Fighter

by Kristianna Sawyer

  I’d had no right to revel in her compassion, or to drain her empathy. I had no right to her, because she was too good and too pure for everything that I was. I was a tainted, foul thing, and allowing myself to have her would be the absolute worst thing I had ever done to anyone in the world. I was a selfish bastard, but maybe I wasn’t that selfish. I was doing my best to protect her from myself. I was also protecting my heart from Mia, though she had already wormed her way inside.

  I stayed until everyone had gone, watching the workers shovel the dirt onto my mother’s grave with a digger. When they had departed too, I walked over to her freshly dug grave, sans marker, which would come later. Kneeling down on the raw earth, I passed my hand to the ground and whispered a final goodbye, knowing I would never return to this place. Not just the cemetery, but this entire fucking town. I would go back to my life in Vegas and try to forget any of this had ever happened. It was the best thing for me, and more importantly, it was the best thing for Mia too.

  I threw myself into fighting. My life became all about training in the octagon. The opponent facing me ceased to matter, as did anything else besides the release I received every time my fist connected with flesh or my foot hit a body. Intense workouts in the gym also offered escape into adrenaline-induced oblivion, so I trained harder than ever.

  That night, I stood in the locker room after a fight, breathing heavily. I had won my match, and Charlie Short hadn’t stood a chance against me. He’d been higher ranked than me, and he was a fan favorite, but I had decimated him. I’d pursued victory with single-minded determination, leaving him gasping on the mat. I should have felt victorious, but all I felt was numb.

  I looked up at the click of heels, an incongruous sound in the men’s locker room. Lila came striding toward me, her face a mask that filtered any clue of how she felt.

  Her voice, however, was not so ambiguous. She sounded like she was biting on ice cubes and frosting each word she pushed through her lips. “What the hell is the matter with you?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean the way you’re fighting. You had no mercy for that guy.”

  I regarded her coolly. “Since when am I supposed to have mercy for my opponent? I won the match, and that’s all that matters.”

  She shook her head, her disgust evident, which made me feel about five inches tall. “No, that isn’t all that matters. You want a good guy image, and I thought you were a good guy. A little rough, with a dark edge, but a good guy. You might lose some endorsements after that fight, and you’re lucky you weren’t disqualified. You hit him long past when you had to. You almost killed him.”

  I could feel my shoulders slumping, and I recognized the truth in her words, though I didn’t want to hear it. “Don’t be so dramatic, Lila. I’m not going to lose any endorsements, and you’ll still get your cut.”

  Her lips clamped into a thin line, and she glared at me for a long second before sadness filled her eyes. “I don’t know where you disappeared to when you were gone for those two weeks, and I don’t know what happened to you, but you need to deal with it and do it quickly, before you lose not just your career, but every person in the world who cares about you.”

  Without another word, she turned on those ridiculously high heels and strode from the locker room. I stared after her, wanting to dismiss her words, even as I felt a hollow pang in my chest. She had a point. I knew she had a point. Hell, I could feel myself getting out of control in the octagon. I was hard on my opponents, far harder than I needed to be. There was a difference between winning a match and destroying your opponent. Guilt weighed heavily on me, and I made a note to call Charlie in a few days to check on him.

  I stripped off the last of my gear before striding to the shower, turning the water on full blast and icy cold in an attempt to master my emotions and regain control. I couldn’t keep going on like this, but I had forgotten how to function any other way.

  13

  Mia

  I guess I should have given up on Paxton by now, but I couldn’t make my heart do that. He hadn’t returned any of the messages I had left for him through his various underlings, and the letter I had mailed to his apartment had been returned to sender. I could take a hint, and if he genuinely hadn’t wanted to see me, and if he hadn’t needed to see me, I would have respected the fact it was over.

  But it wasn’t over. It had barely begun before he had run away. I understood his reasons, though it still hurt like hell to know he could reject me so easily. Still, I couldn’t just let things fester, and I couldn’t walk away.

  Neither could I let my dad get away with what he had done. I had started with a discreet inquiry at the police department, learning—not to my surprise, but to my dismay—the statute of limitations had expired for Paxton to file a complaint of sexual abuse against my father.

  I wasn’t entirely sure I could have convinced Paxton to take that route anyway. He still seemed deeply ashamed by what had happened, though he’d had no choice in the matter. It was a classic victim response, as I had discovered from Dr. Google. That in no way qualified me to help him sort through his lingering emotions, but it gave me some perspective I needed to understand what he was going through. What he was putting us both through, if I were honest.

  My heart ached for him, and nothing seemed important without him. I had made the grave error of falling in love with a man who’d never wanted a commitment. In light of his revelations, and the severing of the last technical bond between us with Laura’s death, we seemed doomed to failure. I should have just let it go, but I didn’t believe in quitting. It wasn’t even so much that as I was driven to help Paxton. Even if he didn’t want me in his life, and he was completely finished with our relationship, I couldn’t just walk away from him yet.

  That brought me to my dad’s home office, as I sneaked around furtively. He was at his work office, so it seemed safe enough to explore his home office. I didn’t even really know what I was looking for, but I figured if he was doing anything shady, he would hide the truth here at home rather than in his office. It seemed like it would be safer from a criminal’s perspective—if he was doing anything illegal besides hurting children.

  I rifled through drawers and searched through the filing cabinets with little success. I wasn’t completely financially illiterate, since I had taken a few economics courses in college, but I had been glad to be done with them. I had one more year ahead of me before graduation, and my schedule was filled with more pleasurable classes focusing on my degree in art history. I was obviously underqualified to detect any shenanigans, but I was determined to keep looking. This was my third attempt searching his office, so I went to the area I hadn’t looked at before.

  He had a bookshelf full of unread books, which was so pretentious. They were classics and first editions, and I knew he’d never read one of them. He used to brag to Laura about what an investment they were, and my stepmother had rolled her eyes more than once at the idea. Like me, she had been an avid reader, and there was something sad about a shelf of pristine books.

  Temporarily distracted, I eyed them with a sigh of regret. I had the urge to pull them off the shelves and flip through them, just so they would look like they had been read at least once. It was a silly reaction, and I shook my head as I started to move on.

  At just the right angle, something caught my gaze. I looked back, realizing one of the books was not quite in order. It was just slightly out of alignment, and I guess that was what caught my attention, because all the other books were as neatly organized as they had been the day they were unpacked and lined up on the bookshelf. I think the only time they’ve been touched was during dusting by the cleaning staff.

  Cautiously, I lifted my hand and ran my finger down the spine of “A Tale of Two Cities.” It definitely didn’t seem like my dad’s type of reading material, even if he had suddenly and spontaneously taken up finding comfort in the written word after the death of his wife—an event he barely seeme
d to have noticed.

  I took the book carefully from the shelf, frowning at the weight in my hands. Or rather the lack of weight. It didn’t feel like a book should feel, and when I started to open it, I gave a small gasp as the pages parted, and the book opened to reveal a secret compartment. Inside was a flash drive, and though I didn’t know what I would find on it, I knew it had to be important.

  My hands were shaking as I took it from secret compartment and carefully put the book back where it had been. I didn’t want to my dad to know anyone had been in here. I hesitated for a second, trying to decide if I should look at it on his computer, or if I should take it upstairs to use mine. Finally, I slipped it into my pocket and decided I would grab my laptop and take it far away from the house before I ever looked at the flash drive.

  Perhaps I was making a mistake, and this was nothing that would ruin him or provide even a small measure of justice, but my instincts told me it was important. If I fled now with a useless flash drive, and he discovered it was gone, he would know it was me, and that would be the end of my attempts to bring down my father.

  On the other hand, if he caught me looking at it, and it was something important, I had no idea what he might do to get it back. I had never seen a violent side of him, just cold anger upon occasion, but he was clearly not the man he projected himself to be around me. That man never could have hurt an innocent child. I didn’t know what to expect or how to deal with this unknown side of him.

  As I eased from the office, closing the door quietly, a hand fell on my shoulder, making me yelp with surprise. I whirled to face my father, heart hammering in my chest. Somehow, I managed to smile. “Oh, there you are, Dad. I was just going to ask you what you wanted for dinner?” Thank goodness today was the cook’s day off, affording me a perfect excuse to be looking for him.

  He didn’t seem at all suspicious, though he wasn’t terribly warm. Ever since I had threatened to leave with Paxton, my father had treated me in a distant fashion. I appreciated the disconnect, because I hadn’t had to maintain as much of a façade or pretend to be oblivious to his perversities. There had been no spontaneous hugs, which I feared would make me want to throw up or slug him in the face. The idea of letting him touch me turned my stomach. In fact, his hand on my shoulder was enough to make my skin burn.

  “Just order in something. I’m not up to another one of your culinary disasters.”

  Under other circumstances, I might have been hurt, or might have even made a joke if he had said it in a tender or teasing fashion. Instead, I just shrugged and nodded, adding casually, “I’ll just bring something back. I have to run an errand anyway.”

  He shrugged as he entered his office, clearly not giving a damn what I was going to do, or what I brought back for dinner. I don’t think he gave a damn about me anymore, since I no longer fit so neatly into “His Princess” box, but that didn’t bother me. I didn’t want his love or affection. I just wanted him to pay.

  My heart was racing in my ears, and I rushed across the entryway to scoop up my keys. There was no time to go upstairs for my laptop, just in case he went straight to his book looking for the flash drive. I had to get out of there, and I had to get out now. I felt a bit like a spy on a secret mission, except I wasn’t furtive, nor was I confident in my abilities to escape.

  I basically ran as quickly as I could to my VW convertible, got inside, turned on the engine, and reversed down the driveway as fast as possible. There was no sign of anyone emerging from the house, but I still pressed my foot almost to the floorboard for the first quarter-mile before I even pulled over to put on my seatbelt.

  My hands shook, and I double-checked my pocket at least three times to make sure the flash drive was still there as I drove away from the city, at first uncertain where I was going. It was only as I took the interstate and started programming my GPS that I realized I was headed to Vegas.

  As I drove, common sense asserted itself over the adrenaline rush from my panicked flight, and I knew I had to slow down and make some plans if I wanted to get seventeen hundred miles from here without being intercepted by my dad or anyone in his employment. At the next exit, an electronics store caught my attention, and it was next to a branch of our bank. I figured that was a fortuitous development, so I got off the freeway and parked in the parking lot.

  I used my father’s credit card without a flash of guilt to buy a brand-new laptop, and then I went to the bank to withdraw a hefty portion of my savings. Some of that money had come from him, though the larger part was from geographically distant relatives on my mother’s side and even an occasional summer job. I didn’t feel any remorse for taking his money, especially since it was going to the worthy cause of getting me to Paxton and hopefully enabling us to destroy my father. It seemed fitting that he should pay for his own downfall.

  I was back on the road within half an hour, and I drove steadily for several hours. My phone rang twice, both times showing my father’s number. I ignored it and the voicemails he left, knowing I would need to deal with it all soon enough, but not ready to cope with hearing his voice just yet.

  When I grew too tired to drive, I pulled off the freeway into a small town and found a hotel. I had no choice but to use my ID to register, but I didn’t use my credit card. Perhaps I was being paranoid, or maybe I had read a few too many thrillers, but I knew he could track me that way if he was determined to do so.

  In the small room that was as far from luxurious as one could get, though it was clean, I plugged in the new laptop and started updates so I could use it. While I waited for the computer to be ready, I took a brief shower, even keeping the flash drive with me on the back of the toilet so it wouldn’t get wet, but was within reach at any moment.

  By the time I emerged from the bathroom wrapped in one of their thin towels, since I had no other clothes and hadn’t thought to acquire any, the laptop was ready. In my nervousness, I fumbled with the flash drive, finally getting it to fit into the USB port. I held my breath as I clicked it open, finding files that were grayed out with strange names.

  Shit. I needed a password to access those files, and I was stumped.

  I tried a few variations of my birthday, Laura’s birthday, and my father’s, but nothing worked. In desperation, I tried Paxton’s birthday on the off chance my father was a sadistic bastard who would get a thrill out of using Paxton’s numbers that way. It was also a dead end. I was reasonably proficient with technology, but I was no hacker, and I definitely needed someone who knew what they were doing.

  I kept the flash drive beside me when I lay down in bed. Reluctantly, I listened to the voicemail from my father. The first was simply inquiring when I was getting back with dinner, but the next and was a different matter. His voice was hard and cold, and he demanded I bring back the thing I had taken. Those were his words, and nothing else. Still, I shivered at the threatening tone. I knew he had to be looking for me, and I assumed he wouldn’t be searching alone. It seemed prudent to ditch my car and make it with cash from here on out.

  Though I had been tired, I was no longer able to sleep. I dressed in my dirty clothes, scooped up my things, and left the hotel room. I was back on the road hours before sunrise, and I drove with single-minded determination, stopping only once for gas. When I entered a large city later that morning, I left my car parked at a busy airport. Then I took a taxi across town to the bus station. I didn’t feel safe until I was on the bus, and we were on the road.

  It was a nightmare journey that lasted twenty-two hours. Every stop made me fearful, especially when I was forced to disembark the bus to change to a different one at one point. I was certain my father or his men would find me, but I never had a hint of trouble. That didn’t mean there wasn’t trouble following me, and I wasn’t naïve enough to think I was safe as long as I had the flash drive.

  Finally, we entered Vegas, and I got off at the main station just down from the Strip. Rather than head toward the nice hotels on the Strip, I made my way toward Fremont Street. I fi
gured I might have better luck getting a hotel room with just cash in that part of town. As I wandered, I found myself on Main Street, which appeared to be a decrepit area full of criminals. It wasn’t a safe place to stay, but it wasn’t the kind of place my father would expect me choose.

  I checked into a small hotel, where the desk clerk accepted an extra hundred dollars in lieu of identification, taking a room that smelled like someone’s ashtray, and spent twenty minutes moving the heavy dresser that doubled as a TV stand to block the door. In addition to cigarette holes in the bedspread and a giant dead roach in the corner, the room had a lock, but I didn’t trust it.

  When I was slightly assured that I might be at least partially safe in this hellhole, I plugged in the laptop and began to search. I already knew I wouldn’t get hold of Paxton, at least not easily. Instead, I had to find someone else, someone who I’d hoped never to meet. Even typing her first name into the Google search bar, along with the words “nightclub owner” and “fighting” made my stomach twist with jealousy. Still, what other choice did I have? Lila-whoever was my best hope to locate Paxton. If I could just find her.

  It didn’t take long for me to discover a Lila Barrett, who owned “SINuous,” a local hotspot nightclub. She was also listed as a sponsor of several fighters, including Paxton LeChance. There was no mention of her less-than-legal fighting endeavors, so either she was careful to keep that part separate from her lawful life, or maybe she had moved into legitimate circles along with Paxton.

  I stared at her picture, nausea churning in my gut. She was fucking gorgeous. I’d guess she was old enough to be my mother—Paxton’s too—but she carried her age well. If she was involved with Paxton, I couldn’t imagine why he’d ever even looked at me. Maybe I was being too hard on myself, but I couldn’t compare to her.

  I firmed my lips, doing my best to push away my jealousy. It wasn’t productive, and it didn’t matter. If he’d chosen her over me, or even if he’d just decided he didn’t want me at all for whatever reason, I still wanted to get the flash drive to him. If it held the key to destroying my father, he had the right to it.