Raw Deal

  “I don’t have the patience for your sarcasm, J,” Mike retorted, grabbing the coconut water someone offered him and guzzling it down. It was vile shit, he’d always thought so, but he would’ve drunk swamp water at that point. “I don’t know why you care, anyway. The more we go at each other, the more people love it.”

  “Because I don’t want to see you miss this fight on account of some minor dumbass injury you got in a scuffle the night before, that’s why. But it’s over and done with now.”

  “Yeah.” It was over and done with. Nothing left but the beat down.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  If not for Zane, Savannah might not have had the courage to go through with her plans. But she was desperate, and through Rowan, she learned Zane was already in Mexico City for the fight. She was able to arrange her flight, but he set her up in a lavish hotel and got a car and driver who was available at her whim. Kind of nice knowing people in high places.

  He also didn’t want her to tell Mike she was coming. She’d protested and considered calling Mike herself despite Zane’s directives, but he’d shut her down when they talked on the phone.

  “His head’s in the game now,” Zane had said. “Let’s not go messing with it. He’ll know you were there once it’s done, and he’ll need you whether it’s to celebrate or pick up the pieces. But knowing you’re watching might throw him off.”

  Once she mulled over it more, she realized that she would far rather Mike win this fight for himself, rather than have any gallant notions of winning it because she was watching, if he would be inclined. This was his comeback; it was all for him. It had nothing to do with her.

  She decided she liked Zane pretty well. When Rowan finally decided to move on, she could do worse.

  Before heading over to the arena from her hotel room, she found the video of the weigh-in, at first swooning a little at the sight of Michael’s chiseled body when he stripped down, so lean and ripped. Even more so than she remembered—his training was paying off. If heaven was merciful, she would have those muscles under her hands tonight. Sounded as if a bunch of other girls in the audience swooned too—Too bad, bitches—and if that one insanely cute ring girl didn’t get her eyes off his ass—

  Okay, focus. Zane had told her that things had gotten heated there too, though Mike seemed calm enough so far as he stepped back into his sweats, letting them hang low on his hips. Jesus, she was going to need a cold shower before she went. She got one in the form of Frank Meyers, who came out boasting and yelling and even flipping someone off in the crowd. And then she sat aghast with building anger as Meyers charged at Mike after weighing in, both of them spitting words at each other until Mike shoved him back several feet and swung.

  Oh, God, she didn’t even want to imagine what the guy had said. Whatever it was, she would shudder to think of seeing the fury in Mike’s eyes directed at her. The people surrounding them could barely hold him back, though Meyers was going easily, grinning and slinging insults. She wished Mike wouldn’t let the man get to him that way, because that was his only goal, but she could only hope that Mike was one of those fighters who performed better when he was angry, because in that case it was already over. He was fucking furious. He would be out for blood in a way he never had been with Tommy, even though they had exchanged a few hostilities themselves.

  As darkness began to fall across the city outside her window, she paced a hole in the carpet, feeling sick with worry. And dread, and need. The time passed too slowly, but it passed too quickly also. At last, it was time to go, so she headed down to the lobby where the car was waiting outside. She’d wanted to skip the preliminary fights; those were nothing she cared about seeing.

  The arena seated twenty thousand people. It had already sold out a while back, but somehow, pulling his strings, Zane had gotten her in.

  I still don’t want to watch, Savannah texted Rowan, feeling her heart in her throat as the excited, buzzing crowd milled around her in the lobby of the arena. I’m so scared to go in.

  The reply was almost immediate. Go in there and be there for your man, Savannah. And stop looking away. If he’s taking it, you take it with him.

  Her breath whooshed out at those words. Okay. She could do that. For him. Her biggest fear was that she would have a panic attack, or freak out, or faint and have to be carried out.

  But she didn’t have time for that today. Mike would need her there at the end. She hoped.

  What if he didn’t? What if she saw him afterward and was greeted with that same cold aloofness she’d heard on the phone the last time they’d spoken?

  It didn’t matter. She had to try. This couldn’t end without her doing everything in her power to fight for it.

  Mike had barely slept the night before, but that was the norm for him before fight night. He didn’t have any delusions of escaping this one relatively unscathed. It was going to be brutal. Meyers liked to go for the choke out, so Mike was going to have to keep him on his feet and wear him down. Too bad Frank’s standing game was just as good as his ground game. But Mike would rather go out on his feet than on his back, crying uncle, tapping for mercy. He would pass the fuck out from oxygen deprivation before he let that happen.

  There you go thinking about losing again.

  “You got this tonight, kid,” Jon said as they sat in the dressing room, until now sharing the charged silence before Mike’s walkout. Silence except for the rumble of the restless crowd beyond the walls. “I feel it in my blood. You worked damn hard to get here and I couldn’t be prouder.”

  “Thanks.” Jon might feel victory in his blood, but Mike only felt Savannah in his. He fiddled with the light object in his gloved hand, only able to feel it with the tips of his fingers. His good-luck charm. The smooth, cool stone, the tip of the prong. Her earring. The one she’d laughingly told him he’d fucked her out of. He’d found it on the floor underneath the very edge of his bed as he was packing to come to Mexico City, and maybe he should’ve sent it back to her, but he’d kept it.

  Until now, he’d tried to keep memories of her at a distance, a survival tactic. He thought he’d succeeded fairly well. But with it all coming down to this night, he let her images swirl through his head, sweet and unfettered. What was she doing? Where was she at this very moment? Was she worried about him? Of course she would be, if she cared about him at all. He liked to think she did.

  Now damn sure wasn’t the time to be questioning whether or not he’d done the right thing, made the right decision. Whether he was in the right place. He questioned it nonetheless. Because the simple truth of it was that right now he could be with Savannah, looking into her eyes, holding her, instead of rolling around on the floor in a sweaty tangle of limbs with Frank Meyers. When he thought about it like that, there was no contest. He’d fucked up.

  But he’d thought he had something to prove, so here he was. He’d chosen his path; he would follow it to its destination, whatever that might be.

  A knock tapped at the door, signaling it was time to get serious.

  Jon looked at him and blew out a breath. “Ready?”

  Mike put his fist to his lips, then slipped Savannah’s earring into the pocket of his sweatshirt. He pulled his hood over his head. Jon put his fists up and Mike bumped them with his gloved ones. “Let’s do it.”

  The lights went out and Savannah practically jumped in her seat.

  “Are you okay?” Damien asked at her side, shouting to be heard over the roar of the spectators, and she nodded quickly. She’d never met Mike’s youngest brother before tonight, but Zane had sent him over to make sure she was okay.

  Savannah had only thought Mike’s eyes were intense. What these guys lacked in familial resemblance—there was practically none in Damien’s case—they made up for in their shared confidence, a kind of fighting spirit that had certainly been responsible for them escaping the horrors Mike had described to her about their childhood. She’d been in Damien’s company for approximately five minutes and was intimidated as hell
by him.

  Like now, for instance. She didn’t have to scrutinize him to know he could tell she was absolutely not okay, and wouldn’t be until this was over. Oddly enough, though, he was staying at her side instead of reclaiming his spot at cage side. One would think his loyalty to his brother would supersede his babysitting a stranger who was on the verge of an anxiety attack.

  Music thundered through the arena, a heavy rock song she recognized as one of Zane’s called “Incensed.” She had nodded along to it the night of the August on Fire concert, but now she stood frozen as a lightshow erupted around the cage and spotlights roamed restlessly over the heated crowd. Huge screens suspended above the cage showed Mike, the challenger, walking the hallway to enter the arena.

  The hood of his black sweatshirt was pulled so low over his eyes she could barely see anything but a shadow underneath, but grim determination set his full lips in a tight line and his jaw could have been chiseled from granite. He moved with the grace she remembered, rolling his head first to one shoulder then around to the other, loosening his arms out to both sides. His team walked on either side of him, their faces like stone, with security on the outskirts of the group. They made the turn to enter the arena, and the spotlight hit them a few sections off to her left.

  She caught a glimpse of him—it wasn’t hard with the way he towered over everyone else—amid the fans trying to get in closer to touch him or get a high-five, but mostly she watched him oblige them on the overhead screens. For the most part, the security officers kept people away, but if a hand reached out for him, Mike made every effort to shake it, bump it or slap it. Over the loudspeakers, Zane sang on—it must give him a thrill for his big brother to use his music for his walkout to face the champion. Of course Mike would do that for him, she thought, feeling a surge of emotion she didn’t need on top of the panic roiling in her stomach.

  All too soon he was at cage side, stripping to his shorts for the pat down. She remembered once asking Tommy why they had to get patted down when they were already shirtless; he’d long-sufferingly explained it was to make sure they had nothing on their bodies to make them slick or to irritate their opponent’s eyes in a grapple. Made sense.

  Done with all of the precautionary checks, Mike bolted up the steps into the cage, into his domain. Camera flashes erupted all over the arena as he waved, and Savannah had the almost uncontrollable urge to dash from her seat, run to him, and drag him out of there. Mine, he’s mine; he doesn’t belong to you people! He was in there to get pummeled to prove something to all of them, but he didn’t need to prove a damn thing to her for her to love him. Why had he chosen them over her?

  Once his adulation died down, the process began afresh, this time with the heavyweight champ. He didn’t look stony faced with concentration. He looked like a bastard come to destroy something precious to her, and she hated him right then. It ran deeper than his being Mike’s opponent tonight—she hated him for using Tommy to bolster his image, to break Mike down and make himself look like a hero. Michael was the only hero here.

  And the crowd knew it. Meyers had his cheering section, but a good portion of the crowd, including several people surrounding Savannah, was undeniably hostile. It warmed her heart.

  The two fighters were introduced. They were brought to the center of the ring, where the referee went over the instructions. Twin pillars of muscle stared each other down, Mike looking almost passive from what she could see on the screens, Meyers openly glaring. When the ref told them to touch gloves, Mike put his up. Meyers knocked them away, garnering a barrage of boos and catcalls from the audience.

  “I’d damn sure hate to be that guy,” Damien commented almost happily. Savannah had been so engrossed she’d almost forgotten he was there.

  “You think he’s going to win?” she asked him, feeling hopeful.

  “He’d better, or else I’m going to lose a metric fuck ton of money.”

  Well. “I can’t believe I’m here.”

  “It’ll be all right,” Damien assured her. Yeah, she could remember walking into another arena much like this one a few months back, telling herself the same thing. She didn’t have time to ponder it. The bell sounded and the guys came out of their corners, fists cocked and ready to fire as they circled each other.

  They were well matched, of a similar height and weight. Michael had the advantage on reach, as she knew from watching their past fight on YouTube. The two traded jabs while Savannah held her breath, wincing with each one. Mike took a vicious kick to the leg she heard from her seat, and she almost whipped her head away, but Rowan’s words rang in her mind, stopping her short. He was fine; he’d barely reacted, simply keeping up his cool, calculating, circling around Meyers. Looking for his shot. More jabs were thrown, some connecting, warming them up, pissing them off. She could see the animosity rising, the aggression.

  Then Meyers went for the takedown. They slammed to the mat, each scrambling for a hold on the other, until Mike suddenly broke free and leapt back to his feet with the lithe elegance of a cat. But he didn’t give his opponent the chance to straighten, attacking with a series of blows that had to rattle the champ hard. The next time she was able to glimpse Meyers’s face, blood trickled from a cut over his eye. It only made him look more feral. He lit into Mike with a flurry of punches that backed him up to the fence. Mike blocked and slipped his way past; almost before she realized he’d even moved, he delivered a kick to the head that sent Meyers to the mat. The crowd went bananas as he went in for the ground and pound, and Savannah hoped to God it was already about to be over. But no, Meyers could be slippery too. He got a well-placed elbow in on Mike’s jaw and, after a sudden scramble, he was on top.

  Savannah didn’t know the jiu-jitsu moves or what they were called, but whatever was happening there, it didn’t look good . . . a painful tangle of limbs that made even her own muscles hurt. She heard Damien curse beside her. Meyers pounded Mike in the face—one, two, three, four, oh God, I can’t look—but she stared on with bottom lip trembling. Mike was trying to make something happen, she could tell . . . a series of slow maneuvers to escape whatever hold Frank had put him in. But Frank was pushing to complete the hold too, to eventually make Mike submit, so it was a battle of sheer strength and endurance. Patience, hang in there, baby, she thought, bringing her tightly laced fingers to her lips. The clock was running down on the first round; he was almost home.

  The sound of the buzzer was music to his ears, and that pissed him the fuck off. Meyers, forced to release him, cursed and shoved his head away to go back to his corner. Jon was waiting with water and an ass-reaming.

  “Show me more combos, Mike,” he said, and the pack of ice they rubbed over his shoulders felt like pure heaven. “I told you. Are you not hearing me out there?”

  Mike stayed silent, fingers wrapped through the fence, head bowed until they got him a stool. He wasn’t going to waste any energy on speaking.

  “Stay off the cage. This isn’t his fight, this is your fight. I want you to use your legs, the way we trained. He hasn’t been preparing to defend against that kind of attack.” It all bled into the background as someone poured water down his throat. His fight, and it was shit so far. He glared across the cage at Meyers in his own corner. If Mike wasn’t careful, if he let the next four rounds go like that one had, then it would go to a decision . . . and he would lose. Again.

  Jon’s last words managed to register. “Get your head in it, boy. Get your heart in it, don’t fade out on me.”

  That was the problem. Neither was here. Twenty thousand people were chanting his name right now, and he couldn’t give less of a fuck. The only thing motivating him at all was that the asshole on the other side had disrespected Savannah and her family. There was that score to settle.

  “Are you all right, Mike?”

  “I’m good. Let’s go.”

  And his minute respite was over—a minute in the cage never went as fast as a minute in the corner.

  Frank came at him hard, closing t
he distance between them and tying him up. All right. Mike answered with two quick uppercuts and then ate the knee Frank threw at him. He felt his lip split open, but it wasn’t pain so much as simple awareness he’d sustained an injury. Adrenaline did funny things to the pain receptors. A quick combination of punches to Frank’s head, getting a “Yeah!” from Jon, and he was free to deliver a stinging kick to the ribs. Oh, yes, he saw that grimace—it was the only thing beautiful about Meyers’s bloody face. Mike had no intention of letting the bell save his ass this time.

  He conserved his energy, planning for this to go to the duration; he had no delusions of a quick end. Frank might be a bastard, but there was a reason he was the champ with very few losses behind his name. It was all pure endurance and skill. Knowing which form of fighting to call upon at any given moment. They tangled next to the cage, Jon yelling at him to get back to center mat—I fucking would if I could, J—they rolled across the floor, and at last Mike managed to roll him into a full mount, pummeling Frank’s face until blood sprayed the mat. Left right, left right. Nothing had felt better in a long, long time than feeling those impacts jarring up his arms. For Savannah, you asshole. The ref came in close, waiting for Frank to drop his defense so he could call it, but it didn’t happen. The champ was a mess; blood covered his face, but he kept those hands up to guard his face, finally managing to twist to his side under Mike’s weight as the buzzer sounded.

  Fuck! If he’d had twenty more seconds, that might have been the end, as Frank’s face was about to repeatedly become the target of Mike’s trip-hammer right fist.

  Jon had nothing but praise this time. It was easier to listen to.

  “You see him, Mike? You see what I see?” he asked excitedly as Mike was toweled off and iced and his cuts examined.

  “He’s out of breath,” Mike said.

  “Fucker’s tired and he’s hurt,” Jon said. “I told you. You trained harder, you trained smarter, and now he’s all yours. Go get him.”