I drew it out for too fucking long—Mack will make me pay for every fucking second that I’d let him believe he’d already won. If I wanted to be gracious, I’d claim that I’d merely gotten sloppy.
If I wanted to be honest, I’d admit...
That I knew she was watching. How would Vinny Stacatto’s whore react once exposed to violence? Not the steady drips and dribbles Arno had fed her, either. How would she react when her nose was rubbed in it? Brutal, no-holds-barred violence for glory. For entertainment. For her fucking benefit.
If her reaction to Arno’s torture had taught me anything, it should have been to never fucking underestimate her. I’d expected the little bitch to be disgusted, even high as fuck. I’d wanted her to stick her pert little nose into the air and avoid eye contact with the big bad monster who’d been forced to save her ass—literally. Mack’s buyer had certainly paid for the privilege to violate Stacatto’s woman in more ways than one.
I’d wanted her to shrink from the grim horrors of bloodshed. She had stared on instead. She watched my every move in the ring. She didn’t take her eyes off the match, once. I could feel her. Every blow I took carried the impact of her fear. Her doubt.
The little bitch should have known better than to doubt me. I’d expected her to flinch in disgust when I finally won, proving that she thought she was entirely above this little shit show. She’d met my gaze instead. She didn’t cringe at the display of dominance—she accepted my win and everything it meant.
She welcomed it. Even down in the pit, I could smell her. I could see the challenge in her gaze. Claim me. Own me. Fuck me. When I left the cage, she’d shivered, half drugged out of her skull, as if expecting me to do it right there in front of Mack and his men. In spite of Stacatto. In spite of everyone. Just stake my claim on her right there for the world to see.
Maybe I should have. Maybe I should throw her against the wall of the training room and take her pressed up against the mats. Maybe I should make her regret accepting Dante Vialle so easily.
Maybe...if she wasn’t too busy riding out a high, too far gone to remember her own name. Her head lolls as I set her down on the floor, her back propped against the wall. Her eyes stare vacant and distant, chasing imaginary figures around the corners of the room.
Mack may have been a son of a bitch, but I knew that he packed good dope. The little princess is on cloud fucking ten. She doesn’t react when I prod her leg with my foot before pulling my jeans back on. I shove my feet into my boots, but I don’t bother with the shirt.
Already, I hear murmurs from the main room swelling to a hum that mimics the buzzing taking residence at the back of my skull. Confusion seems to be the overriding emotion. Their Mad Dog has never lost a fight—as far as they knew. Mack most likely didn’t keep any history books lying around, but the tally of scars on both of our bodies revealed the true score. Mack had only beaten me once during the entire length of our storied “careers.” Coincidentally, it was the same night I turned myself in for first-degree murder. How was that for fucking irony?
As far as our track records went, this was just another match among many where the kitty had beaten the mad pup—but in the years since, the dog had grown an army of fleas. If he changed his mind and decided to change the rules of the game, I wasn’t stupid enough to believe I could fight my way out. The girl would be his, and I would be locked in a kennel for his amusement.
It should have been a sobering thought. Not a tempting one. My body shouldn’t hum with excitement as I swipe a streak of blood from my lip before dragging the girl upright and letting her slump against me. My body craves another fight—the result of an addiction that went deeper than dope or the love of the spotlight. My head was only clear when my fist was pummeling something. Crushing. Bruising. Hurting.
But Mack, while still a sore loser, apparently hadn’t grown stupid.
“We’ll do things your way, Kitty,” he tells me, leaning against the door of the cage when I finally exit the training room. The bastard put his pants back on. His gaze drifts over to the girl at my hip, but they don’t linger, toeing the boundary I just reinforced with my fists. “Darcy will show you where you can sleep. We’ve gotta make our guests welcome, now don’t we?”
Only then do I realize that we might really be forced to stay here, on the bastard’s property. With Arno’s pub blown to shit, it isn’t like there are any other options.
“It’s a nice place,” Darcy pipes up from across the near-empty arena, still seated in the high viewing box. “And your friend, she can stay with—”
“She stays with me.” She’s limp enough for me to throw her over my shoulder again, wincing as pain surges through my right arm. The bastard must have bruised something, but I grit my teeth and spit at my feet. It’s tinged red.
Mack notices the blood and smiles, but his hand doesn’t quite leave his throat. I made sure not to cause any lasting damage, but my finishing move had been no love tap either. “Fine,” he concedes with a grisly chuckle. He’s bleeding from his nose but doesn’t bother to wipe the mess away. It bubbles up around his lips when he speaks, giving every word an acidic edge. “I’m sure the bed is big enough. So, when do we get to hear this enticing master plan the little princess has devised?”
I tear my gaze away from him, eyeing the now empty row of bleachers. “She’s not revealing shit until whatever the fuck you gave her is out of her system.” Going off the fact that she’s still conscious, I can only suspect that he gave her less than a full gram but a little more than the average starting “happy” dose. He wanted her hooked fast and quickly conditioned to accept her fix with a new John. The exact same method he’d used on Parish.
I don’t see Arno when I look for him, but at the moment I’m not sure I even want to. Stacatto may have filmed his humiliation and given Parish the lethal shot, but it was no different from what Mack had done to her—only the bastard had done it slowly, spreading out his torture over years rather than two hours. Back then, I think he’d called it “love.”
My eyes flit over to the blonde slowly picking her way down the bleachers. She keeps her head held high above the carnage, her gray eyes cool and unaffected by the blood staining the sand a few feet ahead of her. I hadn’t watched her during the fight, but now I wonder just who she’d rooted for.
“I’ll give you a day,” Mack says, though I suspect that the fucker had never really stopped talking. The corner of his mouth quirks when he realizes just who my gaze had gone to. “Until then you have the full run of the compound. Darcy will show you around.” He jerks his head just as the woman approaches me, trailed by a light, sweet scent. Strawberries?
She seems taller than she did before, though her head still comes to the same spot, right at the top of my left shoulder.
“You...you okay, Dante?” she asks, reaching up to trail a thumb along my jaw, inches away from the budding bruise. It doesn’t seem to matter to her that Mack is still within earshot, but I shrug her off and head for the door.
“Fine.” It was a fucking lie, but oddly enough there are no physical reactions to contradict it. My hands don’t shake. My head feels clear. My nostrils flare, catching a spicy hint above the dust and blood and Darcy’s artificial shampoo. It’s...more real than all three—an earthy scent emanating from the strands of black hair that fan out behind me with every step. Suddenly, my body does betray me; the front of my jeans tighten.
“Wait.”
I grit my teeth but force myself to glance back at Mack from over my shoulder. There’s a knife in his hand—a slender kitchen one with a blade too dull to cut the palm of the hand he taps against it. “Don’t let the princess forget her knife,” he warns, holding the blade out in my direction. “You wouldn’t want to leave her without protection.”
I say nothing when I cross the arena and snatch the knife from him, shoving it into my pocket. There’s blood on the blade—she must have cut that fucker Sammy good. I clench my jaw against admiration before it even rises up and head for the door.
“It’s this way,” Darcy murmurs. Without even realizing it, I had already barreled my way out of the arena. The night air is a slap against my sweat-soaked skin, and I relish the hit like a jolt of my own electric heroin. Goosebumps prickle along my arms. My senses are on hyper-alert. I can sense every prick that Mack had stationed in the woods, watching me. I hear their unsteady footsteps and jagged breathing. Stupid fuckers. I dare any one of them to...
“Hey.” I flinch when a warm hand settles over my forearm, and it takes everything I have not to grasp the slender wrist it’s attached to and break it. “It’s just up ahead,” Darcy says. Her face gives nothing away, but she quickly removes her hand from me and uses it to point to what appears to be a detached garage a few feet away. “There’s an apartment upstairs. Mack calls it the guesthouse—”
I come to a stop, jarring the woman who dangles over my shoulder. Narrowed, my eyes trail from the building’s single door up to the windows along the upper level.
“It’s safe,” Darcy insists. “Trust me. He makes the people he doesn’t like sleep in the Kennel.” Shuddering, she glances over her shoulder at the building that houses the arena. “Come on. I’ll show you inside.”
I don’t attempt to follow when she prances forward, her hips swinging, blonde hair bouncing over her shoulders. Her fingers grasp the knob of the door, but she hesitates before pulling it open. “It’s been five years, Dante...” She tilts her head, watching me through her lashes. “Don’t tell me you’ve stopped trusting me already.”
There’s a bitter challenge hidden in her soft tone. I don’t know how to classify what we had before. Friendship? Emotions other than hate rarely make a mark on my psyche, but I can’t resist a part of me that grudgingly steps forward when she finally opens the door, and I follow her inside.
The bottom level sports a few motorcycles and crates of tools and equipment. A rickety staircase along the wall leads to an upper level where a battered door separates a narrow apartment from the rest of the structure.
The place is small and reeks of stale cigarette smoke and booze. There’s a narrow kitchen across from a stained couch that I’d consider using as a toilet before I ever sat on it. Down a short hallway is a cramped bathroom and then a room barely large enough to fit the king-sized bed shoved inside it. Slipping past me, Darcy perches herself on the end of the mattress, running her hands along the plain black comforter.
“It almost feels like old times,” she says softly. “You kicking Mack’s ass in front of a packed house. He’d been vicious, even back then...but the skanks who’d hunt you down after were worse.” She laughs and eyes me with a playful shrug of her shoulders. “You rarely went off with one of them though. Back then, you used to only fight for money.”
I don’t bother to answer the question in her tone. I approach the bed instead and toss Stacatto’s woman down onto it. Her fingers fly out in search of stability. The pale skin of her stomach is bared; her sweater rode up far enough to reveal the jagged edges of an N and T. Shoving her onto her back, I wrench the hem down.
“She’s pretty,” Darcy says, propping her hand beneath her chin. “She’s foreign, too. She wasn’t speakin’ English the whole time. Was it Spanish?”
I shrug without giving her an answer, but I can’t help the part of me that wonders just what the little bitch had said. She doesn’t talk now. She stares straight up at the ceiling, her pupils pinpricks, her breathing heavy and slowed. There’s sweat glistening over her forehead, and her lips are slightly parted. She looks dead.
I know that look. As Mack suspected, the little princess is liking the high. Only God knows if Stacatto drugged her at all, but I doubt it. She’s swept away on the burning wave of dope, locked inside her own private cocoon, safe from the pain. For now. The first high is always the sweetest—the cruel benchmark that addicts spend every high after that attempting to chase. You can never reach that bar again. It’s why Mack chose his initial dose carefully, knowing just how much of the hook to bait. He could have sold her out to ten men tonight, and it wouldn’t have mattered. She’d still crave the next fix.
“I need to sleep.” I grit out the words while staring down at my hands, covered in Mack’s blood and my own. Adrenaline still floods my system—I’m too fucking wired to sleep, but Darcy takes the hint.
“It was good to see you, Dante,” she says, rising to her feet. Then she surprises me by stepping forward, placing her hand once again along my swelling cheek. “I know I’m not...I know I’m not someone like Arno. But I was your friend too. And Parish...” She breaks off and stares down at the floor, pulling her hand away.
A good man might let her wallow, but I can’t help but state the obvious. “If she was your friend, then why are you fucking the man who really killed her?” Stacatto may have been the lethal bullet, but Mack was the one who had loaded that gun six years ago when he coaxed a seventeen-year-old Rish into getting high that very first time.
Darcy doesn’t appreciate the reminder. Her eyes flash, and I see the hint of the woman who Mack has turned her into. She may shiver at the thought of the Kennel, but screwing the alpha means that she can’t ignore what puts food on her table. “Don’t attack me, Dante,” she says. “The last time I checked, I wasn’t sleeping with some guy named Vincent Stacatto.”
She leaves, her lips pursed, her eyes blazing, bitter and angry. But I don’t miss the way her hand flies out to gently brush my shoulder on her way past. “Night.”
“Night,” I force myself to reply. Seconds later, I hear the door open and then quietly click shut, but the sound has the impact of a gunshot.
Exhaling, I take up the spot Darcy left, keeping my back turned to Stacatto’s woman. Her breathing taints the air, a slow, raspy melody. I shouldn’t give a damn about what thoughts might cross her mind in the morning when she comes down from the high. I shouldn’t give a damn as to what might happen if she craves it again—and she will crave it again. A life of cruelty left an almost irresistible itch for something to take the edge off the pain.
Cocking my head, I turn to look at her and snap my fingers once. It takes a second for her eyes to focus and crawl in the direction of my hand.
“Hey.” I snap again and reach for her when her eyes start to turn vacant. She ignores me though, and no one’s home when I snatch her knife from my pocket and wipe that asshole Sammy’s blood off on my jeans. Then I jab the edge of it into the flat of her palm, pressing deep enough to break the skin. Blood wells up when I start to cut, sawing a single, jagged line about an inch long in the center of her hand. The pain barely wakes her up, but she’s back again, watching me with hollow eyes.
“It feels good now,” I tell her, knowing that she can probably only process about half of the words I say. “But it won’t last. It never does.”
A low sound buzzes from her throat. Words? A tattered laugh? I can’t tell. Whatever it is trails off when I stand and reach for the buckle of my jeans. I tug them down while I circle the bed to stand directly beside her, my hips positioned above her head so that she can’t miss a single fucking detail. I shed my boxers next, feeling what Mack must have felt when he stepped into the ring, prepared to face an old foe with newly learned tricks up his sleeve.
I wait until she focuses on me. My cock is already stiff when I reach for her hand and place it on my hip, positioning her fingers so that she can feel every jagged variation in the skin. Then I watch her, my eyes narrowed, and issue one single command.