The first blow puffed Tony’s brain into a wad of cotton candy, bolted one of his rear molars halfway out of his gums, and redefined pain into something able to consume a man from the bones outward. A sheet of blindness dropped over his vision for several seconds, but hard-learned muscle memory came to the rescue—the streets of Chicago were an unforgiving classroom—and his arm shot up on its own to block the second blow. Teeth locked, he came out of the arm-block firing.
He threw a ruthless right hook at Unibrow’s cheek.
Missed.
Followed with a left to the ribs.
And found only Unibrow’s protective elbow.
Uh-oh.
Tony ate a shot to the mouth. Silvery-white lightning flashed through his skull, and a fighter jet did a low flyby near his ear.
Tony might be a scrappy street fighter, but his opponent was a professional. And, shit…
With barely a pause between blows, Unibrow kicked Tony. Fucking yow. The solid roundhouse landed to Tony’s ribcage with a crack that the worker bees on the first floor probably heard. A moment after the thud of impact, he felt a numbing heat then a bullwhipped shockwave of pain that ran all the way into his lungs. Breathing became impossible.
He staggered, his knees already putting in a bid to give out and drop him to the floor, end this misery with a full immersion into unconsciousness. But blacking out wouldn’t put an end to his misery. It would only put an end to him. Ronnie, too.
This formula must be buried. Along with everyone who has knowledge of it.
Tony wasn’t just being beaten up here. This was a contract job. These men were going to kill him. And Ronnie.
Intestine-icing adrenaline got his heart thumping faster and his focus pinned. He squeezed his knees until they quit wobbling, set his feet square, then started swinging his fists in a furious, nonstop attack. No more pulling punches now. In fact, he felt a knuckle break.
From the side of his vision, he saw a mad struggle going down over on Ronnie’s side of the house—feet stomping and kicking, elbows flailing and jabbing.
Unibrow ducked underneath Tony’s guard and boar-rushed him. Under normal brain power, Tony would’ve stopped Unibrow from using a fighter’s age-old ploy to get out of trouble—the clinch hold. But he couldn’t lie; he was tiring. The ceaseless movements of feint and strike were using up his gas, and he was also taking a fair amount of return shots. The counter-abuse to his head slowed up his brain’s commands to his muscles, so when Unibrow bent low and thrust a bony skull into Tony’s belly, the only thing he could do was tighten up his ab muscles. It still felt like taking a Jupiter-sized medicine ball to the gut. Oxygen blasted from his lungs, and he almost lost his lunch as he hurtled backward, Unibrow embracing him like a lover.
They plowed together into the wet bar and floor-to-ceiling mirror. Like a Niagara Falls of brittle screams—that’s what the noise of an entire wall of glass and alcohol decanters exploding into a spray of reflective shards sounded like.
“Dammit, Brock!” Abbot bellowed.
Tony slammed to the floor with his opponent on top of him, their brutal fall popping glass underneath Tony’s back. Thank the Madonna for his leather jacket, or he would’ve been in shreds. He still felt stinging streaks along his cheeks and hands.
Unibrow reared above him, his face slashed with an array of crisscrossed cuts like he’d just tried to butt-diddle Edward Scissorhands and ol’ Ed had wanted none of that.
Tony slapped, grappled, shoved, hit, and pushed to win himself the dominant position, but Unibrow was heavy, strong, and knew what the fuck he was doing. Within a few seconds, the man managed to muscle himself into a high straddle, the solid bones of his knees pinning down Tony’s spread arms.
Very bad.
A torrent of punches whaled down on him, each blow jarring his senses and resonating pain through his skull in thunderclaps. Fear knotted around Tony’s solar plexus as a gray fog rolled in. Unibrow’s image distorted, and Tony’s heart beat so hard he thought he might bust an aorta. Coming in from station 102.3 K-Jazz was Ronnie’s scream.
Motivating.
Tony rammed his knee up between Unibrow’s spread thighs. Pro like this guy, no way was he taking a nut shot. Thing was…Tony hadn’t been going for the balls. He socked his kneecap into his opponent’s unsuspecting tailbone and sent the man into a full-facial confrontation with the wall.
Unibrow shouted. Teeth pattered down onto Tony’s chest like pearls from heaven.
A quick, spinning wrestler’s reversal and Tony was on top, head whirling, his vision smearing off to one side of the room. He blinked the bloody sweat out of his eyes, and then the world contracted down to the narrow point of Unibrow’s face. He punched that face. Again and again. Ears ringing, right fist pistoning with the sound of a cleaver, over and over. He hit from the twisted place inside him, and as the blood pouring from Unibrow’s mouth started to turn frothy, he knew that he didn’t have life’s rules right. Once again he—
“Get him, Tony!”
—until the woman who saw only the good in him egged him on.
If Ronnie thought what he was doing was okay, then maybe he wasn’t getting it wrong. Maybe sometimes a man had to do bad things to make good things happen. And maybe doing those things didn’t make a man twisted on the inside, but just managing the best he could in the filth.
The man struggling with Ronnie finally yelled, “Brock!”
There were footsteps behind Tony, then his arm was grabbed and he was yanked off the gory piece of meat he’d created. Many violent responses could’ve answered that—and Tony’s RPMs were already racing at full peg—but as he swung around on the knob-ends of his kneecaps, he saw that Ronnie was already bum-rushing her captor.
She snatched up what looked like a huge glass booger from the desk and smashed it into the back of the man’s head. Without missing a beat, she swung toward Abbot and hit the CEO in the face with enough force to flatten his nose. A meaty chunk of something fell out of one of Abbot’s nostrils, and then he was gone, disappearing behind the desk—not like on television, with a theatrical rolling of the eyes and a thrashing of arms and legs. Just…down he sagged.
Tony struggled to get up, but—
No.
He didn’t make it to his feet. He toppled over instead, the workings of his body suddenly feeling aged and rusty. Scratchy, synthetic carpet pressed his cheek. How strange that it should smell like stale fucking down here…
Someone rolled him onto his back. Ronnie’s face appeared above him, worry lines concentrated along her pretty forehead. Her mouth was moving, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying.
There was an orchestra of bees in his ears. Every breath required thought and effort.
Then one word made it to his translation center: Tony. But why would she call him that? Wasn’t he Antonio?
Wait…
In the next instant, he was sucked into a deep, consuming darkness.
He woke up in a hospital ER ward, Ronnie’s face still above him, floating in and out of his vision as she dealt with doctors and nurses. She was monitoring all the shit they were doing to him, and it was a lot of shit. From what he could tell, they X-rayed him, taped his ribs, jammed his molar back into place, realigned his knuckles to their original position, smeared his cuts and bruises with antibiotic and anti-inflammatory creams, and pumped his body full of pain meds and more anti-inflammatories. After this last step, he was released.
No hotel, he’d slurred to Ronnie. He wanted to go home.
It was a wish she probably shouldn’t have granted. Air travel most likely went against all kinds of medical advice—and didn’t the other passengers gasp and gawk?—but nice girl that she was, she poured him onto an airplane. The flight from Lexington to Baltimore was only an hour and thirty minutes anyway, and he slept for all of it. He woke up to the feel of Ronnie steering him down the gangway, then into a taxi, then into his house, then into his bedroom, where she peeled him out of his clothes and delivered him into his very own bed.
He collapsed against the familiar sheets with a gust of relief.
Too bad Ronnie wasn’t his girlfriend. He could get used to this. He groaned deep in his chest then smiled as he drifted off.