myself.

Better that way.

I hadn’t meant to tell Charlie about my mother.

That shit was sacred.

But I guess walking the razor’s edge of fuck-all made a person share more than they might otherwise.

We could both die choking on our own blood by morning.

Chantel could fuck us both and decide that the devil she knew was better than the devil she didn’t.

Davonte was ass-fucking her business but at least she always knew what to expect.

Terrance could be ten times worse for all she knew.

I understood the risk.

I knew it was a gamble with crappy odds.

But like I said to Charlie…it’d been the only play we had so I took it.

While I’d said that returning to the motel seemed safest, that’s not where we ended up.

I didn’t relish the idea of sitting in a tight space with Charlie for hours either.

The girl made my insides vibrate.

I could smell her skin and taste her sweetness.

My fingers itched to spread her legs and feast again.

Instead, I tightened my grip on the steering wheel, determined to keep my distance.

But something inside me squirmed and thrashed in protest, banging around until I thought I might lose my mind if I didn’t feel Charlie pressed tightly against my skin.

I didn’t deserve someone like Charlie.

Neither did Davonte.

Charlie reminded me of Ma in that she was better than this lifestyle could offer.

Ma had fallen in love with a fighter and it’d been her downfall.

Disowned by her family, thrown into the rough life of the Detroit slums, often bewildered by the violence and chaos that made up each day in a world owned by poverty, Ma had been a rare flower trying to survive through a crack in the pavement.

And I wanted to tell her story to someone.

No, not just someone…to Charlie.

I guess that’s how we ended up in Ma’s old neighborhood, eating convenience store hot dogs that’d been rolling in their own grease for likely hours because they were chewy and disgusting but we were starved and they tasted incredible.

“Where are we?” Charlie asked, realizing we weren’t anywhere near the shitty motel we were staying at. She wiped the grease from her hands and mouth with a paper thin napkin. “Good God, the houses here are monstrous. Can you imagine having money like that? It’s almost obscene.”

I grunted in agreement but kept driving, winding through the tony neighborhood, my beat-up truck nearly screaming that I wasn’t a resident.

After my dad died, Ma used to drive me here, to where she’d grown up, but we never stopped, just drove through like hungry visitors, tourists who didn’t belong.

Fuck yeah, we didn’t belong.

Mansions lined the street.

It was like walking into a parallel world where nothing made sense.

Ma had walked away from all this? For my dad?

I couldn’t make heads or tails of such a sacrifice.

Because of the rift, I knew nothing of my mother’s side of the family and they seemed fine with knowing nothing about me.

No one had shown up for her funeral.

It’d just been me and the priest.

Quiet.

As if Ma had never existed.

I wanted to tell Charlie my mother grew up in this place, that she’d been among the obscenely rich that she and I knew nothing about but that would raise questions I couldn’t answer.

Would reveal soft spots I’d spent a lifetime protecting.

Besides, it wasn’t my world.

Never had been.

Never would be.

Diamond stars punctured the night sky and a nearly full moon bathed everything in a milky glow.

A few moments later, with my mother’s childhood home behind us, I pulled up to an empty park and shut off the truck.

Children’s play equipment gleamed in the ghostly light as the temperature continued to drop, slowly freezing any moisture that remained on the cold metal.

The park was older, probably one of many forgotten by city planners.

Gang graffiti marred any surface big enough to tag and no one had bothered to clean it up.

“Why’d we come here?” Charlie asked.

I shrugged. “You said you didn’t want to go back to the motel just yet.”

She acknowledged my answer with a nod. “Why this place?”

“My mother used to bring me here sometimes.”

“To this park?”

“Yeah.” I shifted in my seat, my gaze drifting over the eery decay. “It used to be nicer.”

“A lot of things used to be nicer in Detroit,” she commiserated. “Many places look like this now.”

Only a native would truly understand the pride and pain of living somewhere that’d fallen so hard that it couldn’t seem to rise.

Entire swaths of neighborhoods had been emptied, left behind because there was no more industry, no income to sustain them.

People had to eat.

Charlie was a smart girl. I knew her brain would put things together without me having to lead her to the answers.

“That neighborhood we went through, the one with all the fancy houses…did your mom live there?”

I grunted in answer, not fully trusting my voice.

“How’d she end up…”

“In the slums?” I finished for Charlie, to which she nodded. “She fell in love with the wrong person. Her family disowned her for shaming them.”

Charlie’s breath hitched at my admission. “That’s terrible. How could they do that to their own flesh and blood?”

“I guess things work differently when you have obscene amounts of money,” I answered. “They didn’t even come to her funeral.”

“God, that sucks. I’m sorry.”

Discomfort danced along my forearms. I wasn’t used to sharing so much. I didn’t know how to deal with the feeling that I was stripping myself far more bare than shedding my clothes ever had.

“You and your mom, you were close?”

“Yes.”

“How’d she die?”

“Doc said it was heart failure but she’d been pretty young for her ticker to go out like that. Sometimes I think she just couldn’t do it anymore.”

“What happened to your dad?”

“Died in a factory accident when I was ten.”

I grew up that day.

Became the man of the house.

Which meant, I had to find a way to make money.

That’s how I found The Underground.

Charlie’s expression softened as she processed my answers. God, I felt naked but not in a good way.

Maybe it would’ve been better to just suffer the close quarters of the motel room.

At least if we’d fallen to fucking, it would’ve taken my mind off what I was feeling right now.

“Why didn’t you leave after your brother died?” I asked, ready to take the spotlight off of me. “What kept you here?”

“Pride. Rage. Grief,” Charlie answered. “Tommy was my brother, the only family that meant anything to me. And suddenly, he was gone. If it’d been my chickenshit father who’d died in the ring, I might’ve shed a single tear, maybe not, but it wouldn’t have wrecked me. Losing Tommy…somedays I think I’ll never recover.”

I understood that pain.

I felt that way losing my mother.

Kids who grew up fast and hard in this life were taught to hold nothing sacred because bad luck was the only luck they had.

You couldn’t hurt if nothing mattered.

I guess you could say Charlie and I shared the misery of breaking that rule.

I wanted to tell her that the pain would eventually stop but I wasn’t willing to lie.

“Leaving would’ve taken you out of Davonte’s circles.”

“Yeah, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I kept trying to find ways to bring him down. I went to the cops and got no help. Couldn’t prove that Davonte had Tommy killed out of spite. It was my word against his and I had no money to grease the wheels.”

“Davonte has cops on the payroll,” I said, confirming her suspicion. “That’s how he’s able to operate his little kingdom without interference.”

“Why’d you stay?”

“I wanted to prove that I was something,” I said, my wind bitten cheeks heating with my admission. Hell, I never talked about this sort of shit for a reason but I somehow I felt safe sharing it with Charlie. “I wanted my mother’s sacrifice to mean something.”

“You thought you were going to make it out of The Underground?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a pipe dream Davonte sells to so many kids. He lines his driveway with their bones. The only person getting rich and getting out of this hell is Davonte. That’s why he needs to be stopped.”

I couldn’t argue that fact but The Underground, for all its faults, had given me purpose when I’d been aimlessly searching for meaning.

“I started off as a courier for The Underground. It helped pay the bills for a kid who was too young to get a real job.”

“When did you drop out of school?” she asked.

I couldn’t deny school had seemed trivial but Ma had felt differently. “I didn’t drop out. I graduated high school by the skin of my teeth but I got my diploma.”

“You did?” She didn’t hide her surprise. “I just assumed…”

“Yeah, I know. A lot of kids employed by The Underground don’t graduate. Money in the hand is way more powerful than the dream of something that can’t pay the rent. I get it. But my mother didn’t feel the same. I did it for her.”

“So why’d you get into the cage?”

“Because she got sick. Making something of myself was the only way I was going to get her to the doctors she needed. I was big, strong, and I wasn’t stupid. I thought if anyone had a chance…it was going to be me.”

Charlie spared me the embarrassment of pointing out that I’d failed just as miserably as the others.

My currency had been my fists, my only value as a punching bag for those with more promise.

Fuck, Ma would’ve been crying in her grave if she’d seen what I’d turned into.

“I wanted more for Tommy, too,” she said softly. “I wanted us to leave this place and go to college together. But Davonte got his hooks into Tommy, blew smoke up his ass and promised a future he was never going to deliver. All because I wouldn’t sleep with him.”

“We’ve all got a sob story, sweetheart. No one gets out of this life without scars.”

I wasn’t trying to be a dick. I guess it just came naturally.

But Charlie snapped back with an immediate and hot retort.

“Fuck you. Don’t mock someone else’s pain. Just because you’ve given up and allowed your heart to turn to stone doesn’t mean everyone else has done the same. I honor Tommy’s memory by vowing to take Davonte down. How are you honoring your mother? By sucking Davonte’s dick? Playing by his rules? Taking whatever Davonte wants to dish out? If it weren’t for me, you’d still be Davonte’s lap dog, eating his scraps, so don’t you dare mock my grief. Don’t you fucking dare.”

That heat, that fire…I wanted to burn with it.

I hooked Charlie around the neck and drew her abruptly to me, our breaths mingling in the chill cab.

I held her hot gaze, pinning her with my own.

“I’m not mocking your pain,” I murmured, my stare dipping to the full pout of her lips. “I’m fucking drowning in it.”

And then I sealed my mouth to hers, taking what I desperately needed like my lungs needed air, our lips smashed to one another, fierce and all-consuming.

My tongue found hers, a wild thing seeking to destroy, to claim, and I encouraged whatever violence she could dish out.

I wanted her pain.

I wanted her heat.

I wanted to drink in the bittersweet agony of every tear she’d ever shed.

I wanted all that was Charlie.

And I realized, too late, that a motel room, a truck cab, they were one in the same.

Charlie was my weakness and I couldn’t fight what I wanted any longer.

Come what may, Charlie was mine tonight.