Raw Deal

Crossing her arms, Rowan pursed her lips for a moment, then tapped them thoughtfully with a pink-tipped finger. “I still have Tommy’s manager’s number. He was another one of those I’m here if you need anything guys who I haven’t heard from since. Well, I need something now. I need a fucking press release.”

  “That could work. We could write something up, send it to him, and he could make sure it gets out to all the news outlets. I mean, look at this, Ro.” She pointed at the number of views the video had accrued. “Hundreds of thousands of people have already heard this river of horseshit. It makes me sick to think of it.”

  “And Mike even tried to tell them he did contact us. He was being drowned out. No one is pointing that out, I bet.”

  “I don’t know, I’m not even going to dare look at the comments.”

  “Hell, no, don’t do that. Never do that. Let me find Rick’s number. And then we’ll write something.”

  They worked late into the night.

  Every day, he trained until he could hardly move. Then he went to sleep and started all over again the next morning. Eat, sleep, grind. Repeat.

  Mike didn’t have much time to enjoy the sights in Mexico City, a place he’d never been. Jon kept his eating clean and his workouts efficient, though adjusting to the altitude was hell on him. Some days it was a chore to lift his arms, and he felt starved of oxygen. He and Jon both hoped getting acclimated to the thinner air at seven thousand feet above sea level for a month would benefit him during the fight. Meyers hadn’t bothered; he was training at his usual camp in California. Whether it was cockiness or carelessness, Jon insisted that he was going to regret that decision.

  “These guys will be dropping like flies as soon as they get that first cut,” Jon had said, “but you’ll be a machine, kid.”

  He might be a machine, but right now his engine was sputtering. Sparring with one of his training partners—he had several who were alternating taking the trip down to Mexico City to work with him—he was damn near out of breath after a couple minutes of throwing combos. But so was the other guy.

  Kason was a good partner because he was quick, had a large arsenal of moves, and he wasn’t easy to shake. Mike’s T-shirt was already soaked with sweat, and he was wearing Kason down with jabs and kicks to his legs while Jon shouted instructions from the sidelines. His opponent wouldn’t expect an attack using muay thai strikes, so Mike’s strategy was to catch the fucker off guard with some brutal kicks. When he sensed the time was right to get serious, he mentally put Frank Meyers’s face on that of his partner and let those fucking hateful words from the press conference echo through his head. It was a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart, and after a moment of reading Kase’s movements, Mike spied his opening to deliver a spinning back kick that knocked him to the ground.

  “Beautiful!” Jon exclaimed. Mike, suddenly feeling a little shitty, pulled his partner to his feet and hugged it out with him.

  “Do that to Meyers and he’ll be taking a little nap on the floor,” Kason commented, tugging off his headgear.

  “Yeah, well, I’ll cover him up and sing him a lullaby.” He could only imagine the satisfaction of connecting heel to chin with that scumbag and watching him fall.

  “Impeccable timing there,” Jon commented, strolling over to slap Kason on the back and hand him a water bottle. “You all right? Got all your teeth?”

  He worked his jaw back and forth. “I think that headgear needs heavier padding. Almost feel sorry for that guy right now.”

  Mike shook his head. “Don’t. He’ll get exactly what’s coming to him.”

  Kason headed out for the day, jokingly calling out that he was going to go throw up now. Mike went to the floor and rested on his back for a few minutes, cooling down and staring up at the lights until he went half blind. After a while he was aware of Jon’s concerned gaze on him. “Tomorrow morning, we need to work on that kesa-gatame escape. Meyers has been using it a lot.”

  “Yeah.” Mike sat up and cranked off the cap on his own bottle of water. Nothing would ever be worse than losing to Frank by submission. He’d rather lose by decision for the third fucking time, black out, take his own nap on the floor, than have to tap. He wanted an answer for anything the guy might try to pull out of his bag of tricks.

  “You okay, kid?”

  Maybe someday everyone would quit asking him that, but he guessed not any time soon. He wasn’t okay. He missed Savannah. None of this seemed to mean a damn thing without her. Not that he wanted to think about losing to that colossal asshole in a couple weeks, but how was he supposed to win when he felt like he’d already lost everything? Win the belt, hear the cheers, celebrate his victory . . . go home to an empty, echoing apartment and a cold bed, alone.

  What was the point?

  “Fine,” he lied, leaning back again and closing his eyes. Jon ambled away to the facility’s small office. Mike might have even lay there and dozed; he wasn’t sure how much time passed before he was startled by Jon calling his name, and his eyes popped open.

  “You still out there? You need to see this!”

  Sighing, he got to his feet, hating the effort of it—damn altitude—and grabbed a towel before going to heed his coach’s call. He found him in at the desk in the little office, his laptop open. Looking up and seeing him in the door, Jon waved him over. “Come here and watch this. Hang on, let me back it up.”

  There was a sportscast in full-screen mode on the computer. Jon let it reload while Mike looped the towel behind his neck and clutched the ends, not expecting much because Jon was always finding little tidbits and sound bites to show him.

  Until a certain surname left the anchor’s mouth and every one of Mike’s senses went on full alert.

  “ . . . interesting press release from the Dugas family regarding the upcoming Meyers–Larson title bout at Mayhem. Tommy Dugas died shortly after his own bout with Michael Larson over two months ago, something Meyers isn’t willing to let the fans forget. But now Dugas’s wife and sister have released a joint statement through his manager stating the following: ‘Because we cherish Tommy’s memory, we cannot allow Frank Meyers to continue to capitalize on it to benefit his own name and image. We do not know him, he did not contact us after Tommy’s death, and therefore he does not speak for us. Michael Larson, however, went above and beyond to reach out to us and offer his sincere condolences in our time of grief. In him we found a friend, a source of comfort and solace, and we wish him all the best.’ The match is set for five days from now, and there’s certainly no love lost between the two AF fighters. They’ve been at each other’s throats in the weeks leading up—”

  Jon clicked the pause button. Solace. Mike blinked as his coach turned to look up at him. “Hey, that’s gotta make you feel good, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said, still stunned beyond the most basic words.

  “So help me put two and two together here. Is that where you ran off to?”

  “It is.”

  Understanding dawned across Jon’s face. “Mike . . . you’ve been in a funk. You’re doing good work but you’re not yourself.” He could see the question there. Which one of them is it?

  “The sister,” he confessed. “Savannah.”

  Rubbing the graying stubble on his jaw, Jon regarded him thoughtfully for a moment. “Sounds like she thinks a lot of you.”

  “I thought she did, and then I signed on for this fight. That kind of killed most of her good thoughts.”

  “No wonder you were so torn about it at first. I thought it had to do with Tommy, all that shit still on your mind.”

  He shrugged. “That’s part of it. Probably always will be.”

  “Will she be at the fight?”

  “Considering the last one she went to ended with her brother dying, I’m thinking that’s a no.” There was no hiding the bitterness in his voice.

  “That’s a shame.”

  Indeed it was. But there wasn’t shit he could do about it. She didn’t want to have anything to do with his li
fe. “It’s my fault. I told her the first time I met her I was thinking about retiring. Because I was, Jon. I was thinking about it hard. And then I took this shot.”

  “I figured you were having thoughts like that. I also figured they wouldn’t last long. You’ve got the beast in you, kid. If you don’t let it out to play every now and then, it’ll eat you from the inside out.” Jon sighed and shut his laptop. “Go rest up. We have a long day tomorrow.”

  As the days ticked by, Savannah found herself winding tighter, restless, uncertain. She worked and helped Rowan with the nursery. A few reporters called for comments, but she told them she had nothing to say that wasn’t already said in their press release, and requested privacy. Rowan told her she’d had the same calls. Her response had probably been far less polite.

  Savannah’s TV remained on sports channels more than Netflix lately; she’d heard their statement read numerous times, heard the anchors talk it to death, heard the responses from both the fighters. Mike’s had been succinct, as all of his comments about Tommy had been.

  “They’re a wonderful family who didn’t deserve the hand they got dealt,” he’d said to the microphone in his face, looking weary to her eyes. “It’s an honor to know them.”

  Frank Meyers’s was far more antagonistic, and of course, far wordier. “It’s guilt, man. It makes a guy do crazy [bleep]. And they’re just trying to make him feel better. It goes to show that he’s beat down mentally, he doesn’t deserve to be here, he doesn’t deserve a chance to take what’s mine, and I’m gonna take him out.”

  Yeah, she might’ve had to restrain herself from hurling her remote at his face on her screen. But she’d said her piece, so there would be no further statements no matter how the reporters who called tried to entice her into trash-talking.

  The fight crept ever closer, and the closer it came, the antsier she grew. She even found herself looking up flights to Mexico City. Most of them connected in Houston. The very name of the city on her screen set off a barrage of sweet memories in her head. At the front of them was the dizzying whirl of the elevator plunging down while he kissed her against the glass, making her drunker than the champagne ever had.

  Memories were bad. Memories were prone to trigger a deluge of tears out of nowhere. She couldn’t handle it. She was sick of tears; she’d cried enough.

  When he gets back, she told herself. When it’s all said and done, maybe we can pick up where we left off. But that wasn’t fair to him. She couldn’t be there through the good times and disappear through the struggles. It wasn’t who she was. It wasn’t. If she let this go by, let him go in that ring without her there, they were done. She felt it like an ominous looming deadline.

  She visited the cemetery more and more, though there was little to do but sit and stare at Tommy’s name on the plaque. He wasn’t here; he was gone. She didn’t feel any closer to him here than she did anywhere else, but she came anyway. Rowan came with her sometimes too, and held her while they both cried. Tommy might not be in that tomb, but he was there inside Rowan, and that was the most comfort she could find. While her sister-in-law seemed to be getting better, though, after almost three months, Savannah feared it was only just now starting to hit her . . . really hit her, and it felt like a punch to the gut. All the anxiety over Mike’s approaching fight didn’t help, and she woke so many nights feeling sick, shaking, bathed in a cold sweat with his name on her lips.

  It was only getting worse.

  “What do I do, big brother?” she asked at the tomb two days before AF Mayhem would take place and seal her fate. It was a bright, beautiful day, not unlike the day they’d interred him, only much hotter. Humidity had her shirt sticking to her and a bead of sweat rolling between her breasts. She sat on one of the two steps leading up to the structure, twirling a blade of grass between her fingers.

  Of course, she didn’t expect an answer.

  But she got one all the same.

  A shrill, staccato cry above her brought her head up to inspect the sky, and there among the blue was a soaring bald eagle.

  Gasping, she stood and stared. Ridiculous to think it was the same one that had been a comfort to her that horrible day, but . . .

  Oh, Michael. The day of Tommy’s funeral, she’d searched the sky for a moment after finding her eagle gone, only to drop her gaze and see his face. And he’d looked so broken for her, so desperate to try to set things right as best he could. He had, hadn’t he? For the brief time they’d had together . . . he’d loved her. He’d scraped all the pieces of her together and tried, painstakingly, to reform her. The person he’d created, though, wasn’t the same one she’d been before she shattered. She could be better for him. She had to be.

  A peace stole through her as she watched her new eagle, such as she hadn’t known in weeks. Life was precious, she thought. And much too short to waste a moment of it.

  “Thanks, Tommy,” she whispered, and bolted for her car, her phone already in her hand.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Cool, Mike. Play it cool,” Jon said at his ear.

  Mike fiddled with the good-luck charm in the pocket of his sweats, twenty-four hours away from his destiny. The air itself was electric in the arena, where the fighters had congregated for the Mayhem official weigh-in. He accepted well-wishes from fellow competitors, more than a few requesting that he mop the floor with Meyers’s ass. They needn’t have asked; no one had more reason than he did to want the same damn thing.

  Weigh-ins were more tolerable than press conferences. Way more. He liked the spectacle, the light show, the huge screens showing recaps and trash-talking—it meant all the work was done except for the fighting, which was the only reason he was here. Plus, afterward he got to drink a ton of fucking water after dehydrating himself for twenty-four long-ass hours. He was a good twenty pounds lighter since beginning the weight-cutting process earlier in the week, but he felt like absolute shit for it.

  Then they were announcing him as the challenger for the AF Heavyweight Championship—“Michaaaaaael ‘Laaarcennyy’ Laaaarrrrsssonnnn”—and he jogged up the steps and out on the stage to loud appreciation and flashing cameras, a crowd of people, and smiling scantily clad ring girls.

  He unzipped his jacket and whipped off his cap and shirt, tossing everything to Jon. Toed off his shoes and stripped down to his shorts, grinning at the feminine appreciation that rang out from the audience. And once he stepped on the scale and his weight was announced, he gave the crowd their show, flexing for the cameras, then made his way to the side of the stage to wait on the champ. Such as he was.

  He’d felt better lately, except for depriving himself of water. The effects of the altitude had eased up until he almost felt normal again, and he’d heard some of the other fighters bitching about it since they’d arrived a few days ago. Good luck with that, fellas, he’d thought. Most of them would probably be puking their guts out after their matches, like he had been after a couple of his first workouts.

  Frank Meyers came out to as many boos as cheers, the belt slung across one shoulder. Rowan and Savannah’s statement had made people hate him more than they already did. Mike distinctly heard someone call out, “Fuck you, Frank!” and noticed that Meyers flashed the heckler the corresponding finger. Lovely. This was being live streamed, but if Meyers wanted to keep showing his true colors, he was welcome to it.

  If ugly could translate into scary, then that was the scariest motherfucker Mike had ever seen. His eyes were beady as a snake’s and he had a gap between his front teeth big enough to fit an extra tooth. Cauliflower ears protruded from the sides of his bald head. He stripped and stepped on the scale while Mike pulled on his sweats and settled his cap backward on his head, eyeing the guy’s every move. Dude was shredded, no denying it. He made weight easily, then played to the crowd, kissing each biceps and yelling nonsense.

  Mike was ready for him as soon as he charged off the scale in his direction, and so were his team and the staff at his side. Fists at the ready for the stare
-down, Meyers didn’t stop until they were eye-to-eye, nose-to-nose while his stinking breath blasted Mike in the face and the men around them tried to insinuate themselves between their keyed-up bodies.

  “You need a mint if you’re gonna kiss me, motherfucker,” Mike growled at him.

  Frank’s gapped teeth flashed in a particularly gruesome grin and he moved to speak directly into Mike’s ear, making his skin crawl. “Got Dugas’s wife and sister doing your work for you now, huh? Which one of them did you stick it to, huh? Or was it both?” He made a kissing noise.

  Play it cool my ass. With everything he had, Mike shoved him back and swung a vicious right, but security was there between them before he could connect. Pandemonium erupted on stage and in the crowd, everything a confusion of bodies and arms and restraining hands with flashbulbs going off, people shoving and cursing and shouting, while Mike swatted some of them aside like flies in his desperation to get to Frank Meyers’s throat. He was going to rip the fucker out; there would be no need for a cage around them tomorrow night. This was it.

  “Mike, Mike, Mike!” Then there was Jon’s voice in his ear cutting through the red fury raging through his veins, his restraining arms around him. But Mike was blind to everything but the bastard being herded off to one end of the stage while the people around Mike tried to hustle him to the other.

  Savannah didn’t need to be worried about him; she should save her concern for the other guy.

  Jon released him and threw his hands up in deference when Mike whirled out of his restricting arms, ready to swing at anyone who touched him, and then a microphone was in his face suddenly, Reid Downing asking him questions about his strategy. Mike’s cap had been knocked askew, so he straightened it and tried to breathe himself calm again before answering on autopilot.

  Like he wanted the other guy to know what he had planned, anyway. Everyone had a strategy until they got hit in the face.

  “Good job playing it cool, kid,” Jon said as they exited after the crisis was averted.