by Bethany-Kris
The look on Sean’s face was one that told Connor not to question his father’s demand, but rather, do exactly as he said. His demand had been spoken in monotone, which was a sign his father had taken just about as much of Connor’s presence as he could handle for the morning, which rarely seemed to be much lately.
The most obvious sign of his father’s lost patience was the monotone he took on. Sean could speak with amusement, rage, or even sarcasm whenever he wanted, but the lilt of those tones still held a falsehood underneath the range of his words. As though he had needed to learn how to speak with emotion, even if it did ring as false.
Sean was most dangerous when he dropped his façade. That was probably the most important lesson Connor had learned over the course of his life. Connor figured it didn’t matter. No need to analyze why his father was probably considering killing him right then, he just knew from experience that he was.
Connor was up out of his chair and disappearing from the office without so much as a goodbye, a wave, or a look over his shoulder. The moment the door clicked behind him, the invisible pressure that had been building inside his chest finally released.
What people said about Sean O’Neil was not even close to a lie. If anything, most people thought the stories about the Irish mob boss were greatly exaggerated, but they weren’t. Not at all. A man only needed to look at Sean to see and feel it. Nothing lived inside that man. He was dead underneath the layer of what seemed like life.
Connor—like most others—put as much effort into staying away from Sean as they did trying to keep the man pleased, even if they too died a wee bit inside for it.
Some monsters needed to stay sleeping.
Sean was one of those.
• • •
The cute girl behind the cash register had just pushed Connor’s black coffee and wrapped bagel across the counter when his phone rang in his pocket, temporarily distracting him from inviting the girl to the back alley. Relationships weren’t Connor’s thing, but a fast, dirty, forgettable ride was always something he made time for, if he could help it.
He’d done all sorts of things that were dangerous, things that truly made him feel out of control, but nothing was quite as good or gave the best kind of high, like sex did.
Especially, when he didn’t know the woman’s name.
Unfortunately, today was not going to be one of those days, if the incoming text on his phone were any indication. Connor read over the message twice as he took a bite of the bagel and balanced his phone between his hand and coffee at the same time.
Brighton. Warehouse 4. 12 AM.
Three simple, vague sentences. Not even a proper address was added on. But frankly, those who received the messages knew exactly what they were for, where they needed to go, and what they would find when they got there.
Personally, he wasn’t a fan of the warehouses in Brighton, if only because the Russians from the Sokolov Bratva organization owned the properties used for the … events. There were all kinds of underground events that happened all over New York, some that his father’s men had a hand in, and others that he’d made his way into, simply by his affiliation to different people.
But the Russian events?
They brought in the dregs. They enticed people with the darkest sorts of interests that even Connor had no desire to witness. A lot like his father, actually.
Maybe that was why he disliked them, but he wasn’t willing to say it out loud. Not if he could earn himself a couple of hundred thousand in a cage by bashing somebody’s head in and walking out a bit richer. Money was the root of all evil—according to some—but to Connor? Money was one of the only things that made him happy.
Connor checked the time on his phone, noting it was still a couple of hours before noon, and he had all day before the event. Maybe he did have time for that back-alley ride, after all.
Turning on his heel, Connor found that pretty cashier was still watching him. He smirked, and tipped his coffee up for a drink.
“When’s your next break?”
Straightforward was always the best way to go.
• • •
Connor stepped into the shoddy warehouse just after one in the morning. He recognized one of the guys at the door, and that was probably the only reason he wasn’t patted down before he was allowed entrance.
The very second he was inside, Connor’s nose stung with his first inhale. It was a difficult smell to describe—the dirt floor, rusted walls, leaky pipes, and rundown state of the place. Yet, above those things, he could smell the animals, the people, old blood, and something sour in the air.
He pushed his thoughts aside, following the corridor that would lead to the main floor. Already, he could hear the snarls and vicious barking reverberating down the corridor, raucous laughter and loud cheers following the noise. Another snarl sliced through the damp air a second before a sharp yelp followed right behind.
Connor just stepped into the main floor in time to see a Rottweiler pin a copper-colored Boxer to the dirt floor, his teeth tearing into the hide of the dog that was down. He passed by the dog fights, and then a well-known prostitute who frequented the events, who tried to approach him, bypassing her as well.
He had a goal in mind, and he knew better than to waste time by getting into conversation with one of the prostitutes working the place.
If he looked hard enough into the shadows, he could find more than enough of those girls working their tricks. A man getting his cock sucked under a table, or a girl getting screwed from behind in the corner.
He just wasn’t interested.
And he didn’t pay to play.
The spiral, metal staircase that led to the upper section of the warehouse was the one place Connor avoided in this particular building. For every girl that worked the floor downstairs, there were five girls upstairs, waiting on stained mattresses and separated by sheets, being used in whatever way a person saw fit to do so.
Skin was a lucrative trade.
He’d seen worse than what was upstairs in the warehouse because of his father, but it was easier to focus on what he was there to do, and then he could get the feck out.
“Irish!”
Connor’s gaze found the man shouting for him sitting on a half-wall near the cage, where two men were fighting, both bleeding profusely from their fists and faces. “Danny.”
“You fighting tonight?”
He made his way over to where the man sat, and quickly pulled himself up to sit beside one of the few people he might actually consider a friend. Daniel—or Danny, as he preferred—was one guy that Connor had grew up with. Danny happened to have a father in the O’Neil organization, and Sean had never openly told his son to stay the feck away from the guy.
“Maybe,” Connor said, his attention going back to the cage. “They weren’t taking names at the door.”
“It’s volunteer tonight.”
“Ah, I see.”
Well, then.
Connor liked that even more.
He sat back, watched the cage, and waited to see a face he might like to kick in.
Ivan Petrov happened to be the lucky bastard Connor decided to fight, although not because he had any particular score to settle with the Russian. Connor had simply noticed that every time a Russian put themselves up as a volunteer to fight, no one seemed interested in challenging them.
Maybe it was the venue—a Bratva-owned warehouse. No one liked to cause a possible problem in a place they didn’t have any say over, or where they could be killed without dispute for starting an issue. Another reason Connor suspected no one wanted to challenge any Russian, was because some of them were dirty, especially when backed into a corner and they thought they might lose.
Connor decided whatever risk involved was worth it.
One, because he liked money. Two, because he wanted to fight. And three, because even though he didn’t have a problem with Ivan, he didn’t like the look of the man’s face. Sometimes that was more than enough to get the I
rish in Connor ready to go to blows.
Both men had undressed down to their boxer-briefs, chatted between one another from opposite ends of the cage, and waited while the money started to flow in from the bets of watchers. Connor was the underdog where the betting was concerned, but he’d expected that reaction, seeing as how this was Russian turf, and he was so far from Russian, it wasn’t even funny.
Even if his face wasn’t known, the visible marks on his body were more than enough to explain his Irish heritage. From the large, script-styled O’Neil tattooed across the back of his shoulders intertwined with a Celtic cross, to the raised scars of carved shamrocks inside both his palms, there was no hiding what Connor was.
The only likeness he shared with Ivan were the multitude of tattoos covering his body in colorful ink. But where the Russian’s ink told the story of his Bratva lifestyle and how he’d come into it, Connor’s told his history—from his first tattoo at aged thirteen, to his most recent just a week earlier—if someone cared to look close enough.
Five minutes into the bare-knuckle brawl, and Connor hadn’t found a reason to regret challenging Ivan’s volunteer to fight. The Russian wasn’t a lazy fighter, by any means. He was quick on his feet, had power behind his hits, and he seemed to know what he was doing. Connor appreciated that, if only because it made his wins that much more satisfying in the end. He liked the challenge a good fighter provided, because instead of just kicking arse and knocking heads, Connor was able to actually put his skills to use.
Too many guys were easy money in these fights.
Ivan Petrov was not one of them.
But, Ivan was not a perfect fighter; no one was, not even Connor. It just so happened to be that Connor excelled in finding flaws in a man’s moves, and waiting for the opening to come again so he could use the weakness to his advantage. Then he would take the guy out before he even knew what had occurred.
Ivan didn’t protect his body nearly enough, because he was too focused on keeping his pretty face covered when the jabs were coming. He also had a tendency of turning away from an oncoming hit, which would be just grand, if he didn’t turn slightly to the right every single time he did so. If a man was going to turn to the right every time a punch or kick was thrown out at him, whether that attack came from the right or left, then he wasn’t going to see the round-up attack coming from his left when he was too busy protecting something on his right.
Connor figured Ivan had an old injury of some sort on his right side that made the man’s instincts want to protect it from further harm—internal bruising from something recent, or maybe an old rib fracture that still caused him some kind of issue. Whatever the problem was for Ivan, it left his left side exposed to the pummeling his opponent was now leveling on him, and the guy seemed almost too shocked to react that Connor had picked up on the flaw.
Nothing was too unimportant to use in a cage.
Not to Connor.
Connor landed a brutal punch to Ivan’s left kidney, one he knew was going to leave the man in pain for days. With some hits, a fighter just felt the force; the way a muscle gave way, the tremor of a bone shifting beneath the flesh. He’d felt it in that punch, and Ivan reacted differently than he had all the times before.
Instead of moving to the right, determined to protect that side, his reaction to the pain drove him to the left with a wide mouth and a hard wince.
Connor took that opening, too. With Ivan’s right side opened up, Connor rounded back on his left foot, turned fast, and let his bare heel land with a solid smack into the injury the guy had been working to protect the entire fight.
He wanted to end this fast, get his payday, and roll the hell out of the warehouse before anyone could say something about it. What he didn’t intend to do, was beat the Russian into a bloody pulp, if he could help it. After all, he might end up meeting the guy again someday.
The memory of mercy was better to leave him with.
Connor wasn’t always so kind.
The roundhouse had its intended effect, and Ivan fell backwards before grabbing at his lower ribcage, protecting it before he hit the hard cement floor with a quiet thud. That silence didn’t last for long, not when Ivan groaned, curling in on his body as he scooted closer to the edge of the chain-link cage.
Connor kept his ground, not turning his back or giving the suddenly shouting people barricading the cage and slamming their hands into the fence any attention. He wasn’t foolish—he’d done this before, turned away thinking he’d won, and suffered for it, too.
Some of these fighters were too feckin’ stubborn and stupid for their own good. Some of them wouldn’t give up, even when they knew they had lost, because that meant defeat; a failure. Some of them would fight until they were practically lifeless or dead because that was far more honorable than tapping out.
It was brutal.
Goddamn savage.
Connor respected it, because he was one of those men, too.
His knuckles were bloodied and bruised—something he was overly accustomed to. His hands might only get the chance to finally heal before he’d open those wounds up again. He barely even felt the pain in his hands from fighting without any sort of protection, as he’d been brawling bare-knuckled since he was thirteen years old, and honestly, he didn’t know any different.
It was the only reason why he never tattooed his knuckles. His fingers, sure. His hands, too. Never his knuckles.
They had their own marks.
A whole story told in raised, red and faded white scars crisscrossing over each knuckle several times over.
He waited for Ivan to do something, ignoring the ache in his jaw and the stinging above his brow. For all Connor’s efforts, Ivan had still gotten him good a few times. A punch he was sure had cracked his jaw, if not almost dislocating it, and another that cut his eyebrow. The hot trickle of blood dribbling down his cheek was irritating, but he had more important things to focus on.
Like whatever that object had been that a guy passed through the fencing to Ivan. Whatever it was, Ivan had been quick to hide it under his body as he pushed himself onto all fours. The cheers from the spectators became impossibly louder, ringing in Connor’s ears and distracting him for a second in time, just long enough for him to take inventory.
In a heartbeat, his attention was back on Ivan.
The guy was taking his sweet time, if getting back up was what he planned to do.
Hands beat at the cage all around him, but Connor only saw faceless people. They wanted a show; they wanted blood and pain. It was what they paid for, so it was no shock to him that when his bloodied, already-beaten opponent tried to get back up for another round, they were more than willing to cheer the Russian on.
Whatever fed their bloodlust.
Whatever made spending money worth it.
Connor rocked back on his heels as Ivan pushed himself up to one knee, and used his other bent leg as a support to lean the majority of his upper bodyweight on. The Russian’s shoulders heaved with his breaths, but he never once showed his hands or turned to face Connor while he was still on the ground.
That alone made Connor twitchy.
Not wary, or even nervous.
No.
Feckin’ twitchy.
He was reminded again of why a lot of the participants to the fights didn’t like joining in when it was on the Russians’ turf.
Because the bastards were shady.
They would do anything to win.
Connor scanned the crowd again, looking for one person in particular. Danny. It was always good to have at least one person on your side on the outside of the cage, especially when a man had good reason to be concerned. Danny might have been able to cue Connor in on what to do, or how to end this entire charade, if he had been able to find him.
He couldn’t see his old mate anywhere.
And unfortunately, it seemed that Connor’s momentary distraction was exactly what Ivan had been waiting for—or perhaps someone else outside the cage had been wa
tching for it, and clued him in.
Connor only saw a flash out of the corner of his eye, but it was enough for his attention to shoot back to Ivan. Just in time, too. The Russian came barreling at him with a knife in hand, aimed high and pointed directly at Connor. For a brief second, all he could see was the glint of sharp metal, and the way the dim lights above danced off the blade.
He liked knives.
He had a whole damn collection of them.
His fascination with blades couldn’t be contained.
Connor didn’t bring a knife to a bare-knuckle fight, though. The same way a man shouldn’t bring a gun to a knife fight. That behavior just wasn’t on the level.
He really wished he was surprised.
But he wasn’t. Not even a wee bit.
Most men would probably freeze at the sight of a Russian coming at them in an enclosed cage with a knife poised to kill, but Connor wasn’t one of those men. Knives didn’t frighten him, he loved them too much to be scared of the way the blade bit into the skin, and he knew all too well how a cut felt after it had been made. He’d taken a few slices from others who thought this particular trick would work on him in a fight, and even a slice from his father, back when he was younger.
More importantly, Connor respected knives and their cuts because he’d done it to himself, many times over, just to see how he would bleed.
Someone else would cower. Someone else would protect themselves from the knife, and risk the rest of their body to harm in the process.
Connor never moved.
Ivan likely thought Connor was frozen as he rushed him, but that was far from the case. Connor lifted his right arm, determined to make the choice of where the blade caught him first, while he figured out the rest of his plan. It worked—the blade sliced into his forearm, though Connor barely felt the cut at all. He felt the blood that came instantly, but not the cut. He was immune to that, now.