“Should that name mean something to me?” She frowns, looking as unimpressed as possible.
“Grayson never mentioned me? I should have assumed as much.” He sighs loudly. “After all the time we spent together, it’s sad that he doesn’t talk about our little adventures. But, what can you do?” He shrugs, his hands open as if to show how powerless he is. It’s a little hard for Adriana to believe his little act when she’s completely at his mercy.
“You said you were a friend of Grayson’s. What kind of a friend kidnaps his girlfriend to blackmail him?” Adriana’s tone is as biting as her words. She doesn’t have any intention of making nice with this man, not after everything he’s put her through and whatever he’s about to do to Grayson.
“You should be less worried about what kind of man I am, Adriana, and more concerned about what kind of a man your new boyfriend is. If you’re as smart as I think you are, you’ll see this as an opportunity for you.” He smiles at her benevolently, but it doesn’t even come close to reaching his eyes.
“An opportunity?” Adriana’s laugh is bitter. “I wouldn’t call being held captive in some rat-infested basement an opportunity! Not unless you and I have two very different interpretations of the word!”
“Perhaps after you’ve heard what I have to tell you about Grayson, you may decide that our meeting was fortuitous, that I saved you from giving yourself to a man whom you know so little about.” His eyes land on the article that still sits on the table in front of him, and he raises an eyebrow at her, clearly wanting her to ask him what he knows.
Adriana has no intention of doing anything that he wants her to do, so she waits him out, swallowing down her own curiosity and her own need to know how the article has any bearing on the Grayson whom she knows and loves. She meets Morrison’s eyes, staring him down and watching his reactions. She allows herself a small smile of satisfaction when she sees the frustration plain on his face before he softens his expression.
“It’s a shame. I really did think that you weren’t quite so naïve.” Morrison scrapes his chair back, as he moves to get up. “But if you’re honestly not interested in what happened,”—he taps the article, pointedly—“then I suppose there’s nothing left to talk about. I’ll leave you with your little furry friends.” He smiles wolfishly at her and turns to go, followed by his goon.
“No! Wait!” The words are out of her mouth before she can stop them. Much as she doesn’t want to give Morrison the satisfaction of participating in his little scenario, equally she doesn’t want to be left in the dark again, with the rats scuttling around her feet.
Morrison turns around slowly, raising his eyebrows at her questioningly. Goddam him, she thinks to herself. He’s mocking me; he’s actually enjoying this. Whatever he has to say about Grayson, there’s one thing for sure, Grayson isn’t a malicious man. He doesn’t enjoy inflicting pain on other people, physical or otherwise.
“I want to know. Tell me what happened to Vinnie Jones.” She takes a deep breath, preparing herself for whatever he may tell her.
Morrison remains standing, looking at her expectantly, as if she’s forgotten something.
She squeezes her eyes shut. “Please.” Her voice seems to be just desperate enough to convince him, and he nods with that same goddam amused expression on his face.
“Of course, my dear.” He smiles at her deferentially, mocking her. “What would you like to know? I have nothing to hide.” He spreads his hands, like a magician who wants to show he has no surreptitious cards.
Everything, she thinks but doesn’t say it. There’s only so much power she’s willing to give away at a time. “How did you two meet?”
Morrison smiles and settles himself in his chair, looking for all the world like the question had made him nostalgic. “Well, Grayson and I officially met the night of the infamous fight.” He nods his head towards the article. “But I was aware of him before then.” He looks up to the ceiling, as if he’s watching his memories play out above them. “He’d started coming to the fights a few months before. At first he kept to the back, you wouldn’t have even known he was there. But as time went on, he got a little more confident and started getting as close to the action as he could. That’s when I realized, he wasn’t watching the fight; he was watching the fighters, studying them.”
“He wanted to be like them.” Adriana finishes the thought for him, trying to imagine what had driven Grayson to the underground illegal fights. However, it wasn’t much of a stretch to figure that out. “He wanted to support his mom and sister. Violence was all he’d known growing up.” A lump in her throat forms, as she thinks about how hard Grayson’s childhood had been…if it could even really be called that. He’d never had much of a chance to be a kid; his father hadn’t given him one.
Morrison waves her explanation away, clearly not interested in the reason behind Grayson’s fascination with the fighters. “He needed the money.” He shrugs, as if that was all that mattered, as if Grayson had needed it to spend on designer clothes and girls.
“So, how did you figure into the story? You said you met at the fight.” Adriana prompts Morrison, wanting to hear the facts, not just the idle speculation of a man who clearly doesn’t know the first thing about Grayson, or perhaps he just doesn’t care.
“I should say I suppose that we officially met at his fight, his first one.” Morrison pulls the brim of the hat that he’s wearing low on his head. He looks like an old-style gangster from the movies in his expensive outfit, but he doesn’t fool Adriana. She knows that he’s just a two-bit villain.
“His first fight was with the man who died.” Adriana swallows hard, not trusting herself to say anymore without her voice breaking.
“It was when I saw him in the ring that first time that I knew he would go far; I knew he would be somebody.” He sounds more proud of his own foresight than of Grayson’s natural abilities. “He had the makings of a great fighter.”
“Turns out you were right. He is a great fighter.” Adriana can’t help but revel in Grayson’s talent. She had never seen anything quite like the way he’d moved in the ring that night, the night that he’d told her he wanted to make her proud. “But he was somebody already, before he walked into that ring.”
Morrison smiles at her indulgently, making her feel like a little kid. “Young love! It sees what it wants to see. Before he met me, Grayson was white trash. He was on the road to a life of asking, ‘Do you want fries with that?’ and drinking himself to death. I made him what he is today.” Morrison stabs his chest with his index finger, emphasizing his own importance. It’s something that he seems to need to do. Short man syndrome, Adriana thinks to herself.
She remembers the conversation that she’d overheard in Grayson’s house that morning. I’m done with you pulling my strings. It had been Morrison; he had been the mystery caller that Grayson had dismissed as some whack-job fan. He had lied to her face. The realization hits her stomach like a bowling ball, but she forces herself to focus on Morrison.
“How did you make him? What did you have to do with what happened that night?” Adriana narrows her eyes at the short man, searching through his expressions and tics like a human polygraph.
“With the murder? I had nothing to do with that.” Morrison lifts his hands, palms up. The word murder sends a shudder through her. “I just helped Grayson realize that no good would come of him being found, holding the body, so to speak.”
“The body?” Adriana’s voice is a whisper.
“Yes, our friend Mr. Jones.” Morrison gestures towards the article. “What, did you think that he ended up with those injuries by hurling himself against a wall?” He shakes his head at her ignorance.
Adriana bites her lip so hard she tastes blood, but she refuses to cry in front of this man. She refuses to give him the satisfaction of seeing her brought to her knees. “Grayson killed him?” Her voice is so cracked and quiet it’s almost inaudible, even to her.
“I’m sorry, my dear, I didn’t quite
catch that.” Morrison cups a hand to his ear, straining to hear her.
“Did Grayson kill him?” She repeats herself, louder this time, but it’s like trying to pull her own teeth out of her head.
Morrison sighs again, theatrically. “I’m afraid so, Adriana. It really was a terrible business.”
“How?” The word comes out half-strangled, and she swallows hard, her mouth suddenly dry.
“I’m sure you don’t want to hear all the gory details…” Morrison looks at her as if he’s assessing if she’s strong enough to hear it, but he’s just toying with her like a cat toys with a mouse before it eats it.
“I’m a nurse; I can take the gory details. Tell me.” She steels herself against what she’s about to hear, remembering that it’s just Morrison’s words against everything she knows about Grayson. But somehow that doesn’t make it any easier.
“He broke his neck. You could hear the snap right from the back of the warehouse.” Morrison smiles, as if he’s telling a family-friendly story, and he plummets another few feet in Adriana’s already low estimation of him.
Adriana doesn’t even bother to try to hide her gasp at his words. She can’t help but imagine what Morrison has described. She’d seen the way he’d attacked King Kong in the fighting ring, the way he had kept his eyes so firmly fixed on Kong when he had gone down onto the mat, as if he was making sure that he was going to get back up again. It all made sense; he was terrified that he’d killed a man again.
It’s a few minutes before Adriana feels safe to speak without all her emotions falling out of her like a spilled box of matches. “You helped him get out before the cops arrived.” It’s a statement of fact; it wasn’t hard to figure out how things had gone down.
Morrison bows his head, as if she’s just congratulated him. “He was just a kid. No one knew who he was, and in those kinds of fights, people don’t tend to come forward as witnesses. It’s not the highest class of person who attends those kinds of events.”
“People like you, you mean.” Adriana’s voice is pure revulsion, and it’s not lost on Morrison. The goon behind him takes a step towards Adriana as if to teach her a lesson on behalf of his boss, but Morrison lifts a hand, motioning him to stay, like he is a dog. The big guy stops dead, but his eyes remain trained on Adriana, as if he’s willing her to make another mistake and do something that will give him a reason to hurt her.
“Glass houses, my dear. I’m not the killer in this story.” Morrison looks pointedly at her.
“And that’s what you’ve been holding over Grayson. You’re the only one who knows that the kid that…that hurt Vinnie…that he’s one of the UFC’s biggest and brightest now. You’ve been blackmailing him for years.” The dots start to connect for Adriana, and she sees how right she is in Morrison’s expression.
“Like I told you before, my dear. Blackmail is such an ugly word. I much prefer ‘incentivize.’” He shoots her a warning look. “Besides, I didn’t hear Grayson complaining when he was sharing in the spoils.”
Adriana frowns, confused at this loop that she’s been thrown for. “The spoils? What are you talking about?”
“You really have no idea, do you?” Morrison shakes his head at her in mock-fascination. “If I were you, Adriana, I would be more careful about the kind of people that I associate with.”
“The spoils?” She prompts him, not allowing him the luxury of going off on one of these tangents that he so seems to enjoy over how little she knows Grayson.
“I didn’t force Grayson into the car with me that night outside the warehouse. He came of his own free will. He left the scene of a crime that he’d committed and took up my offer of a better life.” Morrison shrugs as if to say that it was exactly that simple.
“A better life? How?” Adriana’s father had instilled in her a suspicion of any easy ride. He used to tell her that there was no such thing as anyone doing something for anyone else out of the kindness of their own heart; there had to be something in it for them. When she was little, she’d thought that he was being negative, a hangover from the way her mother had treated him.
“I’m a speculator. Some people speculate on the stock market; I speculate in sport, mostly fights: MMA, boxing, legitimate or otherwise.” He looks at her with false apology.
“You’re a bookie.” Adriana’s father had also always taught her to call a spade a spade, no matter how it was dressed up to look like something else.
“In common parlance, I suppose that’s correct.” Morrison watches her, waiting for her next question.
“So, you helped train Grayson to win in these illegal fights. You bet on him and split the winnings.” Adriana follows the breadcrumbs that Morrison has laid for her, reaching the logical conclusion. It wasn’t exactly the most honorable way to earn money, but there was nothing so terrible, aside from the fact that it was all illegal. Adriana wonders absently where his mother thought all the money was coming from. Perhaps she didn’t ask…she probably figured that she didn’t want to know.
“Not exactly, you’re halfway there though. You’re sharp.” It’s a compliment said in a way that’s so patronizing it’s impossible to take it as such. “We didn’t just split the spoils when he won; we split them when he lost as well.” He looks at Adriana like he’s sharing a secret with her.
Then, it dawns on her what Morrison is trying to tell her. “You knew when he was going to lose because you’d tell him to throw the fight. So whatever happened to Grayson in that ring, win or lose, you both got paid.” She tries to line up this image of Grayson with the one that she has in her mind. The man who she knows would never throw a fight. He would never do anything but give his all; he didn’t know how to live any other way.
“Exactly, my dear! And obviously the more specific you can be, the more you can win. For example, if we bet on Grayson going down in the first, we could make a nice little package, enough to split between two.” Morrison is almost rubbing his hands with glee at the memory of all that money.
“So Grayson made you a lot of money.” Adriana tilts her head at Morrison, seeing him for the greedy little man he is. “And him going legit means that you don’t get to dictate whether he wins or loses, so you don’t have a sure thing anymore.” As Morrison’s expression darkens, Adriana realizes that she’s hit on the exact point. “That’s what this is all about? Money? A couple hundred dollars is enough for you to kidnap someone? Wow, times really must be tough.” She’s almost disappointed that her life is being put into jeopardy for a few bills.
“Just when I think you’re getting it, you say something that proves you’re as silly as all those other bimbos Grayson has had.” Morrison’s tone is bitter. “You think I would go to these lengths of a couple of Benjamin Franklins?” He laughs, but it sounds like it’s something he doesn’t have much practice with. “Grayson’s next match, for the state title, there’s close to a million dollars riding on that fight, and I don’t intend to lose it.”
Adriana’s eyes widen at Morrison’s words. A million dollars was a figure that she couldn’t even begin to fathom, not really. They were figures that didn’t mean anything to people like her who lived in a world of balancing paychecks with the rent, juggling to get to the end of the month, and paying the minimum on all her credit cards. It wasn’t hard to understand how far someone might go for a million dollars.
“So what do you need Grayson to do? What are you trying to make him do in exchange for me?” She watches as Morrison smiles like a crocodile.
“Grayson is going to throw the fight. He’s going to lose, specifically in the third round.” Morrison doesn’t even bother to try to hide his glee at the prospect. “It’s going to get messy, I’m sure. You see Dexter has a habit of hurting his opponents quite badly. The Grayson that comes out of the fight will probably be all but unrecognizable.”
A strangled cry escapes Adriana. “Grayson was right! You are a whack-job! How can you do that to him?”
Morrison looks at her with pity, like she’s an
injured bird that he knows there’s no hope of saving. “Do that to him? He’s the one that left me behind. We were partners, and he just up and left.” It’s the first time that Morrison sounds genuinely hurt, but Adriana isn’t buying it.
“You could care less about Grayson. You lost your moneymaker; that’s all he was to you. So, you had to find a way to make money out of him a different way.” Adriana shakes her head in disgust at the little man in front of her. “He’s not going to do what you want. He’s not just going to let himself get beaten, not after he’s worked so hard to get to where he is. He’s left you behind Morrison. Deal with it. Besides, he knows that you’ll probably just kill me anyway.” Her voice shakes at the last moment, and she closes her mouth, refusing to let Morrison see how scared she is.
“You really do have a high opinion of him, don’t you? The honorable Grayson Fletcher! It’s sweet really how loyal you are to him, even if it is completely misplaced.” He pushes himself up from the table and walks towards her slowly, deliberately, goon in tow. She keeps herself as rigid as she can, telling herself to stand tall and proud. It’s something that’s surprisingly hard to do with her hands tied to a water pipe. “You’re just like all the others, Adriana, don’t you see that? You’re just another one of his little flings. I’m sorry to say that he’s not the man you think he is, my dear.” He looks at her sadly as he settles a conciliatory hand on her shoulder, but she shrugs him off. That only seems to spur him further on to inflict as much damage as he can. “Do you know how many women he’s been with, Adriana? Hundreds and that was just when I knew him. I’m sure the Miami club scene has afforded him all kinds of new experiences.”
MY PROTECTOR: The Valves MC Page 44