NINE
Ward
My only memories of my early life were of anger.
Literally as far back as my consciousness went, which couldn't have been much older than three, that was all that was there - anger.
It boiled in the veins of my little body.
It made me curl my fists until there were bloodied crescents in my palms.
It made me put my face in a pillow and scream.
My childhood memories weren't the dreamy, blurred around the edges, sepia-toned softness many had to think of in quiet moments.
Mine were sharp, vivid, harshly focused.
I could clearly see the plastic blinds in one of my earliest apartments, the way one was broken off in the center, the way another had an indent through ten of the blinds from when a friend of my mother's had gotten angry and tossed her against it, the plastic making a cracking sound as it bent inward.
I had been sitting five feet away on the cold, lackluster wooden floor in front of a dome-fronted TV that was hardly bigger than the cover of the only coloring book I had, watching a grainy, in-and-out of focus cartoon that we only got because of my mother stealing the cable from the apartment next door. It's our little secret, Rossy, she had confided in me, like my little brain even understood the concept of theft or secrets. I can't be living here without my soaps. That I did understand, because it meant that she shooed me away from the screen and watched her own shows, leaving me with little to do but play with broken crayons in a coloring book where all the pages were already half-colored.
He took my mom's purse as he left.
And she cried.
And my reaction hadn't been worry or sadness myself.
All I remembered was anger.
Just like when I was five, a week before I was going to 'be a big boy' and start school for the first time. And she had left me to go get a pack of smokes.
Then didn't come home all night.
Or until the middle of the next afternoon.
Leaving me with an empty fridge and a churning, painful belly.
She had stumbled in, makeup smeared, clothes twisted, shoes in hand, her eyes glassed-over, her voice way too chipper, announcing that she brought me a big breakfast before producing a bagel she had eaten half of.
Anger.
That was all that coursed through me.
Or when I was eleven, several years after getting the first drug lecture at school, mature enough to understand exactly why there were spoons all over my house with burned undersides. Why my mother's moods would spike for fifteen to twenty minutes where she would dance around, tell me these grandiose plans that we were going to do, and then crash, sending her into her bed, too depressed even to sign my permission slip to the museum.
Hell, it wasn't like we had the fucking money that was needed to cover the trip anyway. I stayed behind in the school library with the pinched-faced librarian who kept watching me like I was going to steal her dusty ass fucking copy of Lord of the Flies or some shit.
And as I sat there, reading the pages, trying to think of a world, any world that was different than the shitstorm I lived in, my hand was curled on the desk, fingernails biting in, my pulse pounding, my blood boiling.
It wasn't until I was thirteen that I understood how we managed to keep an apartment - albeit one with roaches in the sinks, a radiator that only worked half the time, and power that flickered on and off even on calm wind days - when my mother very rarely worked.
Sure, there were 'good spells' when she wasn't in bed all the time, sick from the drugs, depressed, and oblivious to the world around her. Those were the weeks - at the very most, months - when she put on decent clothes, went out, got a job, and started remembering to do things like keep food in the cabinets, and buy me new shoes when my toes started to push through the ends of my old pair.
Those spells were rare, though.
And yet we never got thrown out on the streets.
But, well, I was a fucking kid.
How could I have known?
I didn't even know what the terms were until middle school. And I didn't have the disposition - bitter, angry, jaded, disgusted - until thirteen to really consider the possibility.
The oldest profession in the world, right?
Yeah, that was a chalky, nauseating pill to swallow.
You know, the first time you realized what your mom was.
A crack whore.
A literal crack whore.
She sucked and fucked for drug money, for the small bit of food money, for the bills.
And, as I learned when I came home from school to find her on all fours on the living room floor, her tits out, her hair in his hands, getting pounded by the landlord - she sucked and fucked for rent as well.
Maybe to make it even worse, when she saw me, she didn't try to cover up, she didn't tell him to stop, or tell me to leave.
No.
She greeted me like she did every day, like we were going to have a motherfucking polite conversation while some guy's cock was inside her.
The anger that night was explosive enough for me to punch a hole in a wall and break two of the metacarpal bones in my hand. For the first time.
Rent 'paid,' she went out and didn't come home for two days. When she did, she was so fucked up she could barely walk.
I found her passed out in the tub an hour later, water sloshing over the sides, slumped down enough that she very likely would have drowned.
I would say I hate to admit this part, but that would imply regret or remorse on my part.
But I didn't call for help.
I didn't even bother to pull her out of the tub.
I reached in, turned off the water, opened the drain, and left her.
There was only so fucking much I could take.
And when you spent half your life raising your goddamn self, your bond with your mother wasn't exactly what it should have maybe been.
When I was younger and she was high, I used to bask in that brilliant glow, that sunny day in a world of darkness, letting it warm me up, wanting that to be the mother I got to have all the time. Willing it to happen.
But I learned.
Oh, I learned
Over.
And over.
And fucking over again.
The darkness always followed.
It was better never to feel the warmth on your skin at all. It only made it that much darker, that much colder when it was gone.
So when I was a teen and she was high, I stayed away. I locked my bedroom door. I left out the fire escape.
Because I soon realized, that wasn't my mom.
My mom wasn't that happy-go-lucky woman full of hopes and dreams.
That was the drugs.
My mom was the woman who when I once walked past an alley on my way home one night had a cock in her ass and one in her mouth, and a third man standing beside waiting his turn.
My mother was darkness and hopelessness and desperation.
And that, well, it made for a hard person to love.
If I even had any of that emotion left in me.
I was fifteen when I came home from school one afternoon to find her sitting up against a wall in the living room, a pipe shattered on the floor beside her, an empty baggy half-sticking out of her pocket.
I didn't even need to walk over to know.
It was right there, plain as day.
Her wide open unblinking eyes were looking out the window.
And her chest wasn't moving.
Dead.
Horribly enough, my first thought was That took a lot longer than I expected.
Crack whores didn't often get quite so long a life expectancy. Not with the severity of her habit. Not with how many unwrapped dicks had been inside her.
She had a long life, all things considered.
As for me, well, I stood there for a long moment in that shitty apartment with my dead mother's corpse, wondering what the hell was to be done.
If I called the cops and stayed, I would be dragged off to a group home that I wouldn't leave until I was nineteen when they would toss me out on the streets like a piece of garbage with no way to get along in the world.
And that, well, was the best case.
There was also the chance of being bounced from home to home, dealing with 'moms' who were in it for the check to fund their own habits or, worse yet, the genuine ones, the ones who wanted to fix me.
There was no fixing me.
I was scattered pieces across time.
A little bit left in that living room the night of the bent blinds. Some more when I realized my mom was an addict. The last bit when I realized she was a prostitute too.
There was no finding those pieces and gluing them back together.
I wouldn't have let them try anyway.
Soon they would have gotten sick of me punching things, breaking shit, raging out, and would send me back with tears in their eyes like I was their failure.
I wasn't their failure.
I was my mother's failure.
That was all.
And she was dead.
There was no fixing that.
"Tammy, you ready to pay your rent, woman?" the landlord's voice called, sounding way too jazzed up about fucking a woman who didn't have much of a choice in the matter.
"Unless you're into corpses," I told him as he moved toward the doorway, "you might want to take your cock to one of the other whores in the building."
"Well, shit," he said, exhaling hard. "What a waste of a good-looking woman. And a decent pussy too, considering."
That should have pissed me off.
Or disgusted me.
But there was simply nothing to be felt right then.
"Well, you owe me rent, boy," he announced.
"I don't have anything." Hell, my ass didn't even have lunch money. The school had to fund me. Thankfully, they did. Otherwise, I would have spent a lot more of my childhood hungry. At least I got one decent meal a day.
"Yeah, and I don't fuck boys," he said, something odd in his tone making my stomach twist, something that said maybe he didn't, but possibly that he knew someone who did.
Was that going to be my fate?
What a cruel fucking twist in the world.
"Little old though," he said, something that shouldn't have, but totally did make a rush of relief course through me. "Though, I maybe have an idea," he said, going to reach out toward me.
I raised an arm, knocking the hand out of the way. "Keep your fucking hands off me, asshole," I growled with all the authority a fifteen-year-old boy could possess.
"Hey hey," he said, smiling, apparently liking something about my outburst, which I had a feeling didn't bode well for me. "He's got anger issues too. Even better. Walt is going to like that."
"Who the fuck is Walt?"
"He's gonna be your new owner."
My stomach plummeted at that.
See, I grew up in a shitty area. I had a crack whore for a mother. I passed endless dealers and prostitutes on the street on my way home from school. I saw the gambling, the gang turf wars, the seedy underbelly that exists in every town in every county in every state in the country.
There were things that happened that would keep people awake at night.
There were men - and occasionally women - who could, quite literally, steal, brand, bring you to heel, and fucking own you. It happened every day.
One more news story of a young girl gone missing meant one more sex slave to be shot up with drugs and fucked by endless men.
One more healthy young man never heard from again, beaten, drugged, shipped overseas, and sold into slave labor.
It happened.
It happened often.
And it was, apparently, happening to me.
Whoever the fuck Walt was, I knew I needed to stay as far as fuck away from him as possible.
Except even as the thought formed, there was a sharp pain to the button of my chin.
And everything went black.
--
I woke up to the smell of must.
You know the smell.
Of cement and airlessness and wet.
Hell, I had maybe only ever been in one in my life, but I could detect the scent of a basement in under five seconds after regaining consciousness.
My mouth felt weird, fuzzy, dry, almost unfamiliar. I had to rake my tongue against the roof of my mouth and my gums for a long moment before they started feeling normal again.
I couldn't say for sure, but I had a sneaking suspicion that I wasn't just dehydrated.
I had been drugged.
Even as I thought it, I noticed the strange weighted sensation of my limbs, the way I had to focus to make them move, much like you'd have to do when they fell asleep.
It was another five minutes before I could get on my feet, noticing that my shoes were gone, finding that perhaps the strangest of all. They were fucking dollar-store shoes. Who the fuck would want them?
I ran my hand along the wall to keep me grounded, the room too dark to see, and I really didn't want to fall into whatever disgustingness that there might have been on the floor. When I made my way to the window, I found it barred. The kind of thick that meant there was no getting out.
On a growl, I kept following the wall.
And ended up kicking something.
No.
Someone.
"Fucking watch it," the voice demanded, sounding half-asleep.
"Who are you?" I asked, voice a desperate plea, not even giving a fuck if it made me sound weak. "Where am I? Why am I here?"
"Christ," another voice said, maybe slightly older, but not by much, just enough that it had settled into the deep timbre of manhood while mine still cracked on occasion. "Another fucking one," he went on. There was shuffling then a whoosh and a flick of light. He had matches. And, it seemed, a hurricane lantern. He lit the wick and turned to look at me.
I had been right.
He was older, but not by much. Maybe seventeen, closing in on eighteen with black hair, light green eyes, and a face half-swollen with bruises.
"Another what?" I demanded, hands curling into fists, something this kid didn't miss. His eyes went there, a brow raising slightly, before his gaze found mine again.
"Another dog."
"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" I asked, hearing more shuffling, seeing more guys around my age rousing from sleep, looking at me, nothing in their blank eyes but a mild curiosity.
"Welcome to Walt's team," he said, voice chilling. "You will spend the next few years getting the ever-loving shit kicked out of you, eating plain food, and sleeping on a cold, damp floor so Walt's pockets can keep getting fatter. I'm Miller; this is Wozniak, Beckett, Cohen, Delaney, and Adler. Who are you?"
I was pretty sure names like Miller, Wozniak, Beckett, Cohen, Delaney, and Adler were not first names.
So I had to ditch mine too.
And that was the day I stopped being Ross.
And I became Ward.
"Has a nice ring to it too. Walt will like announcing that shit."
"Who will I be fighting?" I asked, looking around, figuring that if there were even a chance of escape, these guys would have found it by now. So I was truly stuck. It was better not to focus on shit like getting out and, instead, find out how I could survive within.
"We fight one another," Miller explained, shrugging. "This," he said, pointing to his face, "was Delaney two nights ago."
We had to fight one another?
How the fuck were we expected to live together, but then brutalize people we had to start imagining as friends. Or at least as close as the situation would allow.
"And if I say no?"
This time, Delaney spoke up. He moved in closer to the light, allowing me to see he was closer to Miller's age - tall, blond, dark-eyed, mostly unscathed.
"You don't want to know what happens when you refuse," he said, shaking his head, something dead in his tone, something haunted in his eyes.
"Just fucking tell 'em," another voice chimed in, younger, more my age, with an accent I couldn't place since I had never been fucking anywhere, a thin build, long brown hair, and gray eyes. Adler. "What good is it going to do for him to see it for himself? That worked out real good for the last one, eh, Delaney?"
Something about his anger made my stomach drop, knowing somehow that whatever had him riled was something I did, in fact, need to know.
"Tell me," I demanded, looking at Adler, chin lifted. I could take it.
"Walt likes his fighters real obedient. And when ya don't do what he says. And the new bloods like to refuse. All fucking bravado, thinking ya are in any kind of control. Yeah, he gets in a pissy mood. And he brings out something he calls The Discipliner."
Shit.
I swallowed hard, trying to convince my stomach to stay steel. "What is The Discipliner?"
"A bat. Just a garden variety backyard bat. Except he don't use it for hitting balls. And, no, if you're thinking it, he don't use it for breaking bones neither."
Shit shit shit.
"Just fucking tell him," another voice said from the back, "so I can get back to sleep already."
"He likes to strap ya down and shove it up yer arse. Right there for the whole audience to see, laughing while ya scream. Then he pulls it out, and has ya thrown back down here where, if you're lucky, ya live. But almost nobody is lucky 'round here. So ya die. In a pile of yer own blood and shit, begging for yer mommy."
Jesus fucking Christ.
I swallowed hard, glad that the bile that eased its way up my throat managed to get choked back.
"How long have you been here?" I asked next, finding maybe his brutal honesty off-putting even as jaded as I was.
"'Bout a year. Give or take a few months. Miller here is the lucky one. He's 'bout to age out, ain't ya, Miller?"
"Age out?"
"His audience likes to keep it young, y'know? Old fucking perverted fucks," Adler went on. "Soon as ya start getting too much hair on yer chest, he boots ya."
"He just lets you go?" I asked, not comprehending why he would do that when someone could obviously point fingers.
"Ya think we are still in the city, Ward? Please. Fucking Cohen over there is from Montana, ain't ya, Cohen? Corn-fed fucker. And Delaney was from California. They take us from anywhere, drug us, and we wake up here. And we ain't got not one fucking clue where here is neither."
"How did you know I was from the city then?"
"Ya got that city kid rough look to ya. And that accent. City boy born and raised. What happened? Ran away from home with nowhere to stay, and got picked up?"
It was sharing circle time, apparently.
"Mom OD'd. The landlord sold me to pay the back rent."
"Ah, tale as old as time, that one," Adler said, a goddamn thirty-year-old trapped in a fifteen-year-old body. "But anyway, yeah. We get drugged again when we're too old, shipped off somewhere, likely waking up as confused as ever. He don't kill us. He ain't shy 'bout that. Would do it right in front of us. So he just gets rid of us when we served our purpose. Something to look forward to, eh? Be sure to send us a fucking postcard, Miller," he called, moving away from me to drop back down on his spot on the floor, on top of a pile of what looked like clothes scooped together as a mattress.
"On the one hand, we do at least get fed," Cohen offered, sighing. "Need to keep our strength up so we can really go at each other. Guess it's one silver lining."
I looked over at Adler, finding him rolling his eyes and shooting me a smirk, clearly not a fan of Cohen's softer attitude.
"Yeah, Cohen. Lots of silver linings in this here hellhole. Go to fucking sleep. Dream of the days when ya were able to eat yer corn and fuck yer sheep."
"You're a fucking asshole, Adler," Cohen shot.
"Yep," Adler agreed. "But this asshole is gonna be able to stay sane until he ages up. Yer ass is halfway to bonkers already. Crying when ya think no one can hear ya. Been here a year, Cohen. Mommy ain't coming. Accept reality."
Accept reality.
Somehow, that resonated.
Adler didn't strike me as a kid who sat idly by and let shit happen to him, so if he was saying the only thing that you could do was survive until you aged out, then I was going to go ahead and take that advice.
I was going to survive.
I was going to stay sane.
I was going to get strong.
And I was going to age out.
Well, that was the plan anyway.
--
I met Walt three days later. That's how long we were kept down there.
When the sun rose the morning after I woke up in the basement, the space became clearer. Just a basement of, likely, an old restaurant judging by the pile of milk crates piled in a corner. There was, thankfully, one bathroom to the end, but it only had a toilet and a sink.
"Like the fucking Hilton, eh, Ward?" Adler asked, coming in to take a piss while I did my best to scrub some of the dirt off my arms and face.
Aside from the bathroom, the barred window, the milk crates, and the seven piles of clothes, there was nothing else around.
"That's you," Miller told me when he caught me staring at the unoccupied pile of clothes. "Don't worry," he said, seeming to sense my hesitance. "He didn't die there. And you are going to need clothes. Gets cold as fuck down here in the winter."
"How long have you been here?"
Delaney snorted, asking me what year it was.
"Four years," he concluded, nodding. "Almost eighteen. Would have been on my way to fucking college by now," he added before walking off, then not speaking to anyone for the next two days.
Pasts, I quickly found, were usually sore spots.
Even Adler, the cynic, the asshole, but also somehow the most charismatic of the group, didn't talk about where he came from, didn't talk about his life before, didn't ever mention what he wished he were doing instead of being trapped in a cold, stinking basement where he was forced to fight if he didn't want to be sodomized with a bat or killed.
There weren't, as Cohen's half-sane brain wanted him to believe, any silver linings.
There was no joy.
No hope.
Just survival.
Just biding time to age out, even though not one of us knew what that would mean.
Twice a day, the door would open, and yet another egg crate would be pushed inside, filled almost to the top with plates and bowls. The food was bland as fuck, but filling. Plain chicken, potatoes, and peas were a favorite. They must have bought that shit in bulk.
We ate.
We each had a cup that was meant to be used to get water out of the tap since no one was springing for soda or juice.
There wasn't much talking.
Miller and Delaney, I figured, were focused on their upcoming potential freedom. I imagined, after years of captivity, the thought of freedom was almost as terrifying as living forever as a fighting dog.
"New blood," a voice called out of nowhere on the third day, making me jump, spilling water over my feet, something Adler chuckled at.
"Gotta work on yer reflexes, Ward. Go on, get up. He'll be coming for ya."
I stood because, well, what other choice did I have?
Even if everything in me was screaming that I didn't want to meet the man who put bats up a boy's ass as punishment.
I took a breath, moving toward the door, waiting.
He unlocked the door a second later, coming in.
And he was about what you might expect with graying hair, a beer gut, a horrendous mustache, and beady black eyes.
"Paid a pretty penny for your scrawny ass," he told me, looking me up and down much the way someone would size up a literal fighting dog. "Gotta fatten you up a bit. Maybe you'll be worth the seven-hundred."
I had a feeling he made way more than seven-hundred on us over the course of our 'careers' as fighting dogs.
"Tomorrow night, you'll fight... Cohen," he informed me, then walked out.
"That's a good match-up," Miller told me, the first time he had spoken directly to me since the night I woke them all up. "He's bigger, but he's softer. Don't know you, kid, but I got a feeling you're hungry. Hungry is what will keep you alive in here. Protect your chin. Cohen likes to do a knockout early to prevent having to make things get ugly."
The next night, I followed the guys out, realizing they were always forced to watch the other fights as well - and, apparently, watch any punishment that might take place.
I had been right in thinking it was some kind of old restaurant. There was a halfway abandoned bar to the side, lined with various half-drank bottles of liquor. The room reeked of it too, along with sweat, and the heady odor of blood thirst.
There was no actual ring, just a scuffed and bloodied floor that the men circled around to, I soon found, throw us back at each other if we got out of reach of our opponent.
Cohen and I were introduced.
Bets were placed.
And then we were told to face each other up.
See, for all my rage, I had never acted on it.
I had never, believe it or not, been in a fistfight.
I didn't know dick about what I was doing.
All I knew was to protect my chin.
So I raised my hands, ducked my chin to my chest, and got my first ass-kicking.
I had to be half-carried back to the basement by Delaney and Adler since Miller was fighting Wozniak.
"Ya gotta be fucking kidding me with that weak shit," Adler said, dropping me down.
"Ease up, Adler," Delaney demanded, taking my cup to go get me water.
"Fuck that. I ain't easing up. That was some pansy ass shit out there. Don't got one busted knuckle. You just took yer hits."
"So what?" I growled, reaching for the water Delaney handed me so I could rinse the taste of my own blood out of my mouth.
"So if ya can't put on a good fucking show, he'll have yer ass for it."
"Not like that," Delaney was quick to explain. "He means that he has no use for a fighter who can't pull his own weight. If you have another fight like that, Walt's men won't place bets on you, which means if you lose, Walt loses money. You need to engage. You need to find whatever rage you might be feeling for being a goddamn fighting dog, and use it in the ring."
"Against you guys," I said, looking up at them, unsure how the hell they could beat the shit out of one another, then share a room.
"Look," Delaney said, squatting down, "we all are in the same boat. We might break your bones and knock out your teeth, but when we get back here, we are all we got. We can't hold grudges. So get angry, burn through it in the fight, then let it go."
With that, they were both called back up, leaving me alone to curl up as much as my aching ribs would allow.
Alone, hurt, confused, I had all of five minutes of feeling sorry for myself.
Then it came back.
My oldest friend.
There for me since I was nothing but a baby.
Anger.
The next time I fought, I used it.
And I won.
Then I lost.
Then I won twice in a row.
Every single time, win or lose, I had new scars, new broken bones, new permanent reminders of my time in that basement with no medical supplies, having to wrap broken bones with strips of jeans that didn't fit anyone there.
Miller aged out four months after I showed up.
Merely one month later, Delaney followed.
Then Wozniak.
And Beckett.
Then one night, the door opened.
When the rest of us woke up in the morning, there were three new kids there, suddenly making us, all of maybe sixteen, the old timers, the ones to impart wisdom, the ones to step up where Miller and Delaney once had.
"Quit the fucking crying," Adler hissed one morning after we had all been forced to watch Walt beat in the skull of a kid who had only been around for three nights. He had, thankfully, been unconscious after the first hit. He died sometime after the tenth.
"Adler," I growled, shaking my head at him.
"What? Like this is new? I've been a fucking bastard since before ya showed up here, Ward. I can't fucking think past the blubbering."
He was doing a lot of thinking lately too.
One year.
Tops.
That was all he had left.
I had maybe a year and a half.
I never did get Adler's story. Where he came from. If he had anything to try to go home to.
As for me, well, I didn't have dick.
I knew my future was going to be a dark, hard, ugly one.
But I would survive.
That was what needed to happen.
"Cohen didn't come back," one of the newer kids commented, a somewhat dim-witted kid whose already small brain likely wouldn't take too kindly to getting knocked around for years.
"Because like I told ya last night, ya nitwit, he aged out."
Out of the seven of us that had been there the night I first arrived, Adler and I were the only ones left. Adler, because he passed for younger with his hair he refused to cut, his thinness. Me because while I hit a huge growth spurt and absolutely looked every bit my age, I brought in a lot of money.
It wasn't until several months later - maybe half a year, time was hard to tell anymore - early on in a non-fight night, that shit changed.
I was called out.
No one ever got called out.
Aging out meant you got held back after your final fight.
There had never been an instance, not in the two years I had been inside that basement where one of us had been called up before a fight.
And then Adler was called out as well.
Adler gave me a look in that moment that I would never forget, a look I still saw in my head in quiet moments.
He looked scared.
It was a look I had never seen on his face before.
And it terrified me. Me, this guy who had become nothing but a walking, talking, living, breathing survival manual.
You did what you had to do.
Day in, day out.
That was your only choice.
To live.
But this guy, Adler, smart-ass comments aside, had always been stronger, always been more hungry, more willing to take it on the chin, to shake it off, to keep plugging on, to offer the new kids up to the liquid burn of our harsh reality, no chaser.
And he was fucking scared.
So even as we were led upstairs and into the bar, his man leaving out the back door, leaving us alone with Walt, we knew the plan.
Come what may, we were going to live through that motherfucking night.
I almost didn't.
"Well well well, the grandpas," he said, nodding at us over the rim of his glass. Scotch. He always drank scotch. "The kids call you that, did you know? Grandpas."
Shoulder-to-shoulder with Adler, I could feel the way the air around him was vibrating. And though his head stayed still, I knew he was looking; I knew he was assessing the situation. He was good at that, at sussing shit out. His eyes saw fucking everything. He had been the only one to know six months before that one of the kids had gotten a nasty infection from the injuries following a particularly ugly fight. The rest of us just thought he was beat, trying to recover.
Another three hours if he's lucky.
It was almost that to the dot.
So I knew he wasn't just standing there looking at Walt with his oily face and thinning hair and stupid ass mustache.
No.
He was taking in every movement the man made, every aspect of the room, what any of it could mean for us in that moment.
"Nothing to say, huh? Surprised. I hear you're a real talker." That was directed at Adler, obviously. No one would ever accuse me of being chatty.
"Ya smell like the dead sea, ya fuck. Trying to hold my breath over here."
I closed my eyes, shaking my head.
He never did know when to check the attitude.
But Walt just snorted at that, going behind the bar for a second, then moving forward toward us, dropping something down at a table just a few feet in front of us.
My gaze went down.
And my stomach dropped.
A gun.
Worse yet.
A revolver.
Don't ask me how I knew.
But I did.
Why the fuck else would he want the two of us?
The only reason we existed was for his sick pleasure, the way he got off on fear, anger, and bloodshed.
Six chambers.
Three bullets.
A fifty-fifty chance of death.
There was a scrape, dragging my eyes away from the revolver to look up and find Walt pulling two chairs over.
"Go on, have a seat. It's time for a fun, friendly game."
I looked over at Adler who was steadily avoiding eye-contact as he moved to sit down, something I found especially disconcerting.
What was he thinking?
Was he plotting?
He was the one always talking about riding it out until you aged up and out.
And he was so close.
But what were the chances that we would both walk away from this game?
Slim to none.
He had to have been planning something, right?
"Alright, you mouthy fuck," Walt said, moving toward the bar, pulling his own gun out of his pocket, and neither of us doubted his willingness to use it. We were one foot out the door already anyway, soon to mean dick to him. Our replacements were in the basement, with years to go still. "You're up first." Adler reached for the gun, everything about his demeanor languid, relaxed, nothing to show his heart was hammering or his palms sweating like mine were.
Which was possibly why I never saw it coming when his hand closed around the handle, his finger went to the hammer, and he raised the barrel at me.
"Oh, now this just got interesting!" Walt declared, a loud guffaw in his voice. "Why didn't I think of that? Much better to see you have to kill each other, isn't it?"
I forced my eyes from the gun, meeting his gaze.
It shouldn't have surprised me, but he held it.
He didn't blink.
He didn't respond to what had to have been shock, betrayal, and outrage in my face.
True, we were forced to live in a different reality where we had to frequently beat the shit out of one another. Adler had broken three of my ribs over the years, knocked out a molar, given me concussions. In turn, I had broken his nose, his hand, a rib, and gotten him unconscious three times.
But that was different.
We were forced to do that.
This was a choice.
"You're a fucking asshole, Adler," I hissed at him, voice low enough that Walt, a good eight feet away, couldn't hear.
"Check yer anger," Adler said, voice low.
"What's all the whispering about, ladies? Get the fucking show on the road, or I start shooting off toes."
There was hardly even a hesitation.
His finger moved to the trigger.
He pulled.
Then pain seared through my shoulder even as the bang made my ears pop.
Hissing in pain, I didn't hear the hollow click of an empty chamber, but I damn sure heard it when there was another bang.
This one not in my direction.
My eyes went to Adler first, seeing him rushing to stand, arm still extended.
Toward Walt.
Who had a bullet hole right through his left cheek, hand raised, eyes huge, blood dripping fucking everywhere.
"Thought the first one'd be empty," Adler explained calmly, looking over his shoulder at me as he ducked down to get Walt's fallen gun off the floor, turning to put it on the table in front of me, then going behind the bar.
He came back with two items.
Only one of them I understood.
The Discipliner.
"Adler," my voice called as I forced my legs to stand, as I mind-over-mattered the pain searing through my shoulder.
"Ain't gonna stick it up his arse," Adler said. Even with his back to me, I could hear the eye roll he was giving me. "Though he fucking deserves it."
Then the gun got tucked in his pants, the bat got swung in his hand, and he bashed in the brain of the man who had killed at least half a dozen times since I had been around, who had tortured more, who did God-knew what to the ones we figured aged out.
When he finally stopped, there was brain matter and skull fragments splattered around the room, and his face, clothes, hair, everything was saturated with blood.
He turned to me, dripping, looking like some savage fucking beast.
And just like that, we were free.
Free where, we didn't know.
Free to do what, yeah, that was a mystery as well.
But free.
Adler reached down, digging through Walt's pockets, pulling out more bullets for his gun, taking a second to load them into chambers, leaving me to wonder how he even knew how to do such things if he had been in a basement since he was fifteen, and took all the cash out of his wallet.
"Thousand," he said, moving over to the table, making five piles on the surface, one for each of the remaining fighting dogs.
"That's not even," I said as I found a rag, stabbing it into the bleeding wound on my shoulder. Two of the piles were stacked much higher than the others.
"They're all fifteen down there," he explained, pocketing his pile. "They're gonna run from here, find the cops, and get placed. Ya and me, we're on our fucking own now. Need something to live off of."
With that, he charged past me, and I was vaguely aware of his feet hammering down on the steps to the basement, of the door opening, of him shouting something at the kids remaining. Knowing him, something blunt, callous, and offensive somehow all at once.
But they all came back up regardless, looking around with dazed eyes, taking the money when Adler told them to. "Yer best bet is to stay together, run, and find the cops," he told them as he moved back toward the other item he had taken from behind the bar - a bottle of vodka - and moved back toward me, roughly ripping the rag out of my bullet wound, then pouring half the bottle over my open flesh.
"Motherfucker!" I yelled, the pain of the cleaning somehow worse than that of the bullet itself.
"Yeah, this is gonna fucking suck," he agreed, pouring the vodka over his fingers, making me acutely aware of what was going to happen just a second before two of his fingers slipped inside my body, digging around for the bullet.
I won't rewrite history just because I don't like this next part.
I blacked the fuck out.
I woke up sometime later to find the bloody bullet pressed into my hand, Walt's body by the bar, and the body of the guard who had brought us up piled next to him. My share of the money was in my pocket.
But the kids were gone.
Adler was gone.
And I was left with only one choice.
The same choice.
The one that would be my life for years to follow.
I had to survive.
"Did you ever see them again?" Adalind asked, shocking me out of my memories, making me realize how much I had given her, more than I had given anyone, more than I realized I even remembered from so long ago.
"Yeah."
I hadn't right away.
I had dragged my busted, broken ass out of that restaurant, finding myself in some place called Alberry Park, in the middle of a shitty area that - even after spending years as a fighting dog, and currently bleeding from a bullet wound - I didn't feel safe walking around in.
I didn't know much about the world I had left behind, except that it was about two and a half years older, and that it was in the middle of fall, making a chill course through me as I padded barefoot through the streets before finally finding a motel, spending sixty of the three-hundred and fifty bucks I had to my name to get a room for the night.
I showered for the first time in years.
I slept in a bed for the first time in years.
And I woke up in the morning with one thing on my mind.
Survival.
Nothing else mattered.
I had lived through the worst of what life had to offer me.
I could live through whatever it took to get something for myself.
I worked odd jobs for a while, anything that could pay enough to keep the motel roof over my head and food in my stomach. Then one night, completely by chance, I happened upon one.
An underground fighting ring.
Run by a man named Xavier Cooper who wore nice suits and drove an expensive as fuck sports car.
But this time, the men in his employ weren't forced into it.
And they made money from it.
Me, well, I had a lot of motherfucking anger to work through still.
I did it in that ring.
For years.
For the rest of my teens and most of my twenties, living like a goddamn pauper in a sleep-and-fuck motel, socking away the money, knowing that someday, I could do something with it, I could make something of myself.
Then I found the goddamn school.
On sale for a fifth what it was truly worth given all the space. But the economy was in the shitter, and no one wanted to open businesses, so no one was biting. Hell, I had talked them down another fifty-thousand when I bought it, which gave me that money to turn Hex into what it was, minus some of the more expensive upgrades I put in later.
It was around then, when I started making a profit from the fights, that my survival mode could finally stop being the prominent part of my personality, and things like the past could creep back in.
That was when I thought about them.
And that was when I started hunting them down.
Miller was a mechanic in Chicago with a wife and three kids who never knew about his past. And while he was glad that I was alive, that Walt was dead, he made it clear that all of that was in the past for him.
Delaney was down in Florida, making good money, living a life that such a thing afforded, drowning the past in endless pursuits of good times. I couldn't blame him for that.
Cohen never did really function properly. He lived with his family who were convinced his stories about being a fighting dog were evidence of a broken mind. And because he seemed happy, I didn't bother going out to see him, pulling him back into a past it was clear he was moving away from.
Wozniak, Beckett, and the kids that came in after were all mostly-functioning adults, one or two with heavy drinking problems, but most of them just chugging along.
I never did find Adler.
Not even a trace of him.
The one out of all of them I wanted to get in touch with again. To thank him for shooting me in the chest, for beating in the skull of a man who turned me into a dog, for digging his bare fingers into my flesh to fish out a bullet that might have killed me, for giving me enough cash to get by.
But he fell off the face of the Earth.
Not the best trackers I sicced on the case could find even a scent of him from California to New York.
Adalind's finger traced over the bullet scar again, something about that action making my stomach swirl around in a way I was completely unfamiliar with.
"So this isn't necessarily a terrible scar," she mused, running her finger over it again. "It gave you your freedom."
"Something like that, yeah."
It was maybe the only scar I had that didn't bring with it awful thoughts. Friendly fire.
Hell, he didn't even mean to shoot me.
He thought it would have been a good distraction, getting an empty chamber out of the way before he turned it on Walt with a live round.
She leaned forward, pressing a kiss to the raised, smooth skin, before pulling back with a small smile.
"Thank you for telling me."
"I've never told anyone," I admitted, not knowing why I felt compelled to share that.
"I figured," she said with a small smile. "That's why I was thanking you."
"You don't see me differently?"
"Than the guarded, distant, somewhat cool man you have been a lot of the time? Yes, I do," she informed me. "But not in a bad way. I understand it now, Ross. No one - save for the boys down in that basement with you - could ever understand what that was like, but it makes sense why you can be so lost in your own thoughts. And your guards with women..."
She trailed off there, making my brows draw together. "What about them?"
She shrugged a little. "I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume you've never really had a woman, save for to have sex with her."
I felt myself stiffen at that, maybe never analyzing that fact myself, never tracing it back, always figuring my guards had to do with that basement, and my inability to open up about it, not the fifteen years before it.
"Haven't exactly had the time," I hedged, not liking the idea that my shitty relationship with my mother - and maybe her 'profession' - had a lot to do with how I viewed women and relationships as a whole. "I respect women, Addy, even if I haven't made time for any one in particular. If it were about my mother, and what she did, I don't think I would have that."
"She was your mom. And she was supposed to be there for you, but she wasn't. And she was the only female figure you ever had in your life until you started, I imagine, having endless sport sex with them when you got free. It had to have impacted you. You have to have messed up ideas about loyalty and warmth and stability with the opposite sex."
My arm tightened around her, pulling her a little closer.
"You're warm, Addy."
Her smile went soft at that, her eyes losing their keen edge, like my words made her stop thinking about my fucked-up past for a bit, and just focused on the present, post-sex, naked in both literal and figurative ways, bodies entwined like I had never experienced before.
I felt like she got it.
Maybe not with the same depth as I did.
But she got it.
This meant something.
This was significant.
Important.
I might not have understood the why or the how. And I might not have had the damnedest clue what it meant for the future.
But this moment, in my bed with her, it meant something.
I got that.
I think she got that too.
So we both silently agreed to drop everything else.
And just be in the moment.
"It's past sun-up," she said, eyes looking heavy-lidded. "I don't remember the last time I stayed up all night."
"Well, it's Sunday, doll. We can sleep in."
I was pretty sure it was the first time in my life I used the term we with a woman.
Oddly, it didn't feel uncomfortable.
Then she snuggled in closer, resting her face against my chest, her hand on my shoulder, covering the bullet scar.
And then we did what I said.
We slept in.