Her words confused him, brought his eyes back down to her. She was small, but not small he saw now. Dressed in tiny shorts and a tank top so skimpy, he could see the outline of her push-up bra. She was short and her breasts were most likely small without the extra padding, but everything else on her was big and lush. Lush dark curls tumbling all the way down to her shoulders. Lush curves, barely constrained by her ring girl ensemble. Lush lips, smiling up at him like they knew each other. And more than that, were already old friends.
Not many women smiled at him like that. Especially the ones who didn’t know his last name, the only real acknowledgment his father had ever given him. Even the women his half-brother had sent to “help” with his recovery after Turkey, had only barely managed to cover up their terror with simpering smiles. Which was why he’d used them then tossed them out of his hotel room immediately after.
Without his last name, he was too frightening. Mountainous body, hawk nose, knived cheek bones that put girls in mind of long ago Mongolians who would not only burn your poor European village to the ground, but also claim every woman in it as his own. Even the gentle tilt of his mother’s Buryat eyes didn’t help, because his pupils burning black as coal let them too easily see the Siberian beast buried just beneath his surface.
But this woman smiled up at him, her champagne eyes crinkling as she nodded at his forehead. “That cut above your eyebrow. I need to patch it up before you can fight again. I’m not just the ring girl, I’m the nurse, too—and the clean up crew, but that’s a whole ‘nother job,” she said with a roll of her eyes.
He stared at her. This woman sounded American. But not like the rich ones his brother kept company with. More like the ones on television. But not exactly. Her voice had a husky quality to it that made him think of the girls who sang in the basement bar where his grandmother used to work.
“It is scratch,” he heard himself saying to her, his eyes going back to the next man he would fight, even if that man didn’t want to.
“Cool, then I’ll have you back out here in no time. Just come with me.”
“It is scratch,” he said again. And this time he didn’t wait for her answer, just started toward the Greek fighter again. The Darkness guiding his every step.
But against all odds, she got in front of him a third time.
“I said no!” she yelled, shoving him backwards. “You don’t fight until I look at that cut.”
The boos cut off with an abrupt gasp, and both he and the rest of the men in the room looked at her like she was crazy. Which she would have to be to shove a six-foot-six fighter known in underground fighting circles throughout Europe and Asia as The Russian Beast.
There were grown men who wouldn’t dare do what she’d just done. But her beautiful champagne eyes held his in a defiant stare down as she declared, “Listen, I ain’t afraid of you! I ain’t afraid of nothing. So you can either come with me now or fight me next. It’s up to you.”
His eyes slitted. She could not be serious.
With an annoyed glare, he simply picked her up and set her aside in one easy motion, then started forward again.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake…”
The next thing he knew, her body collided into his. Two arms wrapped around the back of his neck and pulled him down with what could only have been all of her strength. At first he thought she was trying to bite him—the classic defense of the weak—but then…
Then she kissed him.
The entire world stopped when her lush mouth found his, lips giving him determined claim as her soft curves pressed into his hard body. She kissed him. Long and tough. She kissed him like she already knew him and was merely waiting for him to know her back.
The beast inside him faltered…
And the formerly pissed off crowd erupted into cheers, egging them on in a confusion of surprise and visceral lust. Somewhere in the distance, he heard the heavily accented voice of Cyrus the Greek saying, “Take him somewhere else, Sirena.”
And then the kiss was over. She slid down his body, the back of her feet landing on the floor.
“C’mon,” she said softly, beckoning him forward with eyes that almost seemed to glow in the barely lit space. “Come with me.”
Sirena. That is good name for her, he thought. Because like a sailor enchanted, he let her take him by the hand and lead him out of the fight circle.
2
“JUST take a seat right over there,” she said once they got to her room. She let go of his hand and indicated the little wooden chair she used as an informal nursing station.
He gave her a long, dark look before apparently deciding to indulge her and sit down. She couldn’t keep herself from staring as he did. He had a huge tattoo that took up nearly his entire back. What looked like a Siberian tiger, rendered so realistically, it seemed to animate with the bunching of his muscles as he lowered himself into the chair.
“So, I’m guessing you ain’t exactly a fan of ‘your mama’ jokes,” she said, coming to stand a few feet in front of where he was sitting.
The fighter’s black eyes cut up to hers in a glare of confusion.
“The dude you was fighting tried to talk some trash about her before the fight.” She decided against repeating word for word what the large Albanian fighter had actually said. The promise he’d made in English, the agreed upon common language of the fights. That he would beat the Russian dog and then go find his mother to give her the fucking she deserved for bringing such an ugly beast into the world. The crowd of betting men had eaten it up with a loud cheer.
But a switch had clicked off behind the eyes of the dude everybody was calling The Russian Beast. A deadening like nothing she’d ever seen before.
Now the Albanian was laid out on the concrete floor outside her tiny room, battered and broken, with no guarantee he would survive the night. And it was on her to keep the Beast distracted until Cyrus’s two goons could remove the body.
“Extra hour pay for tonight if you get him to stop,” Cyrus had said, right before he shoved her into the fight circle with the huge muscle-bound fighter. You know, the one who’d just knocked out the last three guys who tried to stop him.
Luckily, she really hadn’t been kidding about not being afraid of anything. But she still couldn’t believe he was here. In her room. Threating to splinter her little wooden chair with the sheer heft of his body. She couldn’t stop herself from stealing several glances at him. He was huge and nothing like the other fighters she’d seen come through this place.
He looked big and Slavic, but the tilt of his eyes told her he might also have some farther East Asian in his background. He had ink black hair tied into a tight knot at the base of his neck—a strong ‘fuck you’ to would-be competitors, because most fighters wouldn’t dare go into a no-holds-barred fight with long hair. Talk about an instant vulnerability! But this dude definitely didn’t have to worry about being taken down in a fight because of his hair. Instead of swagger, he oozed absolute certainty, and she didn’t have a doubt in the world that he could beat down any man who came at him.
She could feel his cold gaze on her as she rooted through her waist pack with deliberate slowness, searching for the mini flashlight she used to see cuts better.
But she could only pretend for so long. Eventually she had to find the flashlight and come stand in front of him to perform her bullshit exam. The dude was beyond huge. Nearly as tall as her, despite the fact that he was seated and she was standing. She moved between his legs in order to get a good look at his cut. Those glittering black diamonds he called eyes tracked her every movement as she came in closer. She felt like she was being observed by a straight-up predator.
The weight of his stare did something to her insides. Made that pretty song she’d heard the other day chew on her chest even louder, just begging to get out.
Trying to ignore the song, she took him by the chin and lifted his face further into the light.
“You’re right, this cut ain’t that deep,” she sa
id after a quick inspection. She clicked off the flashlight and returned it to the waist pack before pulling out a small band-aid.
Outside, the sound of the men cheering on a new set of fighters erupted. Which meant they must have successfully removed the body. The Albanian was probably on his way to get unceremoniously dumped somewhere. If the dude was lucky, outside a hospital. If not…
As if reading her thoughts, The Russian Beast asked, “Why are you here with me? Other fighter is much worse.”
“True,” she agreed, smoothing the band-aid over his itty bit cut—the only indicator he’d even been in a fight. “But he’s beyond my nursing skills. Cyrus wanted me to see to you.”
He stared at her for a dead-eyed second before saying. “He doesn’t want me to fight his Greek. Not good for bets. So he sends you to distract me.”
“Wow,” she said, stepping out from between his legs. “Has anyone ever told you you’re real perceptive, Mr. Beast?”
“I do not usually talk enough for people to say this about me,” he answered.
“Really? Why not?” she asked, genuinely curious about the answer, which was way more curious than she’d felt about anything in a real long time.
“Because I scare them. People do not wish to talk to that which scares them.”
“Oh, I get it,” she said with a shrug. “Well, like I said, you don’t scare me, so talk away.”
Another slitted look, like he was trying to figure her out. And then. “No more talk. I need to fight now.”
“But you just said yourself Cyrus doesn’t want you to.”
He came to his feet, already rolling his neck. “What Cyrus wants does not matter.”
She believed him. This hulking beast didn’t look like he gave two fucks about Cyrus or anything else but his next fight.
“How did you get that?” she asked, nodding toward the ugly scar running a diagonal line across his heavily muscled gut.
He glanced down as if just now realizing the scar was there.
“Fight,” he answered with a sneer. “It is just scratch.”
“Looks like more than a scratch to me.”
A dark second ticked between them. And then he said, “I have to fight now.”
“Want to or have to?”
He stared at her, his black diamond eyes blank. And she clarified. “Most guys come in here wanting to fight. But you got something inside you, don’t you? Something that makes you have to do this?”
She must have hit it on the head, because he looked away. Dropping his black stare from her to the dingy linoleum floor.
Was he ashamed? She wondered. Upset she’d seen through all his hulking insistence to his real motivation? Not his mother’s honor. But that he had a dark rage burning inside of him. Her heart went out to this Russian then, like it used to go out to the road dogs her and Trevor made a habit of rescuing.
Dear oldest daughter, you can’t keep bringing these sad animals home, her mother would say when she and Trevor showed up at the door, Trevor carrying yet another dog some cruel person had left at the side of the road.
Their little house lay on the very outskirts of the small Virginia town they’d moved to when she was seventeen. The perfect place for folks from the surrounding bigger cities to dump aging or hurt pets they no longer wanted. She’d felt compelled to start rescuing those poor dogs from the beginning of their tenure in the little brick house, sometimes going as far as to nurse them back to health before taking them on to the local shelter. Her little brother, Trevor, had been the perfect assistant for her unofficial fostering service. Big and mentally disabled, his kindness continued to know no bounds even after the age when most boys became cruel with raging hormones.
And now here was a man everyone called The Russian Beast, hurting bad from something—she could tell—and fighting demons only he could see. She stepped closer to him on instinct.
But then he asked, “How much?”
“Excuse me?”
“I have been to these fights before. I know how it works with Cyrus’s ring girls. Especially the ones he lets room here.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Oh, you want to have sex with me.” She threw him an apologetic look. “Yeah, Cyrus told me that’s a good way to make extra money down here, but I’m still…” she searched for the right words to describe her current mental state and could only come up with, “…not quite there yet. Maybe next time.”
His dark eyes flickered with angry confusion. “Next time I can have you. This is what you are saying.”
“Yes, maybe next time,” she answered. “Like I said, I’m still working up to it.”
“You are being serious? You are not like Cyrus’s other ring girls? You do not take fighters into your bed after the fights?” he asked, obviously not believing her.
“So I’m assuming you’ve been in this room before?” she asked, her tone wry. “With all those other ring girls?”
He just continued to stare down at her, his unrelenting gaze heavy as stone. “My brother tells me my English is good. Better than his when he was my age. But I do not understand you.”
She tilted her head up at him. Liking him. Liking the way he made her laugh, even if it wasn’t anywhere near intentional on his part. “I’m saying it sounds like you’ve fucked a few girls before me in this bedroom, Beast. Is that clear enough for you?” she asked.
He actually seemed to consider her question. Then surprised the hell out of her when he quietly confessed. “Sometimes the fighting is not enough. Sometimes I need more.”
“More,” she repeated. “For the demons you mean?”
He nodded, looking wary like he expected her to run or something.
But when she continued to stand there, waiting to hear what he’d say next, he surprised her again by asking. “Sirena. That is your name, da, little ring girl?”
“Yep!” she lied with a pleasant smile. “Sirena Gale. My passport got stolen a few days ago, so I figured that was Life telling me to start over. So now I’m Sirena Gale, ring girl-slash-nurse maid. At least until I find the funds to move on.”
He frowned. “Your passport was stolen, but you are not upset.”
She shrugged. “It’s cool. I came over here to be somebody else for a little while. Now I can be.”
“But you are not ready to sell your body?”
“No, not yet,” she answered with another shrug and a smile.
Her answer made his glower go even darker. “I do not like being teased.”
“You should reconsider your position on that, Mr. Beast,” she replied with a grin. “Teasing’s kind of fun under the right circumstances.”
Now he regarded her with a suspicious glare. “Do you know my real last name?”
“It’s not Beast?”
His square jaw gritted back and forward. “You are teasing me again.”
She grinned. “You got me.”
But he didn’t smile back at her. Like at all. “No, I do not have you. Yet.”
The girl standing in front of him, so close but so far away, was not making this easy for him. With her sultry eyes and her teasing voice. But his erection was pounding now inside his shorts, and he was done with her games.
“Tell me this, Sirena,” he said. “You guessed the truth about me having to fight, but do you really understand about me now? What has to happen if you do not get out of my way and let me return to the circle?”
He got a brazen satisfaction out of watching the girl visibly swallow in response to his question, her throat working up and down. And just in case she had any remaining illusions, he told her the hard facts of their situation without any softness whatsoever.
“Fight or fuck, Sirena. That is only choice you will ever have with me.”
Her eyes widened slightly, but she remained where she was. And he had to admire her for not fleeing like a small animal. As most girls would do given a set of similar choices.
Now it was he who stepped closer to her, head dropping so he could get a better look at
her as he said, “You lie about your name, are you lying about other thing?”
“Other thing?”
“When you say you aren’t afraid of me.”
“No, I ain’t lying about that.”
“Perhaps,” he said, bringing his large hands up to her waist. “You should be scared of me.”
“Hmm,” she said, tilting her own head to once again meet his gaze square in the eye. “But I’m not.”
“But you should be,” he said, even as he tugged her closer, pulling her body flush with his so she had no choice but to feel what was going on behind his fighting shorts. The pulsing erection that had apparently replaced his need to fight.
But… “I’m still not scared,” she informed him.
“You should be.”
“But I’m not.”
And before he could answer, she curled her hand around his neck and kissed him, sipping at his sweat, lust, and rage like a curious cat.
He froze, the Darkness inside of him not quite knowing what to do with this bold girl’s kiss. But then…his Darkness exploded into flame.
He kissed her back. Savagely lifting her head higher as he gave her lips rough claim. Kissed her and kissed her until everything around them disappeared: The grimy basement room, the noise of the fight taking place on the other side of the door, the wild sadness that had been dogging him for the past year.
Kissed her until she understood.
She wasn’t a whore, but tonight she would give her body to him. Tonight she would become his possession.
3
HE woke the next day to the sound of an angel singing. Had he gone to heaven?
Of course not. He didn’t believe in heaven. And even if he did, he doubted such a place would let him in.
Nonetheless, he could clearly hear the angel singing in this room. He sat up and found her by the space’s only window with a white mug in her hand, watching the feet of pedestrians pass by as lyrics spilled out of her mouth.
It was a soft song with a strange vernacular. He was only able to catch a few of the English words. Something about summertime and living easy. Although it was not summertime, nor from the looks of her unheated basement room did her living seem easy. But still he recognized the song as opera—beautifully sung, which was surprising since he was fairly certain she couldn’t possibly have any formal training.
HAN: Her Ruthless Mistake: 50 Loving States, Delaware (Ruthless Triad Book 4) Page 27