“What?” I say. “I know what I want. You know what you want. I’m going to take what I want.”

“Not without my consent, you won’t.”

“Then you’re not taking what you want.”

“You know what else I want?” she asks, getting heated. “I want you to not do this fight for the mob.”

I lick my lips. “Well, now that is not that simple.”

“Why? Why can’t you just say no? Is it the money?”

“No, it’s not the money. They… didn’t give me a choice.”

“How?”

“They just didn’t.”

“Did they threaten you?”

I think about telling her the truth, that they threatened her. Her family, too… my family, too. But I don’t want to scare her. I know that it’s selfish, I know I’m only appeasing my own guilt, but I can’t help it.

“Yes.”

“See!” she belts out, slapping my arm. “I fucking told you not to get mixed up with them.”

“It was already too late when they rang my doorbell.”

“So you have to fight?”

“Yes.”

“Because two mob bosses have their favorite pit bulls and want to see who wins?”

“It’s a dick-measuring contest, yes.”

“And you’re going to do it.”

I nod. “Yes.”

“What happens after?”

“Well, I’ve made my terms clear to them,” I say. “Only this one time. After that, I might just retire.”

“From fighting?”

“Yes.”

“Really?” she asks accusingly. “I don’t believe you.”

“Don’t believe me, then.”

There’s a slight pause, and then, to my surprise, she asks me, “Can you remember your first fight?”

I laugh. “Oh yeah, perfectly like it was yesterday.”

“Tell me about it.”

I shrug, hold Penny a little tighter against me. I can smell the vodka orange on her breath, and all it makes me want to do is lean in and kiss her. She holds her lips apart just slightly, and I can see the tops of her teeth.

“Jesus Christ, pen, you’re turning me on.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“I can’t explain it.”

“Don’t dodge my question,” she says. “Tell me about your first fight.”

“Why?”

“It’s important to me.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Pierce, if I can’t understand you, then I can’t be with you. Would you just tell me?”

I sigh. “Fine. But I wasn’t as good as I am now.”

Penny laughs. “I really don’t care.”

Chapter Twenty Eight

It’s like a drug.

I know, cliché as fuck, right? But it’s the truth, and I’m not going to fuck around trying to find a better metaphor.

At first, it’s the adrenaline. My first fight, the crowd wasn’t wild when I stepped into that cage. My first fight, nobody knew who the fuck I was.

But my opponent, Crazy Carl, they knew him. They called him that for a reason…

Dude was built like a freight train, the kind that carries coal. His thighs were thicker than my waist. I knew then and there, even if I’d never seen him fight before, that he was a leg-lock man. He had a heavy base, low to the ground, and he was no doubt going to try and get me on the floor, try and lock me up, pull my shoulder from its socket, make me tap out.

Well, I knew then and there I wasn’t going to be the one tapping out. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t nervous. That didn’t mean I didn’t feel that adrenaline surge, born of a little bit of fear and a lot of concern. Concern not just that I was likely going to sustain an injury during this fight, but for how the hell I was going to even beat this guy.

I knew I wasn’t going to lose, I just didn’t quite know how to win.

My thing’s always been a combination of power, speed, and endurance. I hit hard, but not the hardest. I’m fast, but not the fastest. I can go for long, but not the longest. I’m a bit of everything, and that makes me a nightmare matchup. No strategy works against me. If some dick thinks he can out-dance me, then I can out-hit him. If some brick of a man can out-hit me, I can out-quick him.

It’s just a big battle of rock-paper-scissors. Except I have all three.

And the adrenaline… that adrenaline just feels so fucking good. Time slows down. I react faster, want to draw blood. Fight or flight, and in the cage, nobody runs.

For some people, that adrenal buzz, that heightened plane of senses, it never comes back. Sure, the first few fights you get it, but then it becomes routine. You know what you’re going to do, what your opponent is going to do to you.

You know it’s going to hurt, and it doesn’t worry you anymore. But not me. I always felt that adrenaline. I trained myself to, learned to psyche myself up, learned to trick my brain into releasing the necessary neurotransmitters, firing the necessary synapses, so that my adrenal glands would kick into overdrive, and I’d get that edge.

That glorious, sparkling, blood-thirsty, win-at-all-costs edge.

I fight like my fucking life depends on it. I fight like the devil.

I’ve hurt my opponents in bad, bad ways. I’ve heard blood-curdling screams of pain erupt from my opponent’s mouths, and I still didn’t stop. I pushed, and pushed, and pushed… until I won.

I beat Crazy Carl. I beat him in twenty-two minutes, sixteen seconds. To this day it is the longest fight I’ve ever fought.

He got tired, I didn’t. He got me onto the mat a couple of times, but I wormed out. He almost tore the ligaments in my knee at one stage, but I slipped it out with just a bit of bruising, just a bit of swelling.

He was heavy, stomped like an elephant. It’s not like I could knock him off his base. I tried to kick him out from behind but he just swung me around and threw me at the cage. The pattern of the steel wire was printed in blood on my back.

But I danced, skipped, hit him when I could. He lunged for me, tried to take me down to the mat again. I feinted with a right hook, hit him with a left cross right in the jaw. I thought he was lights out the way his body went limp and fell.

But he got back up. If there was one thing about Crazy Carl, it was that he was persistent.

So we did the dance. I got him again, and again. He was huffing, gassed. I’m not saying it was fucking poetry or anything. I’m not saying it was a pretty fight.