Of all people, the bastard came to fucking Mack for help.
Mack, whose sole definition of the term “friend” only extended to how far up someone else’s ass he could shove his foot out of pure amusement. Mack, who would have easily chopped Arno into pieces and sold him for scrap back in the day if the parts would have brought him some easy cash. Mack, who liked to shoot Parish up with dope and fuck her for kicks.
Mack, who looked at Stacatto’s woman like...
I inhale, my eyes narrowing at the way his gaze had traced her body. He looked at her like he was already imagining her riding his cock. Willing or not, the bastard didn’t give a damn.
“Don’t give me that look,” Arno mutters while the fucker is still out of earshot. “While you were in prison—ignoring phone calls and visitors, I might add. Fuck, I even sent you a letter once.” He scoffs, shaking his head. “Anyway. Things aren’t the same. CJ. Kade. Trolito. Benji. Alex—” He holds up his hand and ticks off the fingers one by one. “Dead. Dead. Prison. Dead. Accountant.” He shakes his head. “Don’t ask me how the fuck that happened—”
“Why him?” I growl, dragging him back to the question at hand.
“He’s the only one fucking left,” Arno argues. “At least the only one with enough infrastructure to take on someone like Stacatto. Take a look around, Dante—” He gestures with a wave of his hand. “This is what’s left of the Saints. But trust and believe that I don’t like this any more than you do.” His eyes narrow, and I know that he hasn’t forgotten how the bastard treated his sister in the past.
“I don’t like it,” I say—not that it fucking matters. This is Arno’s battle, after all. The woman isn’t my responsibility, and I don’t owe her a damn thing—least of all the need to plead her case.
I want to take something from him.
“If you want to hit Stacatto, you need a plan,” I heard myself admit through gritted teeth. “She’s the only one who knows how his fucked-up mind works.”
Arno scowls, and I don’t have to remind him that she already outsmarted Stacatto once. Who knew what she’d learned being tucked away in his gilded cage?
“She is all we need. We could regroup somewhere else. We could—”
“Now don’t be stingy, Dante.” Mack grins as he approaches the bar. The asshole’s done well for himself, it seems. I count at least thirty men in this room alone, and there are even more stationed outside, monitoring the property’s perimeter. What Mack lacked in charming personality he certainly made up for with brutality and paranoia to help win him some new friends. “I want to help. It’s the least I could do for Parish.” The bastard has the nerve to actually pretend to care. He bows his head for Arno’s benefit, but I’m not impressed.
“Then let Arno handle this his way.”
Mack flashes another cocky grin, erasing all traces of mock concern. “Now where’s the fun in that, Dante?” he asks. “Vinny Stacatto’s no average fuck. I want a piece of him too.”
Not out of revenge, I suspect. Mack merely wants a piece of the pie. He wants the girl. He wants to use Arno’s fuck-up for his own gain.
Some shit never changes.
“The pub is gone,” Arno says, explaining the reason why he’s already lurking around the nearest stash of liquor. “Everyone got out, but the fuckers set it on fire—”
“Espi.” I’m already on my feet, but Arno places a hand on my shoulder and shoves me back down.
“You think I wouldn’t make sure he’s okay?” He scoffs. “He was already out running errands for me, but I made sure that he knew what’s up. When he’s ready, he’ll join us here.”
When he’s ready. I grit my teeth and somehow manage to not wrap my hands around Arno’s neck until he tells me where I can find the kid. Instead, my eyes cut to the back of the room where one of Mack’s punks still guards the door to the “clinic.” Unease is a useless emotion. I don’t like to feel it, and I clench my hands into fists, craving the vicious surge of anger in my blood to replace it. Anger, I understand. Men like Mack react to it better than any other fucking language, written or spoken, anyway.
“Dante.” Arno’s watching me, uncharacteristically tense. We’re no longer in his domain. This is Mack’s territory. His property. His rules. My quickly thinning patience. It doesn’t take this long to simply bandage a wound. My gaze returns to the door, scanning the stoic expression of the man standing beside it.
“Dante thinks the woman could be of use. If she’s on our side,” Arno says to Mack, picking up the thread of conversation. That’s right. Apparently, the three of us were supposed to be planning something. Bullshit. Dogs didn’t plan. They stole. They schemed. They reacted on pure instinct.
“We...Dante?” Arno reaches for me when I stand up, but his fingers graze off my shoulder as I start across the bar.
My eyes are on the door while I shove past asshole after asshole, not caring who the fuck I have to jar out of my way. The man by the door perks up when I get close. He glances over my shoulder to where I know Mack to be and nods once.
“I can’t let you—” he starts to say, his posture tensing and stance turning hostile. His lips move, and words keep churning from his mouth, but the buzzing blaring through my skull drowns them out. It’s like my brain separates from my body for a second. I’m merely a machine, cold and empty. My footsteps slow before I enter the man’s personal space, though. Maybe I even mean to turn back.
Then I hear it. I hear her, even above the buzzing. Faint. Desperate. Pleading. Dante!
All I know is that I laugh first. The dumb bitch is calling for me. She thinks I actually give a damn. That I’ll come to her rescue. She thinks I’d care. She thinks. She thinks.
I don’t think, I react. My fists go flying, striking flesh, bone, and wood. I register nothing but pain surging through my knuckles. I see red. I taste it. When I blink, I’m standing inside a narrow room with a black chair in the middle and a row of counters lined with vials of drugs. I spot her instantly, sprawled over the floor, crawling for the door.
Her eyes widen when she sees me. Then she sticks one hand out, the fingers shaking. “He...he drugged me.” The fuck he did. Her words are already running together.
When I take her hand, and pull her upright, her entire body jerks like a kite on a loose bit of string. I let her stagger against me, her hands pawing for purchase over my chest. Behind her, the man named Sammy cringes back against the wall, clutching at his left shoulder.
“She stabbed me! The fucking little cunt stabbed me—”
“Now, Dante.” The voice gnaws on my thickening rage, injecting clarity back into my brain. “This is no way to make new friends.” Mack stands just beyond the doorway, shaking his head while tsk-tsk-tsking through his teeth. “We’re all family here.”
Ignoring him, I focus my attention on the man huddling in the corner. “What the hell did you give her?”
Sammy jumps. One of his hands starts to claw at his wrist, the nails raking the skin. “J-Just a little something to take the edge off—”
“Heroin,” Mack says without a fucking ounce of shame. “Nothing lethal. Just enough to make her docile.”
Docile. I force a dark chuckle from the back of my throat as my eyes skim over Stacatto’s battered and now high woman. Her eyelids flicker, the hazel irises swirling. She’ll be docile, all right. I have to press my hand against the small of her back when her knees buckle.
I swallow hard, shaking my head to hear above the fucking buzzing. “Why?”
Mack shrugs. “To make it easier to send her back to Stacatto in a body bag.”
I laugh. It’s only when I see Sammy cringe into his corner that I realize the sound comes out more like a growl. Trust Mack not to have read the fucking Sparknotes. “Arno tried that.”
Mack’s expression flickers, and suddenly the bastard’s harder to read. “Arno did,” he admits. “But I’m not above using other methods of persuasion.”
“Other methods?”
Chuckling, he runs a hand over the stubble along his jaw. He’s sizing up the details of his plan, picking out just how much information he’s willing to share. He was always a sneaky little fucker. “Let’s just say I already have a buyer lined up.”
“A buyer?” It takes two seconds before the words click and his genius plan unfurls in my mind: he wants to sell her. Whore out Vinny Stacatto’s girl, getting off on the man’s humiliation. It’s sadistic. It’s lucrative.
It’s fucking stupid.
“If you want to take down a fucker like Stacatto, then you go for the head,” I say. “You cut it off the fucking snake. She—” I jerk my chin toward the woman, “she knows the inner workings of his organization. His habits. His weaknesses. We use her to take him down, and you stick to whoring out your women on street corners.”
Mack rubs his chin. “Who’s to say she can’t speak while she’s riding my buyer’s cock?”
Red. It’s only when Stacatto’s woman whimpers that I realize my fingers tensed, threatening to crush her spine beneath them. “She’ll help us take him down on her own.”
“Funny.” Mack rocks his head from side to side, stretching out the muscles in his neck. “I’ve heard about the little tape you made with her. If she’s that good of a fuck to get Dandy Dante on her side, then maybe I should double my asking price?”
“No.” The hoarse command weasels through my eardrums before I even register stepping forward, jarring the woman clutching my shoulders. Her head falls back, those unfocused eyes seeking mine out. “No...only...you.” She utters the words softly enough that only I can hear them, not that they make any fucking sense.
Only you.
“Arno’s already agreed to it,” Mack adds with a casual jerk of his thumb toward the ginger bastard in question. “Look at her. She took the high quickly. The little princess won’t feel a fucking thing—”
“No.” Mack knew business the way a mutt had inner workings of the stock market. He preferred to snarl over scraps to make a quick buck. It was why Dino had overlooked him as a successor; the bastard never thought with his head. “You string her out and trade her for cash. Then what? What next when Stacatto comes knocking with an army at his heels? You didn’t see the men he sent to Arno’s. They were machines. Professional.” I can’t help a flicker of appreciation. A monster could respect the skill of another predator, after all. “Who’s to say that your buyer isn’t already cutting a deal right now to sell you out to Stacatto himself?”
Mack lets loose another gruff laugh. “Dandy little Dante,” he says, shaking his head. “Always Dino’s favorite. You still love putting that unfinished high school education of yours to the test, I see.” For a split-second, he drops the act. True hatred lurks in his gaze, unfinished despite the years I spent in prison. Now that’s more fucking like it.
“And you’re still nothing more than a mutt, I see. Still running with the dogs.”
He doesn’t react to the insult, but even five years ago the fucker had quick reflexes, known to have a knife drawn and a man gutted before the poor bastard even knew what hit him. Arno may have had the temper, but they didn’t call Mack the “Mad Dog” for nothing.
He watches me coldly, tallying up the differences he finds in me. I do the same to him. He’s leaner, and despite the lazy swagger, there’s something careful about everything from the set of his shoulders to the open position of his hands. “This isn’t quite the reunion I’d imagined, Dante,” he admits, his tone harder than before. “But what the hell. Let’s do Dino proud. Two methods. Two good ideas. Let’s settle this in the old way and give the boss a show he can enjoy from hell.”
The old way. My fingers throb, recognizing the implications of the words before my brain even does.
“No.” Arno finally steps forward, shaking his head. “No. Dante, just let the bitch go. This isn’t your problem.”
Let her go. I do, and she falls to her knees. One of her hands flutters against my thigh, braced against it for balance, but she doesn’t try to stand. She doesn’t move. She merely tilts her head back to look up at me. There is no fear or hatred in her eyes. Just grim acceptance that’s quickly swallowed up by the haze of the drug flooding her system. She’s too high to speak out loud, but I can almost hear her voice echoing through my head. Just remember to kill me first, before you send me back to him.
I step away from her and seek out Mack. “If I win...”
“What the fuck?” Arno tries to muscle his way into the room. “Dante—”
“The woman’s yours,” Mack says, placing one hand on Arno’s shoulder to hold him back. “We use your plan. But if I win, we do things my way. And.” He stresses the word, and I bark out a laugh, unsurprised. And there it is—with Mack there is always a fucking catch.
“What?” I demand.
“I win, and you come to work for me. Prison’s probably taught you a few new tricks, Kitty,” he adds with a malicious tilt to his mouth. “I could make a lot of money off you.”
“You’ve kept up with the Cage,” I surmise, once again un-fucking-surprised. Arno may have left Dino’s meal ticket behind, but Mack seemed to be living large off the methods of our old master.
“Cage?” He echoes on a deadly soft chuckle. “Dante, I run the Kennel.” He turns and jerks his head for me to follow.
I step forward. I know my expression reveals nothing when I stoop on one knee and toss the woman over my shoulder first. It’s an action that goes unmissed by no one, but as light as she is, I can almost forget.
Almost. Her scent floods my skin, equally as potent as the drug seeping through hers. It’s not out of any kindness that I intervene in Mack’s plans for her. It is simple retribution. A man owned by no one had to keep his fucking promises, after all.
Regardless, the simple act of shouldering her body makes her a target. A pretty little bone caught in the jaws of a rival dog. No man can ignore her scent. Mack won’t ignore my claim.
I should have stayed in fucking prison. At least the invisible lines we bastards drew in the figurative sand were somewhat clear. In this domain, anything goes. It’s a familiar, if hostile, territory as I follow Mack across the barroom and through a door that opens onto a fenced-in yard. A few paces ahead is a small, level building that appears to be a shack at first glance. A man guards a metal door, chained with a padlock, for show of course. The real security comes in the form of at least twenty pit bulls all herded into individual pens just on the inside of the building. They bark and snarl, gnawing at the chain-link pinning them in.
Mack expanded cage-fighting to dogfighting, it seems. He doesn’t comment on the animals as he leads the way past the kennels and into an open space with concrete walls and two other men posted on either side of a pair of heavy metal doors.
“Welcome to the Playhouse,” he says, flashing his teeth. “Ladies first.”
Ignoring the insult, I stalk forward with one hand pinning the girl in place. The other, I brace against one of the doors and push it open. For a second, I’m almost glad I took the challenge and went first just so the bastard wouldn’t be able to see my face.
He emulated Dino down to the very last detail. It’s a set-up almost comparable to the dog kennels in the other room but larger. A giant chain-link cage, shaped like an octagon, is in the center of the room. The floor is cement, coated with gray sand in the pit, making it easier to clean the gore and bloodstains after each fight. Around the cage is a rectangular placement of bleachers, at least twenty deep in every direction. On second thought, this isn’t like one of the old gambling dens Dino used to run out of a garage with maybe a few hundred spectators a fight at fifty bucks a head. The bastard’s built himself an arena.
“It’s nice, right?” he wonders, appearing at my left side. “Reminds you of the old days.”
I certainly didn’t need a reminder of the “old days.” I still wore the scars. On the nights that I felt like it, I still had the nightmares. More often than not...I still wished I could live them again.
“When?” I ask, my voice hard. Being here brings back the old, steady pulse I used to feel in my core right before a fight. Only then would the buzzing die off, like a wild animal that knew it would be sated soon. “When do we get this over with?”
“When?” Mack steps forward, raising his hands toward the gray ceiling—a gladiator in his colosseum. It’s only when he looks back at me that I see the true beast lurking underneath the human exterior. This man isn’t a gladiator. He’s the fucking lion, sent in to crush the hopes of a mere mortal slave. “We do this now.”
He snaps his fingers, and one of the men guarding the door appears, his posture erect like a soldier in jeans and leather called to war.
“Well, go rile up the masses,” Mack commands with a wave of his hand and a wink. He’s cocky again, the swagger returning in full force. It’s not bravado that swells him this time though. It’s confidence. While I’ve been in prison, he’s been sharpening his claws and honing his skills. I have no doubt who the star attraction of this cage is.
If there was one thing that Mack loved more than money, it was the spotlight.
Within minutes, people start to trickle in, men and women, their expressions wary. At first, I assume that they must have followed us from the bar, but there seem to be more than that. They fill the seats, streaming past Mack and me; I can already sense bets being laid and stakes being raised. Whether he gets Stacatto’s woman or not, Mack will make a tidy profit from this event.
I intend to make him work for every goddamn penny.
After nearly ten minutes of waiting, I glance around at the corners of the room, anxious. Doors lead off at random intervals throughout the main arena—most likely to rooms where each fighter can warm up in private. My muscles tense, aching to do just that. I almost start to approach one, eager to find out for myself where they lead, when a voice rings out. Soft. Honeyed. A woman’s.
“Dan...Dante?” I turn and don’t have time to catch the figure who throws her arms around what little of me she can. “Oh, my God! I thought you were in prison!” She pulls back, beaming. Five years did little to the petite blonde who still sports the same fiery smile that’s equal parts seductive and charming. I wonder if she’s still “working” her old profession. The shit she’s wearing now supports that theory: tiny black shorts and a tight red top.
“Darcy.” She looks good. Almost like the girl I left behind. Almost. But there’s a maturity in her gaze that wasn’t there before. She holds her head high with a confidence that comes only with a position of power. Then I catch Mack staring at her ass, and I realize why.
“You’re with him,” I say. There’s no emotion in the observation. It’s just fact.
Darcy doesn’t answer. Her gray eyes flit up to the woman slung over my shoulder instead. Whatever questions she has she knows better than to ask. She sighs instead and forces her smile wider. “So, when did you get out?”
I shrug and trail my gaze from her over to Arno who watches me with an expression that even I can’t decipher. “About a week ago.”
That timespan triggers something; Van Hallen owed me money, the fucker—and I intend to collect in full.
“A whole week?” Darcy shakes her head in disbelief. “And you couldn’t even come say hi?” She’s still smiling, but I don’t want to dissect the look that distorts her features for merely a second. I don’t have the time.
Apparently, neither does Mack. “Baby.” He jerks his head as if calling a trained pet, but to her credit, Darcy takes her sweet time turning to face him, her hands on her hips.
“Yes?”
Mack grins. “Show Dante’s...friend to the best seats in the house—” he points to a bench at the highest point in the arena with the clearest view of the cage below. “It’s gonna be quite the show. The little kitten returns to the cage.”
“Show?” Darcy frowns. Apparently, she wasn’t around for the excitement, but I don’t fill her in, and neither does Mack or Arno. She’s left to suspect the obvious from my stance and Mack’s excitement. Eventually, her gaze turns to the woman slung over my shoulder.
“She okay?”
“She’s high,” I grunt, shifting so that the girl’s feet hit the ground, but she can’t even hold herself upright. Darcy has to slip an arm around her shoulders just to keep her from falling, but she murmurs something, her gaze focused in my general direction.
“Don’t. No,” she slurs, the words running together. “Don’t. Don’t. Igobackto—”
I turn on my heel, cutting her off. Irritation runs down my spine when I realize that Arno is within earshot, watching me, his expression still unreadable, for once. Mack, the fucker, is already strolling down the center of the arena, toward the cage.
“Twenty minutes per warm-up, Kitty?” he suggests without turning around. “Just like old times.” He wiggles his fingers toward a door that’s directly parallel to the center of the arena.
“Fine.” Already I can hear murmuring about how quick of a fight it should be. Mack the Mad Dog. Mack who fights dirty. Mack who has never lost a match since he opened his own Cage.
I shrug hard as if that might brush off the doubt. Some of it even trickles from the back of my own mind. Prison games were a little different from the fights in the cage. There was no entertainment factor. No money on the line. When some upstart punk came at you with a shiv, there was no boss waiting to step in and pull the match. I was a show dog who’d been thrown from the stage and into the bowels of the pound where a battle became less about glory and more about survival.
I flex my fingers, feeling them sting. The truth was that the “Kitty’s” claws had been worn off scratching at the concrete walls of a prison cell. He’d been forced to shove new weapons into the gaps—whatever tricks and skills he could learn from men with more body counts to their name than the people standing in the cafeteria line every day. How well would those makeshift weapons stack up against a well-fed, regularly trained mad dog?
Well, we would just have to fucking find out. I head for the door while Mack approaches another on the opposite side. I barely make it a step before a voice, low and mangled, calls me back.
“Wait.” Stacatto’s girl is watching me when I look over my shoulder. Her eyes drift up and down my body as if she’s trying to decide which end is which. “Tic-tac-toe,” she says finally, her tongue wrestling with the words. I can barely understand her through her accent, and Darcy shoots me a worried look.
“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of her—”
“Tic-tac-toe,” the woman insists, stressing every word as best she can. She’s fighting the high, trying to resist the pull of the wave sweeping her under. I know from experience that she doesn’t stand a fucking chance.
I jerk my head in a nod and turn on my heel without responding out loud. Tic-tac-toe. She certainly loved her old games—the strategy she’d laid out had been simple but effective: split the board. Allow your opponent to set the first piece and then draw them into opposite corners of the grid while you skillfully lay your trap. By the time you finally spring it, you’ve taken the center of the board before they knew what hit them.
The little bitch thought that one lucky round with a batch of hired guns made her an expert on battle plans. I laugh darkly to myself as I skirt the end of the cage and pull open the door to a small room that contains only a row of blue training mats lined up lengthwise against the wall, a set of weights, and a flickering light bulb. Closing the door behind me, I strip off my coat and shirt and then approach a mirror hanging near the back corner of the pen. I don’t recognize the man staring back at me compared to the boy who first cut his teeth on the cage at the age of sixteen. The Kitty’s grown up. He’s lost his love of chasing the bloody ball of yarn for scraps. He’s honed his skill in the alleys, and he doesn’t like to play with his food as much anymore.
Nowadays, he prefers to grind it down into a pulp to make it easier to swallow.