CHAPTER 39
Landon Lane
JOE WALKED INTO THE LOCKER room as we were leaving. I had everything set up and ready to go.
I glared at him. “Some manager.”
He looked behind me at the equipment laid out on a table in neat rows. “Good job, asshole.”
Where the hell had he been? Didn’t matter. I didn’t have time to worry about him. I had to push all the bullshit away and focus on the fight. I needed everyone else to go off and do their thing. Meditation and focus. That was the key. If anyone knew that best, it was Joe.
“I’m going to walk these guys up to the room. Then we need to get busy.”
He nodded.
“We’ll talk about earlier after I win.”
Joe didn’t speak.
The four of us took off up the elevators.
“What’s that sound?” Logan looked up at me.
Joe stared at me. We knew what it was.
I dropped a palm down on Logan’s shoulder. “Probably some construction in the hotel.”
The elevator shook with each blast. I tried not to envision whatever Sid was hammering away at as my face. It was an intimidation tactic. I was sure Edmon put him up to it.
It worked though. I hadn’t been in his presence in a long time. I felt it in my bones. They kept him on a different part of the island after he’d broken me. We didn’t even know what they used him for. Didn’t care. On the island you did your job and didn’t ask questions.
My stomach tightened a little when the elevator blasted upwards. I didn’t know if it was from the acceleration or Sid taking apart the building with his fist.
I hadn’t been crazy about Cora going up to the room, but I’d weighed the options in my head. She didn’t look too hot and definitely needed the air. They wouldn’t make a spectacle before the fight. They were confident I’d die in a few hours. We had a deal with Edmon. Not to mention, he knew I could still blow their whole operation. I could embarrass him if I needed to.
There was no way I’d win the fight in his mind. Impossible. The place was crawling with press and fans too. They’d all seen Cora on the news and in the papers.
Still, something twisted me up about it, about her leaving my side—even though my brain went through a full cost-benefit analysis and determined it was a non-risk. The analysis didn’t factor in emotions. Emotions didn’t exist in the world of Edmon and Joe and Sid. Only numbers and probabilities.
That’s the bitch about statistics, though. They make you feel good about decisions until it’s one-in-a-million and you’re the one.
Suddenly, we couldn’t get back to the room fast enough.
WE WALKED THROUGH THE DOOR and Cora wasn’t in there. Shit.
I checked all four rooms and the bathrooms. Nothing.
Was it Edmon? Did Cora run? She had a habit of running when things got tough. What did she see? Sid?
She would’ve walked over near the room he was in. It wasn’t too far from the elevators. She would’ve heard the sound, for sure. Had he spooked her? Was she already hailing down a cab to the airport?
Joe clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Not now.”
It was like he read my mind.
“Where’s Ms. Chapman?” Logan asked.
I kneeled to eye level in front of Logan. “She had to—”
“I’m right here.”
We all whipped our heads to the doorway. Cora stood there holding a bucket of ice.
I jumped up and ran over to her. She couldn’t get a word out because my mouth had slammed into hers. My words were a murmur against her lips. “I thought you’d gone.”
When I pulled back, she wobbled on her feet for a moment. Her eyelashes fluttered, and she gazed up at me. “Hey.”
“Hey.” I took the bucket of ice from her and carried it off toward the counter. “Where’d you go?”
She stared at me like she was still in another world, and then snapped out of her daze. “To get some ice.” She paused, and a frown spread across her face. “I didn’t want to pay fifteen bucks for a bottle of water and we have cups in there.”
“Nice.” Joe gave her a nod of approval.
I stared, my brain still convinced she’d ran. Hated myself for thinking it. I shook my head.
She cupped her hands around my face and stared into my eyes. “I’m not going anywhere, babe.”
I pressed my lips against hers again. “I know.”
“Don’t worry about me. You need to stay focused. I’m here. I always will be.”
“Yeah, asshole. She’s right.”
“Okay.”
Before Cora could process that Joe had just given her a compliment, he was standing next to us.
“Are we all good on the plans? We all know what we’re doing?” I turned to Janet. “Any word from Gus?”
She shook her head, slowly.
“Don’t worry about Gus,” said Joe. “Everything else in order?”
I nodded.
He stared down his nose at me. “Say what you need to say. Then we need to go. You’re distracted.”
I flashed him an agreeable stare. “Okay.”
I walked over and gave Janet a light kiss on her forehead. “Thank you for everything. I can never repay you.”
“This feels like goodbye.” She glared. She was a hard woman. Had been through a lot in all her years.
I shrugged. What else could I do? “It is what it is.”
“Not, it’s not. Your future is in your hands.” A tear threatened in the corner of her eye and she blinked it away.
I turned to Logan. “Come here, buddy.”
Joe sighed.
I bowed up nose-to-nose with him. “Not now. You can wait.”
He looked away at the wall. Logan eased his way over, and Joe turned back. He looked down at Logan and then back up at me. “I’ll be out in the hall.”
Logan and I walked into one of the bedrooms and I closed the door. The feelings and emotions were nothing like what I’d expected. How do you walk into a room and talk to your son for what could be the last time? Eight years ago, I wouldn’t have even been able to process something like that in my mind. Miranda, Janet, Logan, Cora—they’d turned me into a human being. I still wasn’t sure how it’d happened, but I knew I could never repay them for something like that. The debt I owed them was mountainous. I would spend a hundred lifetimes fighting to clear it.
Logan and I sat down on the bed.
His face was steady as a rock, like he’d rehearsed it. I couldn’t find an ounce of fear in his eyes. He was being strong. Staying tough for me. I felt both alive and dead at the same time. His innocence was gone, and yet it was still my little boy sitting there in front of me. There’s no prouder moment for a father, than when your son shows more strength and resolve than you. That moment when you know you’re sending a lion out into the wild jungle that is life.
“You never got all the answers you wanted.”
He looked up at me and shook his head. “It’s okay. You need to focus on the fight. Uncle Joe said so. Don’t worry about me. I’m strong.”
“I know you are. Look at you.” I nudged his cheek with a light, playful punch, and exhaled a huge breath. “Look, big man. I, umm, I’m so proud of you. You’re a better man, a stronger man than I am already. You have no idea how happy that makes me. There’s so much I want to tell you in so little time. But listen to me when I say this, if you ever remember one thing I’ve told you—it’s okay to worry about yourself too. It’s our job to protect, but sometimes you have to take care of you. Otherwise, there’s no way you can protect everyone else.”
Logan stared at me like he always did. He took in every word and logged it into the hard drive that was his brain.
My throat went scratchy and raw, and my voice turned raspy. “And it’s okay to be scared. What’s important is that you don’t let fear hold you back, keep you from what you need to do. Never forget that, buddy.”
“I won’t, Dad. I promise.”
“Your mother and I—we weren’t like Cora and me. We didn’t love each other the same way. Not the way where you get married and grow old together.”
Logan nodded. “You told me a little already.”
I squeezed his shoulder and tried to stay composed. At the same time, I tried to be in the moment for him. So many different emotions and thoughts swirled through my mind that I was actually numb. I wanted to be present for him.
“You mom was trying to teach me how to love a woman the way I love Cora now. She wanted me to be ready when I met the right girl. For when I met Cora. She was preparing me. And, umm.” I choked on my words and gulped. “Well...” A few involuntary tears formed in the corners of my eyes.
Logan looked up at me as I wiped them away. “It’s okay, Dad.” He put his tiny hand on my thigh.
I glanced down at it. Down at the same little hand that once wrapped its tiny fingers around mine that day in the hospital a little more than seven years ago. My heart erupted at the sight. The same way it did when I heard his voice cry out for the first time, and saw his pudgy cheeks and squinty eyes and tiny pink body. My eyes blurred with tears and I swiped them away with my forearm. I smiled through them. Smiled harder than I ever had in my life. There are few moments in life you can recall with such clarity that it’s like you can relive them at any time. But the first time I saw Logan—I’d never forget that. My voice cracked, and I sobbed through my words. “W-we m-made you, Son.”
A smile spread across Logan’s face, like he’d been worried I was sad, and he now knew my tears were unfiltered, raw happiness. They were a direct product of the joy that he filled my heart with from the moment he sucked in his first breath to the present. The pure happiness that he brought into my world. A light that eradicated every corner of darkness in my heart and radiated brighter than the sun. A happiness I never thought I’d ever be able to know.
I took a deep breath and continued. I didn’t have time to be giving a history lesson right then, let alone having a near-breakdown, but Logan was more important than anything else in the world. He deserved his answers and the truth if something happened to me. Nobody else knew the whole story. It would die along with me if I didn’t pass it along to him.
I sucked in a huge breath. His hand gripped my thigh and he smiled at me.
“We made plans to raise you as friends. It would’ve been like kids at school whose parents don’t live in the same house. Only we would’ve still been best friends the whole time.”
Logan looked at me, puzzled. “Did you stop being friends? Is that why she doesn’t come to see me?”
My heart pinched in my chest and I felt the sting of tears burning hot again. I shook my head emphatically. I had to let him know that there was a good reason he’d never met her. That he’d never done anything wrong. I’d told him as much in the past when he’d asked, but I never really knew if he’d bought into it. I told myself he did, but a child’s mind is a complicated landscape. “Oh no, Son. If she was—” I had to stop and take another deep breath. I fought the emotion with everything I had to try and get the words out. Finally, I sighed and took a long look at him. “She was so excited to meet you, Logan. She would talk to you when you were in her belly. She even ate healthy foods that she hated. She wanted you to be perfect and get everything you needed. She loved you so m-much, big man.”
I sniffled and realized I hadn’t actually said anything out loud about what happened to Miranda in a very long time. I hadn’t talked about it with anyone. I refused to even acknowledge it for months after Logan was born. A tidal wave of excruciating pain roiled inside of me, and it was about to come out. I dammed it up. Fought it back with everything I had.
“Okay.” I exhaled all the air from my lungs.
Logan gripped my leg harder, and then slid his hand up to my arm. “It’s okay, Dad. You can tell me.”
I nodded and smiled at his strength. I was supposed to be strong for him, and the roles had completely reversed. And that was fine by me. I wanted him to know it was okay to show yourself, be weak in front of people you loved sometimes. It was okay to open up and let them in, so that you didn’t always have to carry around all of the burdens. “So, we went to the hospital when it was time for you to come. And she had you and you were the most beautiful thing either of us had ever seen. We couldn’t stop staring at you. She absolutely adored you. You were it for her. She lived and breathed for you. She wouldn’t stop talking about you. Everything was about you.” I reached out with an index finger and tapped it on his nose. My shoulders slumped, and the blood rushed out of my face.
Logan’s hand moved up and down my arm, caressing my bicep in a fatherly way. I don’t even think he realized he was doing it.
My stare moved from his hand to his eyes. “Something happened. There were complications. It was all so fast, and my mind was spinning.” I covered my face with my free hand and lost it. Sobbed uncontrollably into it. I had to get the words out for him, but it was so fucking hard. I hadn’t ever said them aloud. “They took her back. To do surgery, an-and—”
“It’s okay, Dad,” he whispered. He scooted closer and I felt his arms wrap around me.
I eased my gaze slowly down to his and I showed him my face. Showed him all the vulnerability it held. Showed him me at my weakest point. Weaker than when Joe had pummeled me in the yard. Weaker than when Cora lay practically dead on the highway. I’d stepped up and did what I had to do in both of those moments, but with Miranda, there was nothing I could do. When it came to what had happened with her, it’d broken me, and I’d never taken the time to fix myself. Not in more than seven years. I couldn’t. I had Logan to look out for. Didn’t have the luxury of worrying about myself when he was less than a day old and needed me more. I shook my head. “Sh-she never came back.”
“She died?” Logan stared up at me.
I nodded. Couldn’t do anything else. Couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move.
“Dad, don’t cry.” He dove into my chest and I wrapped him up and squeezed. Squeezed like I never wanted to let him go. So hard I thought I might be crushing him, but I felt his arms tighten right back.
I wiped my eyes. “It’s our job to stay strong and protect the people we love, Son.” I scooped him up into my lap. “But it’s okay to be sad too. Don’t ever let someone call you weak for feeling something. Ever. Don’t you ever think you’re not a man because something makes you sad. Promise me.”
His head bobbed up and down. “I promise.”
“I took you from the hospital and disappeared. I’d seen a picture of Montana in a book and thought it looked like a great place to raise a boy. And that’s where we went.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
I couldn’t tell if Logan was sad or happy or just indifferent. I thought it was probably a combination of the first two. Sad that he’d never meet his biological mother, but happy to know the truth. Happy to know that he hadn’t done anything wrong, that the only reason she didn’t come to see him was because she couldn’t.
We sat there for a little while longer. Just staring at the wall. Both of us looked past it, to what was behind it, to the future. Finally, he angled his gaze back up to me. “Dad?”
I scrubbed a hand through my hair and wiped more tears from my eyes. Then I mussed up his hair like I always did and smiled. “Yeah?”
“You’re going to win tonight.”
My eyes narrowed. I stared long and hard at him. He believed every word of what he said. For kids anything was possible. I needed some of that. “Buddy, I don’t know.” My stare moved back to the wall and I shook my head. I didn’t want to lie to him. He needed to be prepared to handle things.
He gripped me by the forearm. “Dad. I mean it. You can do this. You have to.”
Joe and I had studied every single Sid fight tape in existence. We spent hours poring over them. Joe even more than me. He’d only spotted a couple of possible weak spots. Nothing exploitable.
I moved my hand to Logan’s shoulder. “I will do everything I can. Everything. But you need to be ready to handle it if I lose. Okay?” I sighed. “You have to be ready to take care of the family if I can’t.”
I’d expected him to frown, or freak out, or tell me there was no way I could lose. Expected him to have some false sense of security, or outlandish notion that it was a hundred percent certain that I’d win. But he didn’t.
He grinned and nodded at me. “We can only do our best, right?”
His grin took me by surprise. Like he knew something I didn’t. It worried me on the inside, but comforted me all the same. I had to trust him. Putting trust like that in a seven-year-old seems like a silly notion, but it wasn’t for us. I knew my son, what we’d been through, what he was capable of. Our own experience and journey through life had prepared him and we both knew it. I’d tried to protect him for so long, but not even I could keep him from becoming who he was destined to be—a Lane, a warrior.
I’d told him those same words he’d just said when he was around five and was learning how to ride a bike. Something I knew he’d get a chance to do in Montana and not in a busy city. The kid had an impeccable memory.
I nodded at him. “That’s right, big man. We can only do our best. And as long as we do our best, it will always be good enough.”
We hugged and Logan didn’t shed a single tear. I’d wanted him to be iron and he was more.
We walked out into the living room of the hotel. Janet looked like she’d been threatening Joe with his life if he had gone in and interrupted us. I glanced at the clock. Six thirty p.m. Fights started at seven. I’d probably fight around ten.
I needed to get out of the room and do some heavy meditation for an hour. Then would come the dog and pony show for the press. Walk down a hallway in a robe. Disappear into the locker room. Something for them to show on TV to build the suspense.
One thing still lurked in the back of my mind. Where the hell was Gus?
Janet didn’t know. Joe didn’t seem concerned. Nobody had heard from him.
He wasn’t going to be by my side in the arena, but he was supposed to run some interference with the media so Joe and I could focus. He was supposed to help them get out of there if I lost the fight and could still breathe. Gus was tough as nails and knew the MGM Grand layout better than anyone. We needed him.
I turned to Janet.
She held up a hand. “Don’t.”
I canted my head slightly and frowned.
“No sentimental crap. You hear me, boy? Go kick that guy’s ass so we can all just go home.”
I stared and told her with my eyes I’d do everything in my power. “I love you. You’re the only mother I’ve ever had.”
Cora’s eyes glossed over as she watched.
Janet broke out into tears and ran over. Her arms wrapped around my ribs and she nearly knocked the breath out of me. “I said no sentimental crap.” She sniffled. “You asshole.”
“You needed to hear it.”
She stepped back and put two palms on each of my cheeks. “You’re like a son to me. You know that. And you’re the best son in the world.”
My head angled up to the ceiling. I closed my eyes and then opened them back up at her again.
I turned to Logan. “You hear that? I’m the best.”
I had to make the joke. I didn’t know how much more I could handle.
My gaze roamed around to all three of them and then back to Janet. My eyes said, take care of my family if I don’t make it.
She nodded, and her stare said, you know I will.
I walked to Cora. She tried to fight back the tears, but they came bursting through anyway. My palms went to her cheeks and she nuzzled into them like a cat. “You’re everything.”
I got down on my knees and took her hand. Kissed the inside of her wrist like I always did. I closed my eyes. “Say it, please. I need to hear it.”
“I’m yours. Always.”
She tugged on my hand and I stood and held her. I cradled her carefully in my arms so I wouldn’t aggravate her injury. “This isn’t the last time I’ll hold you like this.”
She nodded against my chest. “I believe you, babe. I believe in you. We all do.”
I leaned down and pressed my mouth to hers. Kissed her softly with a promise there would be more. That there’d be more kisses and more love and more everything. More of me. Soon. “I love you. Always.”
“Always.”
We shared a moment where our eyes locked. Where the world faded and it was just her and me. Losing was not an option. I locked in their faces—all of them. Took a mental photograph and logged it away. They were my fuel, my torch. I lived and breathed for all of them, and I would continue to do so.
I sat Cora down and stepped back. My head swiveled around to everyone once more. All my focus moved to the task at hand. The sentiments and gestures of love were done. The promises had been made. The promises I intended to fight for, to keep. “We all clear on the plans? You guys watch the fight from the room. If I lose, you get out of Dodge with the first route we talked about. If I’m alive, I’ll make my own way out with Joe. We rendezvous where it said on the paper at the house. We’ll regroup. First one there pays with cash and uses an alias. No devices.” I glared at Janet. “Not even the Kindle. We’ll get a new one. Read a paperback.”
Joe’s arms folded across his chest and he nodded. Everyone else followed suit. We were a team, a family. We had this locked up. They were to leave their cell phones on and abandon them in cars with northern license plates in the parking lot. If they couldn’t do that, then use a local vehicle or dump them in a trash can.
“If you meet resistance, alternate to the next route. Think on your feet.”
Everyone agreed. We’d been over it several times on the trip and before we’d left.
“Don’t say the name of the rendezvous point. Not here. Not anywhere. Always assume we’re being watched or listened to until we’re out of here.”
Joe took a step toward the door. “They got it, asshole. We need to go.”
I glanced around at them. “I can do this. We can do this.” I kissed Logan and Cora one last time.
Then we left.