by Hart, Callie
Zeth came at me again. Great knots of muscle shifted like liquid steel under his flesh. Instead of wondering how badly it was going to hurt if he actually, really managed to hit me, I made a quick study of him. I watched those muscles. I disregarded the angle of his body and the way he transferred his weight from one foot to the other, and I saw where the power was building in his body. It all happened in a tenth of a second.
He presented his left side to me, as if he were about to lunge and jab with his left fist, but the tension and the way his abs compressed on the other side of his body told a different story. He was going to feint to the left. He was going to try and misdirect me with a halfhearted strike, and then, while I was focused on the weak punch, blocking him, he was going to assault from the right, swinging his right fist up in a hook that would likely take my fucking head off if I allowed it to make contact.
Well, two could play at misdirection.
I looked to the fist he was thrusting out toward my shoulder, pretending that punch was the only worry I had in the world, and I waited. In the space of a heartbeat, Zeth twisted his body, pivoted, and that right hook was sailing toward my jaw with an unbelievable force.
Motherfucker.
I’d anticipated the maneuver, but fuck me running if the man’s speed didn’t surprise the shit out of me all over again. I had just enough time to twist, spinning to the side and ducking. A microsecond later and that would have been it. I would have been on my ass, eyes rolled back into my skull, counting fucking sheep.
A kernel of irritation itched at me. I’d bitched about the other fights being too easy, but this fight wasn’t going to be anything of the sort. It was going to be hard. I’d be lucky to walk away from it unscathed, let alone win, and if I did win, the victory wasn’t going to be as sweet as it was earlier. It was going to be tinged with fucking relief, and that bit at my pride.
“Remember, Son. Pride cometh before a fall. After murder, pride is the most heinous sin of all. Do not succumb to it. Do not bow down to your ego. You’ll only ever end up hurt, or hurting those around you who care about you. Do you hear me, Felix? Are you listening to me?”
I shook my head, trying to dislodge the sound of my father’s voice as I danced beyond Zeth’s reach. Now was not a good time to be reliving life lessons from the Father Marcosa who had preceded me. That was how my father had always operated, though. He was always showing up when I least expected it, when I needed to concentrate, when I needed him sticking his nose in the least. He was a stubborn, obstinate, rigid man who never knew when to back off. Really, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the fact that he was still turning up and fucking with me, even though he’d been dead and buried for years. It was just his style.
Zeth huffed down his nose, moving into yet another defensive position designed to confuse and trick me. I witnessed the flare of anger in his eyes, though. He was pissed that he hadn’t put me to sleep with that sneaky right hook. Distracted enough that he didn’t see my right knee come rocketing up. He didn’t manage to step back in time to avoid it. I thrust my hips forward, sending the full force of my body weight into the lunge, and when my kneecap made contact with Zeth’s torso, his loud grunt of surprise and pain bounced off the walls of floor fourteen.
There was no time to celebrate. His elbow came out of nowhere, landing a sharp, dazzling blow to the side of my head, and suddenly everything was spinning. Some fighters would have used my momentarily dazed state to recover themselves, but not Zeth. He grabbed hold of me by the back of the neck, pulling me toward him, bringing his own knee up so swiftly that I barely managed to roll and drop out of his grasp in time.
This. Mother. Fucking. Bastard.
He was fucking with me.
He was trying to catch me off guard.
He wasn’t going to get away with doing either for long.
I ground my teeth together, swearing colorfully as I straightened and launched myself at him. Not in an uncontrolled attack. No, that would have been a rookie error, and I didn’t make those kinds of mistakes. At least not anymore. I threw myself at my opponent, knowing who he was, and knowing all too well how he was going to fucking react. He was going to let me hit him, and then, once he’d taken the blow and absorbed it, he was going to kick my legs out from underneath me and try and get me to the ground. Precisely what I would do in the same boat. I’d trained endlessly in order to counter the move, though, to prevent myself from being dominated in a grappling, wrestling match, and I was ready.
Zeth took the punch I landed to his stomach. My hand exploded with pins and needles, a sharp lance of pain and heat surging up my forearm as my knuckles met a wall of muscle so hard it might as well have been a slab of marble. This guy knew the drill. He knew how to take a hit. Even though he’d tensed to absorb the impact, he grunted, cursing from the impact. He reached for me, grabbed me, wrapped his hand around the back of my neck again, and I saw the moment he lifted his leg, bringing it back, about to sweep my ankles. I prepared to kick out with my own foot, a devastating downward stomp that could shatter bone if I aimed it correctly, but then Zeth was gone. He released me, pulling back, then he was turning, spinning, and the back of his fist was whipping around, about to come down on my temple.
It wasn’t a graceful move, but the drop and roll I performed saved me from a guaranteed knock out. Zeth snarled, baring his teeth—the first real show of anger he’d let slip—and he reacted, dropping down, his full weight behind his knee as he brought it crashing down onto my chest.
Oh…
…fuck!
I couldn’t…
I couldn’t fucking breathe.
That didn’t matter, though.
The stabbing, fiery pain that had laced itself around my ribcage and squeezed like crazy didn’t matter.
The cold, disconnected, withdrawn look on Zeth’s face as he raised his fist didn’t matter.
The way my head pitched, my vision seesawing as I turned onto my side and pushed myself back up onto my feet didn’t matter.
The only thing that mattered was that fucking thumb drive. If I didn’t get it, Rabbit wouldn’t find out who Carver was. And if Rabbit didn’t help us, it wouldn’t matter how many other hackers I tried to pay, threaten or bribe. They were a community of back-stabbing assholes, but they were smart, and Rabbit was the best of them. If Rabbit deemed a job dead in the water, no one else would dream of touching it. They could be running as many protection programs as they wanted, they could be as covert and secretive as they wanted, but he would still find out and he would still punish them. He would take whatever they had. He would destroy everything they’d built for themselves, and once they were ruined in the tech community, he would send someone over to break a few bones, too. Rabbit worked out, but typically hackers weren’t gym types. As a rule, they weren’t known for being badasses who could defend themselves at all.
I hissed, trying to expel the pain strobing through my body as I righted myself and faced Zeth again. The other man wiped his nose with the back of his hand, sniffing, and I realized with no small amount of satisfaction that he was bleeding from there, too, now. That satisfaction didn’t last long. My vision suddenly went blurry, and then it went red, my eyes stinging as my own blood ran into them. Fucking great. I must have cut my head.
“Shame we’re not fighting for money,” Zeth commented. He was breathing hard, but otherwise he didn’t appear to be fazed by the situation at all.
“You’d bet on yourself, I take it?”
He rocked his head from side to side. “I’d have to, you know that as well as I do. But you’re a feisty bastard. Seem to know what you’re doing. I might have put a couple of bucks on you too, just in case.” He grinned, and there was an amused glimmer in his eyes that briefly lifted the stoic, robotic air that cloaked him like a shroud. I returned the smile, a frisson of anticipation sparking and catching light in my veins. Yeah, it sucked being hit. And yeah, it sucked that I wasn’t making easy work of wiping the dusty polished concrete floor wit
h the guy. But there was something vaguely exciting about all of this. I hadn’t truly had to defend myself in a very long time, and now that I was having to, it was as if a part of me that had been slumbering was slowly waking up, coming alive and stretching its legs.
It had been years since I thought I might die, and right here, right now, there was a very real chance I might end up dead. If I lost to Zeth, Oscar could tell the floor boss still keeping score by the elevator to slit my fucking throat. He could also tell Zeth to end me and this evening’s earlier transgressions would be forgiven.
That knowledge, the impending nothingness that hovered so close by that I could almost reach out and touch it…it made my heart pump so hard that it felt like it hadn’t been beating at all up until now.
“I probably would have dropped a buck or two on you as well,” I fired back. “But it wouldn’t have mattered in the end. I’d have made a killing when I beat your ass and put you in the ground.”
Zeth’s eyebrows rose slowly—he looked faintly impressed. “Very confident. I like that.” His eyes flickered toward the floor boss, and it looked like he was going to say something else. He didn’t, though. He charged me, both fists pulling back, and then he was a whirlwind of arms and legs, his fists and his boots lashing out and striking.
I returned the favor. He wasn’t going to beat me. He wasn’t going to injure me further than he already had. He wasn’t going to gloat over me and goad me into submission, because I was going to do that to him.
For every blow he landed on me, I landed one on him.
Every time he wheeled, or turned, or struck, I did the same.
Every time he pinned me, or grappled with me, or took things to the floor, I twisted free of his grip and did the exact same thing to him.
We were so evenly matched, I lost count of who was bettering the other.
A fight in The Barrows could last anywhere from five seconds to five minutes. Ten, sometimes, if the fighters were insane and just wouldn’t back down. I had no idea how long Zeth and I danced around one another, taking and throwing punches, growling through the hits and refusing to back down, but it was far fucking longer than that.
He was my shadow and I was his. His fury matched my own. He caught me off guard, and seconds later he was on his back when I caught him. I was cut and bleeding, bruised black and blue, and I’d never felt more fucking alive.
The smell of iron and sweat filled the air. We skidded and slipped in the darkening pool of blood that had gathered at our feet, and the whole time neither one of us would call it.
My pulse was a frantic, crazed drum beat, pounding in my ears, as Zeth ducked under my arm and slammed his balled-up fist into my jaw. My vision swayed, white lights flaring and pulsing in my head, but I didn’t slow. I skirted around him, feinted to the right, then drove my own fist forward and up into his side, knocking every last molecule of oxygen out of his lungs as he doubled over and groaned. When he rocked back, his teeth were coated in blood and he was laughing like a fucking maniac.
“All right, all right. I get it now,” he growled. “You’re insane. I’m insane. We’ll both kill ourselves before we tap out on this thing.”
“Agreed.” I tried not to pant. My mouth was full of blood, too. I leaned forward and spat onto the concrete, grimacing at the volley of pain that relayed up and down my side. Felt like something might be broken somewhere, though I couldn’t tell what.
“I have a proposition,” Zeth offered.
“If you’re about to tell me you’ll do me a kindness and put me out of my misery, you can go fuck yourself.”
He laughed again, drawing in a ragged breath. “I need the information off the thumb drive. You need the information off the thumb drive. I say we bust our way up onto the roof, fuck this Oscar guy up, take the damn thing and get the fuck out of here. We can make copies and we both get what we need. Simple.”
I stared him down, narrowing my eyes, which was really fucking easy since both of them were nearly swollen shut at this point. What he was proposing made a lot of sense. But was he lying? Was he going to fuck me over the moment we got our hands on the drive, or was he the type of guy who kept his word? I knew he was a seasoned fighter, and I knew he was pretty quick witted, but beyond that I knew nothing about the fucker. Gears were turning in his head. He could have been plotting ways to bring Oscar down, or he could have been planning on ways to put me down. There was just no knowing. That was the thing about the men who visited The Barrows: typically, they weren’t the type of men you could trust. Myself included.
Pacing, circling Zeth, making out as if I was just biding my time, waiting for the perfect moment to hurl myself into another fully-fledged attack, I heaved in a breath and ran my tongue over my teeth, checking to see if any of them were broken. Looked like I’d been spared that misery this time. “All right,” I said. “But a word of warning, Zee. My life means very fucking little to me. I don’t care about pain. I don’t care about suffering. I don’t care if I have money in my bank account, or a roof over my fucking head. There is only one thing that matters to me in the entire fucking world, and that’s the woman currently waiting for me in my apartment. If I don’t get that drive, she isn’t safe. And if anything happens to her, I will stop at nothing to bring down the fieriest vengeance upon the heads of the people who stood in my way. Do we understand each other?”
Prowling around me, his eyes flashing, a cat-like, calculating smirk pulled at Zeth’s mouth. He huffed lightly down his nose—the barest hint of amusement. “Don’t worry, Priest. I got it. Now. I’d say it’s about time we put an end to this bullshit and move on with our lives, wouldn’t you agree?” He held out his hand. An obvious sign of peace, when we were meant to be tearing each other limb from limb.
“Hey!” The floor boss snapped, growling under his breath as he stalked over toward us. “Are you fuckers stupid? Haven’t you heard of Oscar Finch? He’ll fucking kill you if you don’t stop fucking around.”
Zeth arched an eyebrow at me, glancing down at his hand.
Sighing, I slapped my own hand into his, briefly shaking it. I’d been a lone wolf for so long now that striking up an accord like this felt alien and unwise. I did know one thing, however: there was nothing deadlier than a lone wolf. Unless you had two lone wolves, and they were prepared to fight alongside one another. Regardless of whether I had issues with Zeth after we were done here, things were set in stone now. We weren’t laying another finger on each other for Oscar Finch’s entertainment.
The floor boss’s mouth opened, irritation flickering in his weak, watery blue eyes. But before he could say anything, Zeth spun around, faster than lightning, and hit the bastard so hard that I heard his skull crack before it had even had chance to bounce off the dirty concrete.
TWO
SERA
Before
I waited out on the curb for the black SUV, my back rigid, my chin held high, knowing Sixsmith was watching from the upstairs window. He’d taken to doing that these days—observing me from his bedroom, standing a foot back from the dirt-streaked glass, as if he figured I wouldn’t know he was there if he were cloaked in shadows. He didn’t realize that I’d spent the better part of my life fine-tuning every sense I owned to detect when his attention was turned to me. My skin was so sensitive to the weight and pressure of his eyes that I could almost feel his gaze burning through the dusty, threadbare carpet that covered the splintered floorboards in my bedroom whenever he suddenly remembered I was up there and not in school.
My jaw was still hurting something fierce from the last time I’d gone visiting with Sam Halloran. I was still bruised from the encounter. A deep, offensive purple shadow marked my jaw, and down my neck four smaller bluish marks chained the column of my throat. “For the life of me, Seraphim Lafferty, I don’t know what gets into you girls at your age. Those ugly things on yo’ neck ain’t love bites, y’know. They be hickeys, markin’ you out as a woman of loose morals.” Mrs. Merrit, our neighbor three houses down, told
me when she’d come across me walking home with the groceries yesterday. She’d chosen to frown and tut at me, chastening me for the marks, when she knew full well the bruises weren’t fucking love bites. It was plain as day that they were finger prints.
I’d attempted to cover the bruises with makeup before I’d left the house; Sam hated seeing the evidence of his own brutality on me. He liked to pretend he was a kind, caring lover, and I came to him twice a week of my own volition. But covering bruises was tricky, because Sixsmith would tan my hide raw if he ever saw me wearing makeup.
Keeping the two of them happy was impossible. If I made sure Sam was placated, then inevitably Sixsmith ended up laying into me for one thing or another—wearing the skimpy clothes Sam had me parade around in for him, or smelling of the perfume Sam insisted I spritz all over my body. And if I, instead, made sure Sixsmith was as happy as Sixsmith ever was, then Sam would strap that goddamn ball gag into my mouth so tight it felt like the corners of my mouth would rip open. He would punch me so hard it felt like landmines were detonating inside my skull. He would do far, far worse things than that as he shoved my legs apart and forced his way inside me.
I was constantly balancing on a tightrope of hatred and abuse. Every morning when I woke up, I found myself curiously wondering which one of them was going to send me toppling from that rope, plummeting to my death far below. Strangely, I wasn’t scared. In point of fact, I was actually kind of looking forward to it.