“Again,” Carlo Segura growled, as he spun away from Dax, as usual revealing his impatience through body language more than words. He was coiled tight this morning. Nothing Dax did seemed good enough. They’d gone through this same arm-bar escape maneuver umpteen times now, and Carlo just wasn’t happy with Dax’s speed or technique.
The next attempt was even worse. Dax didn’t even complete the move; he broke off and said “Fuck” under his breath. It didn’t help that the gym’s thermostat was on the blink again. Sure, it was chilly outside, but that didn’t mean Scallion’s had to be hotter than a goddamn foundry. The other guys didn’t seem to mind as they worked the bags, skipped, sparred, and generally dug deep to perfect whatever they were doing. Dax, on the other hand, could not get it together today. He was in tremendous shape, probably the most ripped and certainly the fittest, in terms of stamina, he’d ever been in his life, including his time in the United States Marine Corps. But his head was not on straight. Carlo knew it, too.
“Again. Concentrate.” Dax’s longtime sparring partner, whom he’d known since his early days in the Marines, Carlo, was an expert in Brazilian Jujitsu, one of the best anywhere. He’d shown Dax all his tricks, and in turn, Dax had shown Carlo everything he knew about Aikido and Tae Kwon Do. Combining those three disciplines, plus the rudiments of others like professional wrestling, karate, and Muay Thai, had seen them attain second-degree black belts, side by side, and they’d even spent time as instructors in the Marine Corps martial arts program.
They knew each other’s fighting styles inside out, but this was the first time they’d trained together in over a year. Whereas Dax had left the Corps after eight years, Carlo wanted to be a lifer; he’d serve for the full twenty years. So sessions like this were few and far between, and those old, subtle calibrating influences they’d had on each other’s psychologies during training now seemed rusty, even awkward. They’d never been best friends exactly, but they’d always understood and respected each other as fighters and as soldiers, their competitive instincts kindred. Together in the ring, or in the field, they’d always relied on their techniques and their instincts to see them through to victory, or at least to make it back in one piece. But life had gotten between them. And in civilian circles, those techniques and instincts did not always apply. In fact, more often than not they got in the way because ordinary people didn’t think in those terms. They didn’t need them.
Here in the world, you still fought for what you wanted, but you did it with emails and memos and mostly behind a cloak of anonymity. You didn’t risk yourself out here. Dax had found that out the hard way last night, when he’d stepped in to save a man’s life in the ring and gotten his nuts kicked in by the public and the International Mixed Martial Arts Federation. No, out here you didn’t do the right thing; you did the proper thing. There was a big difference.
“What’s distracting you, bud?” Carlo asked him. “Seriously, you’re miles away. What gives?”
Dax stood up straight and ran a hand over his damp buzz cut. “Nothing that can’t wait. Come on, I wanna nail this thing.”
Carlo shook his head. “Not until you tell me what’s up. Those gremlins in your head, they got something to do with last night?”
“Could be.”
“Why? You did the right thing.”
“Not according to every other asshole who was there. I stopped their fun, and they hated my guts for it.”
Carlo cocked his head to one side. “Come on, you can blank that shit out. You know how it works. There’s something else, isn’t there?”
“Yeah, that ref—”
“The ref was a piece of shit. Bought and paid for. Someone, somewhere didn’t want the fight to end early. It had to be a KO or a tap-out or else big bucks would be lost.”
“Exactly.”
Carlo squinted at him. “And we’ve seen that shit before. So tell me, what’s really knocked you out of joint?”
“I don’t know. Things.” In Dax’s clammy fist, a layer of dampening chalk dust; in his mind, a look of horror he couldn’t get over. Thad Hollis’s missus, ringside, alone among a crowd of rich pricks and their trophy wives, alone in what she saw happening to her man in the ring. Dax had seen desperation like that before, written on the faces of brothers-in-arms in the direst combat situations, certain that something bad was about to happen and equally certain there wasn’t a damn thing they could do to prevent it. Sure, he knew that look well. A person was most alive behind a look like that. And something about Tiana Crowe had struck him deep in that moment…he’d seen her at her most desperate.
The whole arena, the whole world had been against her. Against her man in the ring. She’d loved and she’d hated and she’d blazed in that moment. Through her pain, Dax had seen what she’d seen, understood what she knew and what no one else had cottoned onto: that something was wrong with Thad Hollis. Not the fact he was losing the match. No, it was more than that. Something only a person who was intimate with him would know about him. His fighting and his behavior had been erratic, as though he’d been struggling to stay in control of himself. Dax, probably like everyone else, had assumed it was adrenaline or maybe steroids pumping him up, but when he’d observed Tiana, not just worried but furious and terrified at the same time, he’d understood what was wrong.
The ref should have stopped the fight. He was right there, he could see that Hollis had lost his coordination, that he wasn’t responding to the vicious blows, that he wasn’t going to tap out inside that sleeper hold. And when Dax had seen her face, he’d reacted the exact same way he’d have reacted if one of his brothers-in-arms had been close to death in the field.
Well, it wasn’t exactly the same if he was honest. The fact that Tiana Crowe was one of the most intriguing and beautiful women he’d ever seen, had made him not just react to her pain, but well and truly overreact. In his own way, he’d protected her in the ring last night, not just her clueless boyfriend.
“Don’t feel like talking, huh?” Carlo began to unfasten his hand wraps.
“Not really, bud. Just some stuff I need to get straight in my head. You know how it is. Back in the world, things can get…complicated.”
“Tell me about it. But you should really focus on this, on being the best. You are, you know, as much as I hate to admit it.”
“What?”
“The toughest son of a bitch I’ve ever fought. Don’t let all this other bullshit get to you. Just remember what it was like over there and stay in that zone. You’ll go all the way. None of these pricks will get anywhere near you.” He paused. “Monte still around?”
“In and out. Last time I spoke to him he was getting ready to enroll in that famous course he was always telling us about.”
“No shit. Engineer?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s the stuff right there,” said Carlo. “Fresh out of the clinic and already dreaming big.”
“Yeah. But he’s not fully out yet.”
“Planning ahead though, right?”
“I guess.”
Carlo chuckled to himself as they made their way to the locker room. “You two always did have it all worked out.”
“Yeah, we always said we’d take over the world somehow. One builds bridges, the other knocks people down for a living. We’ve got it all worked out.”
“Think he’d want me to swing by?” asked Carlo. “I don’t fly back east for another few days.”
“Probably not a good idea,” Dax replied. “It’s not you, muchacho. Monte’s had a hard time letting go, that’s all. He’s good for a while, then something will trigger him and he’ll either bounce off the walls or shut himself off completely. Seeing you might put him right back in that place he doesn’t want to be.”
“But he sees you, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Any other guys from the unit?”
“None that I know of. We never talk about it. I think that’s why he can put up with me—because we got out at the same time and he knows I’m never going back. Moving on—that’s been his problem. A part of him is still there, back in the shit.”
“He just needs time, though, right? To adjust? He’s not a head case or anything?”
Dax didn’t answer that. He didn’t know how to. Wasn’t it all a question of degrees? His own readjustment hadn’t exactly been a picnic. In fact, the jury was still out on whether he—or Monte, or any of the guys for that matter—would ever recognize the people they’d been before joining up. It just wasn’t something you could quantify. Not even in fighting terms. The strongest guy in the world could go to pieces under fire, or he could take anything combat could dish and then still go to pieces when he returned home—for reasons too personal and too insidious to predict.
Every man in the unit was different. And yet they all had this in common: they’d experienced things that no one in civilian life could ever understand. For that reason, Dax knew, it was important that he spent time with his old friend, Monte—the best friend he’d ever had—for both their sakes. Adapting to the world would always be a struggle, but at least in each other’s company they could take on the world together, and take it slow, with one foot on safe ground. Maybe Carlo didn’t understand that yet, still tied to the Corps as he was. He hadn’t had the rug pulled out from under him yet; he hadn’t tried to lower his combative guard and let the world in only to find that, in doing so, you let more things out than in—things that should never see the light of day. Things that didn’t belong in this emptier world of vague threats you couldn’t fend off with training or adrenaline in the heat of combat. A soldier needed thick skin, he needed that ability to disconnect parts of himself, to let his training and his survival instincts take over. But here, you were supposed to shed that skin, to reconnect those parts that had been shut off for so long, and to forget that training and leave those survival instincts behind.
The suck was behind them now. But it still clung to Monte, just like it did to Dax and the others, and like it would to Carlo when he finished his twenty.
“I don’t know about head cases,” he said, “but that ref from last night wants his head busting, that’s for damn sure.”
“You going to follow up on that?” asked Carlo.
“Dunno. You reckon I should?”
“I’ve never seen you back down from anything, muchacho. And they’re probably going to come after you with everything they’ve got. The IMMAF, I mean. You showed up one of their own on live TV.” Carlo snorted a laugh. “You’ll be a freaking legend in the unit. That clip will be all over YouTube by now.”
“The idiot should’ve stepped in before it got to that.”
“You threw the sucker away like an old burrito. Legend.”
But Dax wasn’t thinking of the rat-faced ref or the TV cameras or anything else. He just couldn’t get over that look of horror on Tiana Crowe’ face when she saw her man lose his hold on reality in the ring.
It was the look of a woman who couldn’t possibly know what that unreality of combat was like, yet she’d glimpsed it nonetheless. In those fleeting, agonizing moments, she’d seen a great fighter, the man she loved, crumble to nothing. But more than that, much more, she’d raged against it.
The only question now was…where could Dax find a woman like that?