“Do it again.” Arms folded across his chest, Zack gestured Shayla to her feet. “Try to keep the drill flowing as smoothly as possible until your reactions are natural and instinctual.”
She shot him the glare of death as her third training partner of the hour, a scrawny dude Zack had carefully selected for his cowering manner and lack of anything even resembling muscle, scuttled away, only to be replaced by a dude even scrawnier.
“You can’t be serious,” Shayla bit out. “I’m pretty sure after our training weekend of hell, I’ll be able to clear collar ties in my sleep.”
“And you’ll probably be doing them wrong there, too,” Zack snapped. “It’s a warm-up and a wrestling drill that even newbies can master. You need to focus. Haven’t you been paying attention for the last three days? I set up an underground fight for you on Thursday so you could try out the new techniques, but you aren’t even trying to master them.”
Finding an underground fight club in a new city wasn’t an easy thing to do, especially for a man who had fought for one of the biggest MMA promotions in the world, making him a “sellout” to the underground community. Underground fighting was illegal in most states, including California, and the promoters went to great lengths to keep their fights off the California State Athletic Commission’s radar. The fight organizers screened and limited attendee lists, texted event announcements only two hours before the fights started, and required everyone to say a code word to get in. Still, underground fights were where many fighters honed their skills, free of rules and regulations, and after a lot of digging, he had discovered that the Predator was Redemption’s key contact for the underground circuit.
After only a few grumbled protests, the Predator had made the arrangements for Shayla to fight at Zack’s request. They didn’t speak about the membership card, but Zack knew the Predator had been watching him train, just as Zack had been watching him. After years on the professional circuit, he had lost touch with the gritty, raw, no-holds-barred fighting of the underground where the Predator had made his name. Although Zack was certain he wouldn’t be meeting the Predator in the ring, it made sense to be prepared.
“Are you watching Shayla or the Predator?” Sadist came up beside him, gesturing between Shayla on the mat with her new opponent and the lean, dark-haired Predator bouncing a heavyweight around the cage, his scarred face a mask of boredom.
“Both.”
“If you’re looking for weaknesses in the Predator’s game, don’t waste your time,” Sadist said. “He doesn’t have any. He also doesn’t fight fair. We tried to get him onto the amateur circuit, but he dropped out after a few months because he didn’t like the rules. He’s all about no-holds-barred street fighting. No limits. No mercy. You know what I’m talking about?”
“Yeah. I do.” Matt and his group of thugs had dragged him into more than one alley over the years. Zack had learned street fighting out of necessity, but it was only when he joined the MMA gym that he learned how skill could overcome size or strength in numbers. Every time he stepped into the cage, he remembered those days and how every beating had been a stepping stone to where he was now. Nothing tempted him more than a chance to fight with someone who didn’t give a damn about the rules. But he would have to step into the ring to do it. He would have to take the risk that another man would die. “I’m not fighting him.”
“He and Shayla are tight,” Sadist continued as if Zack hadn’t spoken. “I thought there was something going on between them, but then Sia showed up one day, and boom. That was it. One day, he’s cracking bones and smashing skulls. The next, he’s married and has a kid. You find the right girl, and it hits you like that. Maybe you fight it tooth and nail. Maybe it’s a long and bumpy road. Maybe you run the other way at first. But when you look back, you realize it was a foregone conclusion the very first time you met.”
“You trying to tell me something?”
Sadist shrugged, his gaze on Shayla twisting her opponent into her tenth collar tie of the morning. “Sometimes we’re hardest on the people we care about the most.”
Was he being too hard on Shayla? Hell, even his coach hadn’t asked as much of him when they were just starting out, but he had to be harsh to keep some distance between them or risk hurting her again. He had shocked even himself the other night. His desire—no, need—for her had been so intense and all-consuming, he hadn’t given a second thought to how rough he’d been in bed. If Zack from then had met Zack from now, he would have punched himself in the damn face.
“Heads up,” Sadist warned.
His head jerked up, and he neatly caught the fight gloves Torment tossed down from the practice ring beside them.
“Blade Saw is on his way here, and he needs a partner,” Torment said. “I was supposed to be coaching him and Homicide Hank, but Hank’s wife just went into labor. It’s their sixth kid. Or maybe seventh. No one can keep track. I don’t know how he does it. I can’t even handle one. Our little girl, Brianna, is more than a handful.”
Zack curved his hands around the soft leather gloves. This was exactly what he needed to burn off some steam. Nothing relieved his tension more than a good session in the ring. But after losing it with Shayla in bed, he wasn’t prepared to take that risk.
“No, thanks. I’m going for a run after Shayla’s done.” He tossed the gloves back up.
“Suit yourself.” Torment caught them in one hand. “I like to help my fighters succeed. And if you’re fighting the Predator, you’ll need all the help you can get just to make it out of the ring alive.”
Zack bristled. “I don’t think it’s me you need to worry about.”
“So you are going to fight him?” Sadist asked.
Zack gave himself a mental kick for the slip. Staying out of the ring was easy when he was recruiting fighters, but being in the thick of things, part of a world of alpha egos and testosterone, made it damn hard to keep the promise he’d made to himself the night Okami died.
“I didn’t say that. Might be that I’m done with Shayla in the three months before the membership expires, and I won’t need to stick around.”
Torment leaned over the ropes. “You won’t solve her problem in three months. It took Fuzz and I four years to help her get where she is today. She came to us broken. She’s far from fixed.”
Curious, he asked, “How was she broken?”
Torment and Sadist shared a look. “The first year she joined, it was all about rehab,” Torment said. “I had her bring in her X-rays so we could come up with a training program to help her get strong again. I never imagined bones could be broken like that from a fall down the stairs. It wasn’t just her leg. Her ribs, shoulder, and arm had been broken. And her hand”—he held up his hands in a warding gesture—“was crushed.”
Zack felt a prickle of warning sheet over his skin. “Crushed?”
“She let me take the X-rays to a doctor friend of mine, an orthopedic surgeon, because at first, I didn’t know how to help her. He said the force necessary to cause many of the breaks couldn’t have come from a fall.”
The warning prickle turned into a five-alarm fire. What had happened to her in the years after he’d walked away?
“Did you ask her about it?”
Torment worked his hand into his glove. “She told me she was clumsy, and it was a bad fall.”
“She’s not clumsy.”
Torment nodded. “She recovered quickly, probably because she was in such good shape, and she was determined to get better. She’s one of the most dedicated fighters in the gym. She’s here when I open the door in the morning, and unless she’s working, she’s usually one of the last people out at night. She went from barely being able to walk to becoming our top female fighter through an incredible force of will”—Torment shook the top rope—“right here in this ring.”
Zack ran a finger along the lower rope, feeling the coarse fibers grate over his skin. Once upon a time, he’d been like that. From the day he walked into the Glenwood MMA gym, he wanted to be the best. He wanted to know he would never be powerless before another man, that there would never be another Matt who could beat him to a pulp in the alley. But more than that, he wanted to be worthy. He wanted to show the damn town—no, the world—that he could rise above his upbringing. He wanted to give Shayla something more than a trailer park kid who hadn’t even finished high school.
How many times had he climbed into a practice ring without paying attention to the rough feel of the ropes, the tension that allowed them to flex when a fighter fell against them? He curled one hand around the rough fiber, testing the thickness and the strength, while at the back of his mind, he was pulling the ropes apart, climbing into the ring. The mat would be cool and firm under his feet, his opponent wary of facing Slayer in a fight.
“That’s why her last four fights are such a mystery,” Torment said, climbing through the ropes to join them on the mat. “She moved up to the next level and then slid down. If she loses one more fight, the title belt qualifier will be totally out of reach.”
“She’s afraid,” Zack said, half to himself.
Sadist cocked his head to the side. “Afraid of what?”
“She’s afraid to take a risk.” He turned to Sadist. “You know what it’s like climbing up the amateurs. You’re on a roll, winning fight after fight, and then suddenly, you hit a wall. It takes a while to realize that when you get near the top, it’s a whole new ball game. Your opponents are a different class of fighter. Suddenly, it’s not enough to just know the technique. You need to be something more. You need to anticipate what your opponent is going to do and where he is going to be. You need to have the confidence to take a risk—to go beyond what you’ve learned and improvise. You need to have the strength to leave yourself vulnerable if you want to win.”
“I’d say that’s pretty spot-on,” Sadist said. “Sounds like your head is still in the game.”
Longing ripped through his body. One step and he would be back in the ring, gloves in his hand, a worthy adversary across from him. His fingers tightened around the rope. He could almost hear the buzz of the crowd, the blare of the speakers. He could almost feel the hard mat under his feet, smell the popcorn and hot dogs, the yeasty tang of beer, the sweat of the men who had fought before him. He could see the glare of the lights, the eager faces of the crowd. And then he imagined a scream, like the scream of Okami’s wife when she realized her husband was dead.
“Not anymore.”
Torment tossed the spare gloves in a box beside the ring. “You need more than your head in the game. You need your heart in it, too.”
Zack had never talked about the Okami fight with anyone, never expressed his feelings of guilt or self-loathing. But Torment seemed to understand everything he couldn’t say.
“You might want to keep an eye on your fighter,” Torment continued, looking over his shoulder. “Looks like she’s about to 12-6 Marty and get herself kicked out of the gym.”
He looked up and saw Shayla poised over her opponent with her elbow in the air. A 12-6 was a downward elbow strike in which the elbow went from straight up to straight down and was illegal under the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts because of the serious injuries that could result from its use.
“Jesus Christ. What did he do to piss her off?” He raised his voice to a shout. “Shilla. Stand the fuck down.”
“She hates that name.” Sadist chuckled. “We gave it to her when we saw her potential. We wanted to keep her motivated. Torment came up with a random number of fights she had to win to be able to change it—a number she’d only achieve if she made it to the top of the amateurs—and that became the Redemption rule.”
“You’re a bastard,” Zack said to Torment. “Anyone ever tell you that?”
“I’m a man who gets what he wants.” Torment gestured over to the mats, where Shayla was very clearly not standing down and Marty was in need of imminent saving. “I thought you were, too.”