FIGHT FOR ME (13 page)

Alain saw that she had been silent for awhile and took the phone. “You’re coming,” he said into the receiver. It wasn’t a question. It was somewhere between a confirmation and a demand.

A moment later he seemed to be satisfied with whatever response he had been given. He flipped the phone shut and let it fall into his suit pocket.

Chapter Eighteen

“Well, Miss Robins.” He walked in a circle around her, slowly, each footfall clicking against the concrete. “What to do with you until the matches start…” He had made the full revolution around her and was standing in front of her again.

He leaned in toward her.

His breath smelled like mint. His skin looked powdery up close.

Ivy collected saliva in her mouth and spat on him.

He jerked upwards, his lips curling. “Bitch,” he said, and walked back toward the door that was somewhere behind her. “Igor, Vinnie! I need a tissue!” she heard him yell.

About fifteen agonizingly slow minutes later, the two burly men from before came and started to drag her chair toward a small door on the side of the building. The legs of the chair made a horrible screeching noise on the concrete.

One of them opened the door and the other pushed her into the brightly lit room. Then they let the door swing shut and left her there.

Ivy blinked as her eyes got used to the extra light.

She was in what looked like an office. A Hispanic man around her age with gelled brown hair was sitting behind a beat up desk, going over papers. He looked up at her. “You are the Panther’s girlfriend, yeah?”

“Um,” Ivy started. “Yeah.” She really had no idea what to say.

This man seemed a little nicer than any of the other people she had been in contact that day. She decided to try to get him to let her go.

“What’s your name?”

“Miguel,” he said, and looked back at his papers.

“Miguel, could you please let me know where I am?”

“You don’t know?” He pushed his papers aside and leaned back in his ratty office chair. “I guess they wouldn’t tell you.”

He gestured to the posters on the wall behind him. She hadn’t taken much interest in them before that moment. They showed huge, muscled men roaring, surrounded by crowds of onlookers. It looked like the moment before a fight.

“Fighting,” he said simply.

“Like… Fight Club?” Ivy asked, wondering if her earlier guess had been at all right.

“No, not like fucking Fight Club,” he said, laughing a little. “Like underground fighting. Men from all over the country—sometimes the world—come here to compete. If you win a fight, you win money and move up in the rankings. If you lose, anyone who bet on you loses money and you go home with broken bones.”

Ivy glanced at the shelves that lined the walls opposite the desk. They were filled with plastic bins. “And what’s in those?”

“Money,” Miguel said. “Cash. Tonight there’s a special challenge. Fight the reigning champion and win, well, you get half that.”

“How much would half of that be?”

“Oh, half a million dollars, give or take,” Miguel said. “I’ll be counting it in a little while. It’s part of my job. I keep track of the money and the contestants. I’m the liaison between this underground fighting arena and those in the rest of the country. I send the champions to world competitions.”

“How’d you get that job?” Ivy wasn’t really putting any thought into the small talk anymore. She was rapidly trying to figure out how Lucas fit into this whole situation.

“I was a world fighting champion,” he said. “But then…” He trailed off and stood from his office chair. He grabbed a pair of crutches from under the desk and helped himself into full view of Ivy.

His left leg was missing below the knee.

“My shin was nearly snapped in two during a fight in Japan a few years ago. It got badly infected and I had to get half my leg amputated.” The way he said it, he didn’t sound too concerned. “I had a shitload of contacts and I knew the business, so here I am, managing the Blood Coast fighting arena.”

So they were somewhere along the coast.

“Who’s Alain?”

Miguel made his way back to his office chair. “A manager. Kind of like me, but he focuses on being the representation for world champions. He gets them fights, gets them the proper training and medical care, and gets a cut of their winnings.”

“I heard Alain call Lucas the, um, Panther. What does that mean?”

Miguel was now looking at his papers again, seeming to go down a list and check some things off every few seconds. “Well,” he said, not looking up. “Every fighter gets a nickname once he’s famous enough.”

Ivy decided not to ask any more questions. She felt a little sick. Yeah, she didn’t want to know this. This was a whole other world, one that she didn’t belong in. She was hungry, tired, and her head hurt. Her image on a man she had thought she might want to settle down with and raise kids with was being torn apart.

She felt like shit.

The next hours went by slowly and strangely.

She spent most of the time watching Miguel count stacks of money. Eventually he left her in the office alone. She never worked up the nerve to ask him to untie her.

She started to hear voices outside in the main warehouse. Soon the individual voices turned into a rush of voices, blending into each other. There were a
lot
of people in there.

Miguel came into his office for a moment to grab one of the papers on his desk. He looked at Ivy and smiled, looking somewhat sorry for her. “Hey, I wanted you to know this isn’t a normal thing for us. Alain needed to go to great measures to get Lucas back here. He lost a lot of money when Lucas disappeared and he’s just looking to make some of it back.”

It sounded like an apology, but it also didn’t quite come off as one. Ivy said nothing.

“The matches are about to start and Lucas isn’t here.” Miguel glanced up at the clock above his desk. “Hm.”

On that strange note, he left.

The thick metal door of the office offered some relief from the noise of what was going on in the warehouse, but Ivy still imagined she could hear the punches landing on each man. She could sure as hell hear the carnal screams when a fight finished.

Everything about the situation made bile rise in her throat. She hated violence. She hated conflict and confrontation. Displays of physical prowess made her afraid. And all of those were happening just outside the door.

And… And soon Lucas would be a part of it.

Somehow, for some reason, this was her reality. It would happen.

Ivy took a breath in and held it. She counted to three and let it out. She did that several more times. She tried to let the sound of the fighting outside wash by her without acknowledging or processing it.

She was not exactly successful, but she did manage to make time move by more quickly. When she looked up, the clock read an hour later. She started to just watch the clock, begging it silently to move faster, to make this end faster.

Almost a minute later, she heard a voice clearly only a few feet outside the door. She froze.

“I need to see her,” she heard. “Where is she? I need to see that she’s fucking okay.”

It was Lucas.

Chapter Nineteen

“Lucas,” Alain said soothingly, though she could imagine how Lucas would hear it as maddening. “We will of course have her in the audience as… motivation. You can’t see her yet.”

“Let me fucking see her,” he said, but his voice was farther away. She could imagine the huge brawn of Igor and Vinnie dragging him away from the office door.

“Lucas!” she screamed, realizing he could hear her through the door if she could hear him. “Lucas, I’m here!” But she got no response.

She wondered how long it would be until Alain or his men came to fetch her as Lucas’s “motivation.”

The plastic tie around her wrists was tight, but she gritted her teeth through the pain and tried to yank at least one hand out of the restraint. She made no progress other than to scrape some skin off of the back of her wrist.

She bit her lip and tried to ignore the pain. She decided to stop struggling. Lucas was there. It seemed like he would do whatever needed to be done to get her out of this situation.

At that realization Ivy felt a little better. Just a tiny bit.

He couldn’t lie to her after this. After this was over, they would have no huge secrets between them. And he would have proved that he was willing to go to extreme lengths to keep her safe.

He would, right?

Why had he left this whole world of underground fighting in the first place? Miguel had said “disappeared?” She wondered what had happened but really had no idea where to start imagining.

The door opened and an overwhelming stench of sweat, cigarette smoke, and something bitter filled the room. Miguel stood by the door, supported by his crutches. One of Alain’s men kneeled by her chair and cut through the binding on her wrists. He yanked her up and started to pull her toward the doorway.

“This next part is going to be a little scary,” Miguel said sympathetically. “But if Lucas does what he’s told you’ll be fine.”

She soon lost sight of Miguel as the muscled man at her side dragged her through the crowd of men. She wondered if she was the only female in the entire warehouse.

They broke through the crowd and were in the center opening. Alain’s man pushed her onto the ground in the center of the ring.

She hit the concrete hard, barely putting out her hands in time to stop herself from hitting her head on the ground. Her muscles ached after being tied in an uncomfortable sitting position. She tried to sit up but it hurt too much. She lifted her head and looked around.

Men of all ages and types were yelling and pushing at the ropes that marked off the fighting arena. Alain’s man had disappeared into the crowd

One man hopped over the rope and went to stand by Ivy. He was wearing a bright pink and red striped suit jacket over tight jeans. He had a waxed mustache and a shaved head.

“Gentlemen,” he screamed over the cacophony. His shrill voice easily pierced the noise of the crowd. “Now for the match you’ve all been waiting for… Our reigning champion, the
Hammer
versus a
challenger
!

“Now who will that challenger be?” The strange announcer stood on his tip toes and looked around the room in an exaggerated manner. “Well, back by popular demand, the scrappy young up-and-comer who became the master of the international underground fighting scene…” He paused for dramatic effect. The audience had grown mostly silent. “The
Panther
!”

The resulting hoots, calls, yells, and roars from the crowd made Ivy’s head hurt more than it already did. She managed to push herself up into a sitting position and thought about trying to escape, but realized that there was no way past that rope and into the crowd.

“Gentlemen,” the announcer said again. “The
Hammer
!”

A man with a chest like a barrel and arms and thighs as thick as young children hopped over the room. He lifted his arms and tensed his muscles, showing the girth and magnitude of his limbs. He wore nothing but loose jeans cut off at the knee.

“And, the moment you’ve all been waiting for…” The announcer dragged it out again. “Here to fight for the freedom of this fine young lady…” She felt the eyes of the crowd on her. She wondered if the audience thought it was just a ploy to make the fight more dramatic or if the situation was real.

She wondered if anyone in the audience would even care.

“The
Pantherrrr
!”

Lucas stepped over the rope and into the ring. The response from the audience was so loud Ivy could feel it in her bones.

He barely looked like the Lucas she knew.

He was wearing black shorts and nothing else. The panther on his chest was glistening. His gaze was fixed squarely on the Hammer. He didn’t even look at Ivy.

A cigarette hung languidly between his lips. He took one last drag and let it fall to the ground, putting it out with his bare heel.

As soon as he took a step forward, the announcer grabbed Ivy and dragged her out of the ring. “You can watch from here,” he hissed in her ear before disappearing into the crowd.

She was on the other side of the rope. She used it to support herself as she dragged herself up into a standing position. The side of her body that had hit the concrete earlier felt broken and bruised.

Men pushed in at her from all sides but she maintained her “front row” position. She watched as Lucas and the Hammer circled each other. She didn’t breathe as she watched. She didn’t think.

They spent a good thirty seconds just watching each other, barely moving. It felt like a very long time. No noise came from the crowd. Ivy imagined that she could hear Lucas’s breathing.

He was only about fifteen feet away from her. She wanted to call out to him, get him to acknowledge her presence, but she couldn’t. She simply couldn’t speak.

Without any warning Ivy could detect, the Hammer roared and lunged toward Lucas. Lucas ducked, dodging the Hammer’s huge fists. Before straightening he landed a quick punch to the Hammer’s gut.

The huge man didn’t seem to feel it, but took a step backward as if he needed to catch his breath. Or maybe he just wanted to make Lucas think he needed to. By then Lucas was a few feet away, out of the Hammer’s reach.

They circled each other again for a few moments.

Again, the Hammer lunged forward. When Lucas went to duck, the huge man took a swift step toward the direction Lucas had dipped his head. The Hammer smashed his fist into the side of Lucas’s head.

Instead of stumbling back, Lucas shook his head as if shaking off the pain and responded with a punch of his own.

Soon the men were moving too quickly for Ivy to fully comprehend their moves. They seemed to fight in bursts. They were exchange blows, then move back and circle each other, and then exchange blows again.

It seemed to be going nowhere. She noticed that Lucas was breathing a little harder than the Hammer.