Fighting for What’s His: A Warrior Fight Club Novel

by Laura Kaye

  “Okay. Let me just put my bags in here…” She lowered everything off her shoulders and retrieved her phone from her back pocket. “And I’ll pull up my calendar on my…” She frowned. “Do you feel that?”

  Andy barely had a chance to react to her question.

  The world exploded around them.

  A deafening boom was accompanied by everything moving, and then a wall of heat and just sheer force slammed into Shayna and threw her back and to the ground.

  She blinked and groaned as debris rained down around her, some of it on fire. Her ears rang and her head spun and her arms and face burned in a million tiny places.

  What just happened?

  Her back and head protested as she forced herself into a sitting position on the street, the world still a tilt-a-whirl.

  Time slowed to a crawl and Shayna couldn’t believe what she saw.

  A wall of flames towered over the garden-style apartments that sat back about a hundred feet from the street. One whole part of the building had collapsed. People were running and screaming. A few people peered out of second- and third-floor windows and waved for help.

  Dear God.

  She tried to shake away the fog clouding her head and glanced down to see that her clothes were covered in tiny pieces of glass and wood and metal…and that a two-inch piece of metal had lodged in her right forearm. Dozens of other tiny cuts explained why her skin burned so bad. But otherwise she was fine.

  But what about…

  On a whimper of realization, she cried, “Andy? Andy, are you okay?”

  Shayna forced herself to her feet and found him flattened against the side of her car. The force of his impact had been hard enough to cause a dent above the rear tire.

  She went to her knees beside him. “Jesus, Andy, talk to me.”

  “Are the kids okay?” he rasped.

  Her throat went tight. “I…I don’t know. I think they should be. They were far enough away.”

  He nodded on a groan and dragged his phone out of his pocket. “I’ll call 9-1-1.” He grasped her wrist. “And you…you need to do your job.” His eyebrows rose meaningfully, asking her if she understood as he pressed the phone to his ear and started speaking to the dispatcher.

  The words hit her almost as hard as the blast wave.

  Holy shit, he wanted her to photograph this.

  Shayna rose so fast that it made her dizzy, but she braced on the still-open trunk of her car until she could reach her bags. Her mind was racing but she knew what she needed to do.

  She fished a tripod out of one bag along with a charging cell and her phone…where was her phone? She finally found it ten feet away where it’d apparently been blown out of her hand. The screen was cracked, but otherwise it worked.

  She pressed a number in her contacts and put the phone to her ear. “Rose, it’s Shayna. Andy and I just witnessed an explosion in an apartment complex across from the Northeast Rec Center. Can you get me access to the Gazette Facebook page? I can stream the scene live.”

  “Give me two minutes. Are you guys okay?”

  “Okay enough. Hurry, Rose.” They hung up.

  Shayna placed the tripod next to Andy, who was trying to get up off the ground. “Are you sure you should do that?” she asked as she adjusted the stand’s height, secured her phone to the clip, and plugged in the battery.

  “I’m good. You good?” he asked, not sounding very good at all. Then again, Shayna had a piece of metal sticking out of her arm that she weirdly couldn’t feel. So maybe it was like that for him, too? She nodded. “You’re gonna stream this. That’s smart. What can I do?”

  “Rose is going to call back with the login to the Gazette’s Facebook page. Do a live video. And keep an eye on the charging cell. There are three more just like it in my bags. Don’t let it run out of battery.”

  “Got it,” he said.

  Shayna went for her D850 next. It could fire thirty frames per second and had enough resolution to capture an incredible degree of detail. She put the strap around her neck and started shooting.

  The flames. The debris. The running people. The gaping hole where a building once stood that she could just make out through the roiling black smoke and fire.

  “I’m going closer,” she said. Sirens wailed in the distance, thank God.

  “Wait,” Andy said as her ring tone sounded. It was Rose with the login information. “This is going to get picked up everywhere. Let’s do this like a TV intro.” Shayna immediately moved behind the camera and logged in as Andy moved in front of it. “Just tell me when you’re ready, Shay.”

  “Move that way a little,” Shayna said, setting it up for the best shot. Andy grimaced as he moved, but neither of them were about themselves right now. “Stop.”

  “Okay, go ahead,” Andy said. His shirt was torn, there was a crack in one of the lenses of his glasses, and he had the same scattering of cuts and nicks over his forearms and face as she had.

  She typed in a short descriptive line for the post, and then the live video counted down 3-2-1 and she gave him a thumb’s up.

  “This is Andy Katz of the Washington Gazette reporting live from the scene of an apparent explosion at the Northern Arms Garden Apartments in Northeast DC. My photographer, Shayna Curtis, and I were here on another assignment when the blast occurred. As you can hear in the background, police, fire, and EMS are on their way but haven’t yet arrived.”

  Ten people tuned in to watch. Then a hundred. Within sixty seconds, there were nearly a thousand people watching and reacting to the live video.

  “It’s not clear whether or how many residents might’ve been inside the building or what caused the fire, but as you can see, inhabitants are streaming out of neighboring buildings.”

  She gave him another thumb’s up. He had it from here. Rounding the far side of her car so she could stay out of the video’s frame, she put the viewfinder to her face. Her heart was racing and she couldn’t stop sweating and blood kept dripping into her eye, but she couldn’t worry about any of that just then.

  Crouching out in the field in front of the building, she took wide-frame shots of the blaze and then of the towering column of smoke and flames. She moved closer, and the whole world narrowed down to what she saw through her viewfinder.

  People huddled together in raw shock. Gas company employees running from the buildings. One of their utility helmets in the grass. Three people clustered in a window immediately adjacent to the flames.

  Jesus, when were the fire companies going to get here?

  She’d no more thought that then the first of the emergency vehicles swung onto the block.

  In a burst, she captured shots of the first responders unloading and setting up the scene. Firemen unrolling the hose, opening the hydrant, donning their gear. The EMTs laying out a triage area and reaching out to the first of the injured. The police setting up a perimeter.

  Which meant she needed to get these close-ups while she could because she knew she was going to get pulled back any second now.

  “Help us!” a lady screamed from her window.

  Shay went as close as she dared, close enough that the heat hurt her face and hands. “Hold on,” she yelled. “The firemen are here. I’ll point them right to you.”

  Shayna let the camera go slack on the neck strap and waved her arms as a line of firemen started across the short field. A group came right for her. “There are three people in that window,” she told an older man with a weathered face. “But there were also two in that window just a minute or two ago and I haven’t seen anyone come out.” She pointed to where she meant.

  He nodded. “We’re on it. Thanks. You should get back now. This scene’s not stable.” He jogged away.

  And Shayna continued taking pictures. Because telling our most human stories through images was her job, her passion, and the way she made a difference in the world.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The knocking would not fucking stop.

  After at least ten mi
nutes of it, Billy hauled his ass out of bed and down the stairs, fully prepared to murder whoever was on the other side of that door.

  “What?” he growled as he opened it.

  “Took ya long enough,” Mo said, giving Billy’s face and bare chest, both covered in bruises, a once-over before inviting himself inside. “You look good.”

  “Fuck.” Billy buttoned the fly to his jeans. He’d been too strung out to take them off when he’d fallen into bed.

  “Yeah, that about sums it up, I’d say. What the hell did you do to yourself?”

  “Nothing. Listen, Mo, I was kinda in the middle of something—”

  “Sure you were,” he said, making himself good and comfortable on the couch. He even propped up his feet on the table and crossed his ankles. The fucker. “Just to move this along, know that I’m not leaving. Because after I figure out what’s going on with you, I’m hanging around to help Shayna whom it seems is in a big rush to leave your house all of a sudden. Have any idea why that might be?”

  “She found a new place. You heard her,” Bill said, dropping heavily onto the couch himself.

  “You let her news fuck you up even more, didn’t you?” Mo arched an eyebrow. “She said she found a roommate and you heard that you were too late. And then you learned that it was a guy and what you heard was that she wanted someone else. How am I doing?”

  Billy let his head fall back against the cushion. “You’re really fucking irritating, Griffin.”

  Mo’s low chuckle rumbled through the room. “Translation: I’m batting a thousand. Good to know.” When he spoke again, his voice had lost that humor. “She was upset after you left. I get why you got out of there. But what I don’t get is whatever happened between you since then. And whose fist you ran into. Repeatedly.”

  “Do you know a vet named Gordon Rizzo?’

  “Aw, you gotta be shitting me,” Mo exclaimed. “You went to that underground fight club again?”

  Billy’s head whipped up. “Again?”

  “You think that didn’t make its way back to me, son? I’ve been in this city a lot longer than you.”

  “Well. Shit.”

  “Uh huh.” Mo shook his head. “Don’t even think of pulling shit that again. Somebody liable to shank you as well as punch you in there. Gimme your word.”

  “I needed the release, Mo.”

  “Gimme your word.”

  Billy heaved a deep breath and all of a sudden he felt every one of his bruises. “Fine. You have it.”

  “Now, tell me what you did to chase Shayna away.”

  Fuck. Mo wasn’t giving him an inch, was he? Not that he really deserved it.

  Boom!

  Billy and Mo both flinched as a thunderous noise pierced the afternoon quiet. Whatever it was made the glasses rattle against each other inside his kitchen cabinets.

  “What the hell was that?” Billy asked, foreboding crawling down his spine and his heart galloping as his brain threatened to pull Billy back into his past.

  Into the ambush. Another explosion. The pain of fire all across his skin.

  “Something big,” Mo said, frowning. He pulled out his phone and started typing. “Texting Riddick. Even when that boy isn’t on shift he’s got that incident scanner going.”

  It only took a minute or two before Sean responded. “He says, ‘Probable natural gas explosion at an apartment complex.’”

  “Shit,” Billy said, blowing out a shaky breath. “That sounded close.”

  Mo eyeballed him in a way that made it clear he understood what was happening to Billy. “You could’ve planned something a little less elaborate to divert me from this conversation, you know.”

  Billy actually managed a chuckle. He scrubbed at his face and heaved a deep breath.

  Mo’s phone buzzed another incoming message, and a big frown settled across the man’s face as he read it. “Billy, I think you need to go grab your laptop.”

  He rose. “Why?”

  “Just go get it.”

  Ice skittered down his spine, and Billy made quick work of grabbing the laptop off his bedroom chair. He settled next to Mo on the couch when he returned. “What am I looking for?”

  “Go to the Gazette’s page on Facebook.”

  Oh, fucking hell. How was the Gazette a part of this? Billy did what Mo said. “What? What am I looking for?” he asked again. And then he saw it. A live video in progress of a massive fire.

  He shuddered. He fucking hated fire.

  A disheveled man with multiple lacerations and a pair of broken glasses narrated the scene. “If you’re just tuning in, this is Washington Gazette reporter Andy Katz reporting from the scene of an apparent explosion and three-alarm fire at the Northern Arms Garden Apartments. My photographer, Shayna Curtis, and I were at the scene covering an unrelated story when we witnessed the explosion at approximately eight minutes after three o’clock…”

  “Oh, fuck. Shayna. Oh, fuck.” His heart in his throat, Billy switched over to his text app and fired off a message. His hands were shaking, making it hard to hit the right keys. Then another. Then another. They all showed as Delivered but not Read.

  Shayna are you ok?

  Just saw the news about the explosion. Let me know you’re okay.

  I’m sorry, please call or text me. Worried.

  “I’ll call her,” Mo said, but he shook his head. “Straight to voicemail.”

  Billy slammed his laptop closed. “She’s there. She’s there, goddamnit. And she might be hurt. Did you see her colleague?” One heartbeat passed, and then another. Jesus, how was it possible that she’d been at the scene of an explosion? Nausea rolled through his gut. “I’m going over there.”

  He took the steps two at a time. Shirt. Shoes. Keys. Phone. Then he was back downstairs.

  Mo stood in the middle of his living room. “It’s going to be a mob scene, Billy.”

  He met the other man’s dark gaze. “She thinks I want her to move out, Mo. She’s probably rattled and possibly hurt, and she think’s I want her gone.”

  “Then it’s going to be a mob scene plus two,” his friend said. Just like that.

  It took forever and a fucking day to get anywhere close to the scene of the incident, at least that was how it had felt. And then Mo and Billy were forced to park and hoof it the last four blocks. Of course, there were barriers everywhere once they arrived, and a crowd ten deep of looky-loos wanting to watch as the disaster unfolded.

  And, of course, there was the fucking fire, which made Billy’s skin absolutely crawl with the desire to flee. Which, hell no. Not without Shayna.

  “We’ll find her,” Mo said. “The angle of that Facebook feed was from over there.”

  Billy followed Mo’s hand signal and nodded, and they made their way around the crowd, close to where the majority of the emergency vehicles had parked.

  “That’s Riddick’s company,” Mo said, pointing at one of the trucks. They made for it, and Mo flagged someone down. “Can you tell Sean Riddick that Mo’s here and needs to talk to him when he has a sec?”

  “Sure, man,” the guy said with a wave.

  “Look,” Billy exclaimed, his heart suddenly in his throat. “That’s Shayna’s car and her colleague.” And, Christ, she’d been parked so close.

  “Billy.” Mo grabbed his arm and hauled him a few steps to the right such that they could see around the back of one of the hose trucks. On the grass just beyond, black tarps were laid out on which sat dozens of patients. EMTs moved among them administering first aid.

  And that was when Billy saw her.

  She was at the edge of the group—just out of frame, as it were—taking pictures. He remembered imagining Shayna as a war correspondent, and it was exactly what she looked like as she skirted around the edge of a disaster scene littered with scattered debris, discarded bandage wrappers and water bottles, and other detritus.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he managed, his hand grabbing at his heart. He called her name.

  But of course she coul
dn’t hear him over the rumble of the fire engines or the still crackling flames or the spraying of the hoses, not to mention the voices of onlookers, the crying of children, and the occasional voice through a bullhorn.

  And then Sean Riddick came around the back of the firetruck, his face sweaty and grimy and his turnout gear smelling like smoke. He took one look at Billy and said, “Shayna’s here. She’s injured but she won’t let them take her to the hospital. Then again, she was the first one on the scene and almost all the initial images and the live stream video are hers. I get why she doesn’t want to walk away.”

  Billy’s stomach dropped and his heart squeezed and his chest swelled with pride. “How badly injured?”

  Sean looked to the right and left and then lifted the yellow tape. “Come on back,” he said. Billy and Mo followed him through the gear and people and around the triage area. “She’s got an impaled object wound in her arm. They wrapped and cushioned it, but they don’t want to take it out here because they don’t know how deep it is. And she’s got a head lac that needs stitches. Everything else is superficial, though there’s a lot of it. She was standing pretty much right where they set up their camera.”

  Right. So, grounded-fucking-zero. Billy was fucking shaking—for her and for the memory of what’d happened to him.

  “Somehow, though, she still looks better than you.” Sean smirked, and Billy didn’t even mind the jab when the guy pointed Shayna out. “Catch ya after,” he said, already backing away.

  “I owe you, Sean.”

  The guy shook his head. “No, you don’t. Just take care of her.”

  Billy stood about twenty feet away from where Shayna was crouched taking pictures. So in her element. So fucking beautiful even though he could see the head wound and the bandage on her arm from here.

  Suddenly, she looked right at him, then she did an almost comical double take.

  Billy couldn’t stand the distance between them for one more second. Not the physical distance that kept her from his arms. Nor the emotional distance that prevented her from knowing exactly how he felt.