Released

  “He’s a good one,” Yolanda said.

  “You two know each other?” Al asked.

  We made quick eye contact before we admitted that we did.

  “Well, hell, Liam,” Al said. “Yolanda’s one of the best trainers around. She’s got her boys all over the city. I’m surprised she never introduced you to Graham before.”

  “You know Graham?” I raised an eyebrow at her.

  “You’ve been talking to Graham?” The surprise in Yolanda’s voice was evident. “You haven’t accepted an offer, have you?”

  “Offer?” I repeated.

  Yolanda looked at Al expectantly.

  “We hadn’t gotten that far,” Al said. “They just met tonight. Graham wanted to see him in action, and I didn’t want the shit kicked out of me again, so…”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” I snapped at them both.

  “I guess that cat’s out of the bag.” Graham’s hand clasped my shoulder as he walked by and kissed Yolanda’s cheek. “Good to see you, Yolanda. I didn’t realize you ever got this far north.”

  “Just came to see my boy here.” Yolanda’s smile suddenly turned venomous as she stepped closer to me and tried to link her arm with mine. I stepped away, but she stayed close.

  “Your boy?” Graham repeated with raised brows. “You have a contract with Liam?”

  Graham glanced at Al expectantly as Yolanda and I answered simultaneously.

  “Yes,” Yolanda said.

  “No,” I insisted, and then looked over at my former trainer. “What the fuck, Yolanda?”

  “Not now, Liam!” she hissed under her breath. “I’ll explain later!”

  “Fuck you,” I growled at her before turning back to Graham. “I don’t have a contract with anyone.”

  Graham looked over at Yolanda again and crossed his arms.

  “Dammit, Liam!” she suddenly yelled. “You never did know how to keep your fucking mouth shut!”

  Before I could even think about taking a swing at her, she turned on her heel and marched right out of the gym. The glass doors didn’t quite hit her on the backside on the way out, but I had the feeling I might have seen the last of her.

  No regrets.

  “What the hell was that?” Al asked.

  “She never did like competition,” Graham laughed. “I take it you have worked with her in the past?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I used to train with her. She’d set up my opponents for cage fights on the south side of town.”

  “Geez, seriously?” Al shook his head. “You’re a lot better than that. Even if Graham doesn’t have anything for ya, I know some people who will set you up with traveling fights. There’s a lot more money in those. It’s all aboveboard, too, so you can train on the side, make enough hours to get benefits—the lot.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I have no fucking idea what you guys are talking about.”

  “Come on and sit down,” Graham said.

  We walked over to the far side of the ring and into a little office behind it. Al shut the door, and Graham and I sat down in the rolling chairs inside.

  “I’m with Ultimate Industries,” Graham said. “I find talent for UFC, and I’d like to talk to you about maybe lining up a fight or two. I think you’ve got a lot of potential here if we can just rein in the cage fighter a bit.”

  “Ultimate…what?” I repeated. “UFC? You mean actual UFC—the UFC? On TV and shit?”

  Graham laughed a long, hearty laugh.

  “Actual Ultimate Fighting Championship, yes.”

  “Fuck me hard,” I muttered. “If I had known that, I wouldn’t have held back so much.”

  Another raised eyebrow from Graham made me smile.

  “You’ve got a lot of attitude,” he said, “but I think we can make that work to our advantage. You’re a damn good fighter, Liam, and you could be a great one. You’ve also got a great look, which is going to make the female fans go nuts.”

  Graham continued on, but I could only barely hear him. The sentiment of the first part of the conversation was swirling around inside my head like a whirlpool. He was talking about fighting—real, professional goddamned fighting!

  Part of me was about as excited as I had ever been, but as soon as my head started wrapping around the notion, it came crashing down.

  “Tria,” I whispered.

  “I can get you a contract, Liam,” Graham was saying. “Three fights to start—one here, one in Chicago, and another in Cleveland. Depending on how you do, we can start looking into something more permanent.”

  “My…my wife,” I said. “She’s having a baby in just a couple of months. I…I have to think about it.”

  “I’m going to be in town until Friday,” Graham said. “The offer stands until then. You talk it over with your family and let me know what you decide to do.”

  “Okay.” My voice didn’t even sound like my own.

  I walked slowly out of the gym with my bag thrown over my shoulder and my eyes on the ground. I walked right past the bus stop in favor of just hiking it back to the little rental house. My head was in too much of a fog to sit still.

  There was no doubt that Yolanda had kept me where I was on purpose. Whether it was to get money from my parents or just to take a cut of my winnings, I didn’t know. Furthermore, I no longer cared. She was out of my life, and I intended to keep it that way.

  My life.

  What exactly did that mean now?

  What was I? A fighter? A ring maker?

  Should I change my name from Takedown to Sauron?

  My hand went instinctively to my pocket, but it was empty.

  Damn, I wanted a cigarette.

  The fact was, I didn’t need to talk it over with Tria. I already knew what my answer was going to be. UFC was nothing short of a dream come true for any fighter, and if I had met Graham a year ago, I wouldn’t have hesitated to take the offer.

  But now things were very, very different.

  I had a wife.

  I had a baby coming.

  I was making an okay living setting stones, but ultimately I was going to own a gigantic corporation whether I wanted it or not. Even if I turned around and gave the whole thing to my cousin, I was beginning to realize that Teague Silver had always been my destiny.

  And Tria would be at my side.

  I was never one to take the selfless route, but there were more important things now.

  Chapter 18—Relocate the Belongings

  As soon as I picked up the phone, I regretted it. I suppose it ultimately turned out all right, but my initial reaction was one of those ambivalent, churning feelings of dread and duty in my stomach.

  “I don’t suppose you’d be able to give me a hand, would you?” Krazy Katie’s social worker asked. “The landlord is quite unpleasant, and though Miss Took didn’t have a lot, I really could use the help.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said with a sigh. It definitely wasn’t something I was looking forward to doing, but I didn’t have to work, and Tria would be in class until late. Without any excuses, I dragged my ass out of the house.

  I took a bus across town to the old neighborhood. Just seeing the building made me want a cigarette, and I knew I was going to end up finding cartons of them stashed away inside Krazy Katie’s apartment. It was going to be hard to resist. I promised myself a trip to the gym when we were done, hoping that would at least appease some of the cravings.

  In some ways, withdrawal from nicotine had been worse than heroin. It wasn’t that the feelings were any worse—I didn’t get physically sick, but I was moodier than Tria and spent a lot of time just standing outside on the porch to keep myself from running out on her. I couldn’t stay inside, or I’d start screaming at her. If I started screaming, she would start crying, and I would feel like a total asshole.

  I hadn’t actually told her I quit. I wanted to make sure I really could do it first.

  Walking up the stairs was equally eerie, both because of where I was going
and the familiarity of heading toward the old apartment door and knowing I wouldn’t be going inside. If I did, Tria wouldn’t be there, feet tucked under her butt on the couch and smiling up at me with her schoolwork all splayed out on the coffee table.

  Everything seemed so simple then.

  Now there was an impending baby, and since Tria had passed the most dangerous stages of pregnancy as far as I could determine, I found myself mostly concerned with what the heck I was going to do with a kid. Erin told me to start making a list of things my parents did right so we could talk about how I could foster the same things within my own child.

  I reached the top of the flight of stairs and stared at the hallway full of trash bags.

  The social worker—Samantha—was already inside, filling a huge trashcan with papers and the empty cigarette packs from the walls.

  “The landlord said all the furniture belonged here,” Samantha said. “He wants everything else out, I guess. There’s no will and no relatives. I didn’t know if there was anything you wanted, but feel free. Whatever isn’t trash is going to Goodwill.”

  I nodded and then made my way to the kitchen to start removing all the food that was left and putting it into boxes. We could take it to the free store down the street. There was another box for things that were worth donating—mostly clothing—but it was only about half full. Among the piles, I found two of my shirts, a belt I remembered owning, and my favorite boots.

  I thought I had lost them, but apparently, my neighbor was hoarding them.

  Samantha was digging through some papers, and I looked over her shoulder a couple of times. I had hoped maybe I would find something that would tell me more about her—where she came from or how she ended up where she did, but there didn’t seem to be anything. The only thing that even remotely connected her to another person at all was the little photo on a table next to her bed.

  It was the one she had been holding on the fire escape—the picture of her mother. At least, I was pretty sure it was. I picked up the picture and asked Samantha what I should do with it.

  “She didn’t have any relatives,” Samantha said. “It will probably just get thrown away.”

  “Fuck that,” I muttered and then looked back to her. “So I can keep it?”

  “Sure,” she shrugged.

  I didn’t know why it was important, or what I was going to do with it, but throwing away the one thing Krazy Katie seemed to care about other than the cigarettes didn’t seem right at all. With the picture shoved into my back pocket, I went back into her bedroom to keep plugging away at all the crap in there.

  Shaking my head at the mess, I dug back in the closet and into another pile of clothes. The dress Tria had worn to Ryan’s wedding was there, too. So was one of her economics books and a pile of mechanical pencils I was pretty sure belonged to her.

  In the back of Krazy Katie’s closet was another big pile of clothes. I started hauling them all out by the armload—dropping shoes all over the place in the process. When I got to the bottom of the pile, something blue caught my eye.

  What the hell…?

  In the back of the closet, underneath the pile of clothes, was the little blue bookshelf I had made for Tria all those months ago. I shoved a couple of shoes off of it and then hauled it out into the middle of the bedroom. It was no doubt the one I had made, just a little more beat up than it was originally. There was a slight chunk out of the left corner and a few black lines down the back of it, which made me wonder if it had been thrown into the dumpster or something.

  I tried to picture Krazy Katie climbing around in the trash to haul it out, and though I found the mental image comical, I also found it completely plausible.

  Swallowing past a lump in my throat, I carried the little shelf out of the bedroom and put it by the door.

  “No furniture,” Samantha said.

  “This one doesn’t belong to the landlord,” I told her. “I made it.”

  She gave me a strange look but didn’t press the issue. I hauled the damn thing back to the house on the bus along with the other things that had belonged to either me or Tria. The act got me a lot of dirty looks, but I ignored them.

  Once I got everything into the house, I wasn’t sure what to do with the bookcase. Our bedroom was full of furniture already, and the baby’s room didn’t make sense—she wasn’t going to be reading for a while. The living room was small and there wasn’t really a good place for it. I put it down next to the television, but it didn’t really fit there.

  By the time Tria got home, I had given up trying to find a place for it, and it was back next to the TV again. I had flopped down on the couch with a beer in my hand and my feet up on the coffee table.

  Tria sighed as she came in, dropped her book bag near the door, and reached behind her to rub at the small of her back.

  “Come here,” I said, and she walked over to stand in front of me while I massaged my thumbs up and down her lower spine.

  “It’s getting harder,” she said quietly.

  “That’s how you got like this in the first place,” I replied with a grin.

  She smacked my shoulder playfully before dropping down beside me.

  “I swear, she’s going to weigh ten pounds when she comes out.”

  I wrapped my arm around her, and Tria leaned against me with her head on my shoulder. She sighed and closed her eyes for a moment, but when they opened again, she went still.

  “Where did you get that?” Tria gasped. “I…I thought it was gone.”

  “So did I,” I replied as I followed her gaze to the bookshelf. “I thought all our shit was gone, but Krazy Katie had a bunch of it, my boots, too.”

  “I see that,” Tria said. “And so does the coffee table.”

  She gave me a significant look until I put my feet back on the floor.

  “I wasn’t sure where it fit,” I said as I nodded back toward the bookcase. “I mean, if you even want it. I guess the baby could use it for—”

  “No!” Tria said definitively.

  I glanced sideways at her.

  “It’s mine,” she responded. Her voice was a little softer, but her lower lip was just slightly pouting.

  Tilting my head, I turned to look her in the face before raising an eyebrow.

  Tria shrugged.

  “The baby gets everything,” she said quietly. “The bookshelf is for my books. It’s mine.

  I tried not to laugh.

  “Are you feeling jealous of the baby before she’s even born?”

  “No,” Tria responded firmly, “but she doesn’t get everything. I don’t want to spoil her.”

  She crossed her arms, and her expression made her completely unbelievable. I managed to hold in the laughter for about four seconds, which earned me another playful smack on the shoulder. In turn, I tickled her sides, which made her scream almost instantly.

  She had become more and more sensitive lately around her belly.

  She tried to squirm away, but I picked her up and hauled her to the bedroom. It was getting a little more difficult to carry her—not because she was that much heavier—she had only gained thirty-five pounds, and I still could have bench-pressed her without a lot of effort—but her center of gravity was all different.

  I wasn’t about to tell her that. I wanted to keep my cock attached to my body.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked when she stopped struggling and wrapped her arms around my neck.

  “I’m going to fuck you,” I informed her.

  “Oh, really?” she said with a touch of mock indignity.

  “Yep.”

  Inside the bedroom, I let her down gently on the bed before yanking my shirt over my head. Tria’s eyes darkened as she watched me unbutton my jeans.

  “You like a little show, don’t cha?”

  “Hmm…maybe,” she replied with a noncommittal shrug.

  I undid the last of the buttons, and then pushed my jeans down just a bit—not enough to show more than my hips, but enou
gh to give her a little glimpse of what was down there. Then I leaned back against the wall next to the bed and ran my hand inside my jeans over my cock.

  Tria raised an eyebrow.

  “Just tell me you want it, baby,” I said, “and it’s all yours.”

  “You dragged me in here.”

  “Dragged?” I repeated. “Well, if you don’t want it, I guess I’ll just take care of this myself.”

  I slid my hand deeper into the front of my jeans and shoved my boxers down enough to take out my cock. I stroked it while Tria pretended not to look. Her tongue darted out over her lips, which made me grin down at her.

  “Tell me how much you want it,” I whispered. “You know you can’t resist.”

  Tria sighed dramatically.

  “I want your cock,” she said, completely deadpan. Then she burst out laughing.

  “Get your clothes off!” I yelled as I moved forward and grabbed at the edge of her shirt. She laughed but didn’t resist as I quickly stripped her of her clothes and climbed into bed beside her. I ran my hands over her protruding belly for a moment before I leaned in and pressed my lips against the bulge.

  “Beautiful,” I said softly.

  Tria rolled to her side, and I moved up behind her. Sex with me on top had become pretty much impossible, and she wasn’t comfortable on her hands and knees lately, so we had recently moved to lying on our sides with me fucking her from behind.

  Sex with pregnant Tria was…different.

  It was different, but not bad at all, not in the least, but everything about it was a far cry from how it had been when I would pick her up and slam her into the wall a few times before tossing her over the edge of the couch and listening to her scream my name and scare the neighbors. It wasn’t fast and furious, and it wasn’t the least bit rough. Though neither of us said anything about it, we both naturally moved into a slower, softer approach.

  I slipped into her, pushing gently with my hips as my hand slowly and softly cupped first one breast, and then the other. Her nipples were super-sensitive, and she sucked in air as soon as I came into contact with them. I shifted my hips forward until I was completely buried in her, slowly slid back out, and then back in again.