Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 126003 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126003 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
No. He can’t say that, can he?
So he’s stuck with me. Naturally, he wants to keep me alive, and professional fights—legitimate fights—are the way to do this. If I went professional he could point to me and say, “Look at our boy Eason here. Come to my gym and I’ll turn you into him.”
Which would be a lie—there’s no way to become a fighter like me unless you came up like me—but who cares.
There’s another part of me—the hopeful part—that wants to believe Davis actually gives a fuck about my future. I want to believe we’re kinda like brothers. In it together. A team.
I’m just not convinced.
Davis steps onto the mat in front of me. “You’re never gonna guess who that was.”
I don’t even look up. Just keep wrapping my hands.
“Macks. Remember her?”
I pause, still not looking up at him, and think back, placing the name. “The Ring of Fire reporter?”
“Yeah. Her.”
“What the hell did she want?” Davis doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then an idea hits me, so I look up, feeling more hopeful than I have in a long time. “She’s got a fight for us?”
“What? No.” He laughs. Like what I just said was so stupid, he might never get over it.
I’m instantly irritated. The Ring of Fire was my life. Winning death fights was the only purpose I had. And then Cort van Breda and his little camp of murderous children killed a whole bunch of important people in some Brazilian jungle and it was over. Just like that. Over.
Cort wasn’t supposed to win his last fight. And I don’t really care about that part. I would’ve fought Pavo or Cort. Wouldn’t have mattered to me who won.
The point was that I was next in the rotation. The winner of that fight was mine. I had everything on the line—literally everything I had left in this world—and Cort van Breda went and fucked it up with his dreams of freedom.
I will never get over that. Ever.
“Then what the hell did she want?” I’m squinting at Davis, getting angrier by the second.
“She’s looking for a woman.”
“Why is she calling you about that?”
“Because this girl is one of Cort van Breda’s child fighters.”
I stop scowling at him and just stare for a moment. “Which one?”
“Irina.”
“Never heard of her.”
“No. She wasn’t in the Ring of Fire. Obviously, since she’s female. She was only thirteen when that whole shitshow went down. But Macks tells me that she was the one who took down Udulf that day.”
“Lie.”
“Macks was there. She should know.”
“Maybe.” I mumble this, then go back to wrapping my hand. But when Davis remains quiet, curiosity gets the better of me. “Why is Macks looking for her?”
“It’s personal. That’s what she told me.”
I look up at him and find him doing something with his phone. Texting someone, maybe.
For a few years I wondered what happened to Cort and Maart and Rainer. I heard rumors that they were running a supply ship. But then, one night, there they were—Maart, at least. On the fucking pay-per-view stream. Having successfully transitioned his top fighters from the death camps into the legitimate world of MMA.
He’s got a world-famous gym down in Rio now. Fighters—top-notch fucking fighters—coming out his ass. He’s got money, and women, and drugs—maybe not drugs, but probably—and fame.
Davis deconstructs each of Maart’s fighters in every single event, so I’ve seen all the fights. The whole thing makes me furious, but there’s no way I can’t watch them. I’m obsessed with all of it. The gym, the location, the guys—and one girl, though she’s retired now—the contracts, the money, the fame. All of it.
I’ve got most of that shit too. But he’s still got his people.
My people are gone. And maybe it’s irrational, but I blame Cort, Sick Heart himself, for that.
Still, this little twist in the narrative is interesting. “Did she run away or something?”
“Dunno. I just told Macks the same thing you said. Never heard of her. But get this. While we’re on the phone, she sends me a pic. It’s of a billboard in Times Square. Then another pic. Which is the same picture, but a different location. London. Then another. Paris. She sends me twenty-nine pictures of billboards all over the world and they’ve got one thing in common—this girl she’s looking for. Irina did some modeling. Bathing suits.” He pauses here to smile at me. “You wanna see the pics?”
“Why would I?”
“She’s pretty.”
“So?”
Davis gets frustrated. He’s always frustrated with me. “I know you’re angry about how it all ended. And I can tell you over and over again until I’m blue in the face that it’s all worked out for us. But you never seem to get past it, Eason. You need to get past it.”
“Get… past it? Get fucked, Davis.” I get up, hands now wrapped, grab a jump rope out of the box, and start skipping. Every time my left foot hits the floor a sharp pain shoots up my leg. But I ignore it. I’m getting really good at ignoring it.