by Roxy Sloane
"It was terrible. I came in here to get away for a bit." She's still dabbing at her top, so I ask, "What's going on with you?"
She throws her hands up in frustration. "Some jackass spilled booze all over me! I smell like a brewery. I have a tank in my bag that I was going to wear to workout in today, but it's way too casual."
I have an idea. "But you could wear it if you had something over it, right?" I slip off my red blouse and hand it to her.
"Nikki, I’m not taking your shirt."
"Yes you are. I'll be fine in this camisole. It's dressy enough to stand alone. And the costume change will do me a favor, too."
"Oh my God, I owe you big time. You're the best. Seriously."
She ducks into a stall to change and then tosses her soaked top in the trash.
After we freshen up our makeup and hair, Kayla and I head out together. She leans in to kiss my check, thanking me one more time, and then disappears into the crowd.
#
Instead of heading back into the noise and chaos of the party, I exit onto a terrace that overlooks the water and the city. It's a perfectly clear night, and Miami is showing off. The buildings blaze with light, and the water sparkles, reflecting the glow. I breathe in the air, which has cooled slightly. It's salty and crisp, refreshing. And the view is gorgeous.
I'm going to miss the city. Miami was just starting to welcome me when this happened. But it's too dangerous for me to stay. I'm afraid of what Xavier will do, and Barton's only going to keep pressuring me to go undercover. I'm in completely over my head.
The door opens behind me, and I turn around. It’s Hailey.
"I thought I'd find you out here."
"This view is amazing."
"Yeah, this is probably my favorite bar in the city." She looks at me and frowns. "You lost your shirt?"
I bust out laughing, all the tension making me a little delirious. When I try to respond, I just laugh harder, until I'm snorting. Hailey joins me. I realize it's the first time I've laughed this hard since the first day of work on the island when we almost missed the ferry.
When I finally calm the giggles enough to speak, I tell her about Kayla's wardrobe malfunction and my desire to go incognito for the rest of the night, or at least make an attempt to. Then Hailey asks me about Xavier.
"It looked pretty heated, Nikki. Is he being abusive? Is that where you got the bruises on your arm?"
"Actually no. Those are a long story. Part of why I feel like I should move back home."
"I wish things weren't so complicated for you. It's been nice having you around."
We smile at each other warmly and stare out at a boat gliding through the water. It sounds its horn at the partygoers, and they scream hellos.
But then other screams start. And not the friendly kind. They pierce the night air, echoing in my ears. I’ve heard screams in horror movies, but that’s nothing compared to the raw, primal sounds coming from the path. These contain real fear. These raise the hair up on my arms. I know I don’t want to see what’s down there. But the screams draw me in as much as they repel me. I have to know what happened.
Hailey and I take one look at each other and race down the stairs to the water-side path. A crowd has gathered at the far end, just around the curve of the hotel, hidden from view by anyone except those in the water. At first I think some drunk party-goer must have fallen in. But the atmosphere is tense and people seem scared.
When we reach the crowd, a few girls are sobbing. A police officer and a security guard are fishing someone out of the water with one of those big pool hooks. Through a break in the crowd, I see my red shirt, and my hand goes to my mouth. I turn to Hailey and see my horror reflected in her eyes.
The officers gently lay Kayla on the concrete. A gasp goes up from the crowd, and I have to work to keep from vomiting. The side of her face is mangled. Someone bashed in her skull.
Chapter Ten
We stay until after the ambulance is gone, with Kayla's body in it. No lights and sirens since there's not a rush to get her to the morgue.
The police question all of us there. The spot she was in is blocked from view of the bar. No one at the party saw anything, and if anyone walking on the promenade saw something, they're already gone or not talking.
Hailey and I cling to each other like life preservers. The alcohol has long left my system, leaving only the raw numbness of shock and grief. I didn't know Kayla well, but she was kind to me and I liked her. Plus, she and Hailey were close, and it kills me to see Hailey hurting like this. I can’t believe she’s dead.
I can't help but think that it's my fault. I loaned her my blouse. She was wearing black like me. From behind, with our hair color being pretty close, it would be easy for someone to confuse us.
What if someone meant to kill me but killed her instead? What if I'm the target? As soon as they know they didn't get me, they'll try again. What if it's Hailey who gets caught in the crossfire next time? What if it's someone else, some innocent person I've never even met? How can I live with someone being killed because of me?
My mind races, and panic starts to rise up in me. Nausea comes with it.
I have to end this. I can't let this happen to someone else.
Myka and Sasha come over and wrap us in a hug. They take Hailey over to a bench and sit with her in between them.
I pull out my phone and send a text.
"I need to see you. Right now."
#
The diner looks just as dingy as it did the other night, but it makes me feel better just the same. I order coffee as I walk past the bar and head to the back booth. Barton is doing a crossword puzzle while he waits for me.
He looks up when I approach and sit down. His smug expression irritates me. He knew I'd be back at some point.
"What can I do for you, Miss Scott?" He takes a sip of his coffee and sets the cup down on the table.
"I'll do it, I'll help you take down Xavier."
"Why now? What's changed?"
The image of Kayla's disfigured face rises in my memory, and I shake it off. "I don't want anyone else to get hurt."
He nods and gives me a reassuring smile "Then we want the same thing."
Fear rises up in me, but I push it back down. I can’t let anyone else get hurt. I know I have to do this. For Kayla. For Eli. For me.
“Tell me what I have to do.”
TO BE CONTINUED…
What happens next? Nikki and Xavier’s story comes to an explosive conclusion in THE SCENE 3, out 8/5/15.
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HARD
RYDER
CH. 1
There are two smells in the world I love more than any others: a woman right before sex and this warehouse right before a fight. They’re different, of course. There’s nothing like a naked, wet, waiting woman, the scent of her skin salty with sweat but sweet at the same time, like swimming through an ocean of roses. The warehouse’s odor is far less pleasurable, phantoms of last round’s knocked-out teeth, bruised faces, and aching bones making the air heavy, grimy, stifling, like the smell of fresh dirt. But both are thrilling and unpredictable and make me want to explode.
Even when it was me in the ring a few years ago, my ribs about to get punched, my knuckles about to crash into someone’s cheekbone, the smell of this place would intoxicate me. Facing off with a guy whose sole intention for the next several minutes is to pummel you into submission is as terrifying as it sounds. And as exhilarating. The policy of bare-knuckles brawls is no shirt, no shoes, big problem standing right across from you. But all I had to do to calm myself was take a big inhale of this warehouse air, let the molecules seep into my lungs, into my bloodstream, and I won every match.
I always win.
So tonight, after Crutcher
beats Miller in an upset, a big win for me for sure, when Tyler tells me that some kid is in for $10,000 and has disappeared, I tell him he’s got to have it wrong. “I would never have let Jamie McEntire run up that kind of tab,” I say. “I’ve seen him around. I wouldn’t give him ten dollars, let alone ten thousand.” When I took over running fight night two years ago, I did a little cleanup from the mess my predecessor left. No five- or six- figure debts to people we don’t know, no credit to anyone who’s welched more than once. We may be an underground operation, but there are standards. There’s also a dress code: women in heels, men in collared shirts, and our crowd is the type who likes to drop a lot of money on both. We have security guards. The bartender will call you a cab if you get too drunk. I run a tight ship. Even the police think so. That’s why they don’t hassle me. Sometimes they even take a try in the ring.
Tyler shrugs. “It’s been gradual. Losses on a couple fights, loans to cover him,” he says. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news. But I double checked the ledger, and it adds up.”
“Fuck me,” I say, and a blond woman in high heels and a dress so tight she must not have exhaled all night turns toward us. She raises an eyebrow at me, smiles like she might take me up on the offer.
And with the way she wraps her mouth around the neck of that beer bottle, keeping her eyes locked on mine as she takes a drink, I might just let her.
Tyler’s voice yanks me back to the problem at hand. “So what do you want to do?” he says. “He’s offered his house as collateral.”
I shake my head. “This isn’t a swap meet.” Sometimes people think that just because I run an illegal fighting circuit and betting ring, I must be dishonest or inattentive to keeping the books, or maybe just dumb. So they try to take advantage of me occasionally. They think I won’t notice or care if they siphon a little cash or don’t pay in full or don’t pay at all, that I’m just a guy who made his money beating the shit out of strangers while debutantes and their dates made their bets. All brawn and no brains. But they’re wrong.
In the ring, I didn’t mind being underestimated. It helped me win. Some spectators think when you look like me, tall, muscular, broad-shouldered, you won’t be agile enough to dodge a right hook. So they bet against you. They don’t realize those muscles aren’t just for showing off to the female members of the crowd—not that I minded when they noticed. Those hard biceps mean you’re strong, and those washboard abs make you quick, and it all adds up to making my bank account big.
But as the boss outside the ring, I can’t have people not take me seriously. The Armani suits I wear on fight nights look damn good on me but they don’t come cheap, so when I loan money I expect to get it back when the handshake said I would. It’s only fair. I’ve got a reputation to protect, not to mention a legitimate business career to support, owning two of Atlanta’s most popular nightclubs, a cocktail lounge, and Altitude, a bar some buddies and I run together. I got to the top flying like a butterfly in the ring, but I stay there because I sting like a bee outside it.
And Jamie McEntire’s about to feel what I mean.
“You know where this kid’s house is?” I say, clapping Tyler on the shoulder. He nods. “Good,” I say. “You’re driving then. Grab Valero and let him know that as soon as this crowd clears, we’re making a visit.”
Tyler leaves, and the woman in the tight dress with the lucky beer bottle approaches. The dip of her neckline is as low as her skirt is short. “Someone should wash your mouth out,” she says.
“Sorry if I offended your delicate sensibilities,” I say, smiling. We’re at an underground bare-knuckles fight. Fuck is hardly the most offensive thing she’s been exposed to tonight.
“Not at all,” she says. “I like a man who talks dirty.” She takes a sip from the bottle, tipping it toward me. “Want some?”
I don’t think she just means the beer.
Over her shoulder, behind her in the crowd, I see a guy in a decent-looking grey suit. He’s standing with a few other people but his attention is clearly fixed on her, watching. I tilt the bottle back toward her with my index finger. “Who are you here with?”
“No one special,” she says, taking a step toward me. “Unless you want some company.”
Women. They smell good, they look good, they taste good, but they can be so bad for you.
I’ve been Grey Suit back there. Even in the shadows of the warehouse I can read the look on his face, the narrowed eyes, slightly turned down mouth. He’s a guy who knows that just because he’s the one who’s taking this girl out tonight it doesn’t mean he’s going home with her. Back when I was fighting, my girlfriend at the time used the hours I was knocking guys’ blocks off to get her rocks off. She even slept with some of my opponents, who I beat anyway, but still—I don’t know if she was just bored or mean, didn’t love me or herself or both, but when we broke up two years ago, I swore off relationships. My motto is get in and get out, in all ways possible.
So Tight Dress standing in front of me, just the right size to straddle my lap in the front seat of my Audi, would usually be the perfect ending to a night.
But I can’t abide dishonesty, not even from a one-night stand. Like I said: there are standards.
“Your date’s not doing it for you?” I say, nodding at Grey Suit who’s now standing by the door where people are starting to exit. It must be after two a.m. by now and a weeknight, which means most of these people are six hours away from clocking in at the office tomorrow. Thrill seekers by night, executive decision makers by day, that’s a lot of our audience, and even though I’ve never been able to tolerate living that kind of rigid, conventional lifestyle for myself, their money’s just as good as anyone else’s. They may even have a greater appreciation for the brawls, since bare-knuckles fighting is a far cry from whatever uptight Fortune 500 company or corporate law firm they work at.
She glances at Grey Suit, then turns back to me. “He’s okay,” she says. That pretty mouth of hers widens. Despite the darkness of the warehouse, her teeth gleam like white stones. “But you’re Ryder Cole.” She runs her hand lightly over my arm. “And I’m willing.”
My bicep belies my intention to be behave, contracting instinctively as her fingers linger on my suit sleeve. “To do what?”
“Anything you want.”
I lean close to her. “I want you to go home with the guy that brought you and fuck his brains out like a good girl,” I say. “But you can think about me while you’re doing it.”
I cross to where Tyler waits by the door. Security will close up. We’ve got business to attend to.
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THE BILLIONAIRE BARGAIN
ONE
Is death by lobster tank too merciful?
It’s a serious question. See, my so-called “best friend” Kate has decided that just because she’s happily paired up with the boy of her dreams, it’s her mission to spread the sweet sweet joy of monogamous bliss to all and sundry, but especially to certain people who “are married to their job,” and “going to give themselves an ulcer,” and “it’s just one blind date, Lacey, jeez, you need to loosen up.”
My blind date was so loosened up I was afraid he was going to slide off his chair into a puddle under the table.
“And that’s why I, like, definitely think we should take a like, more s—shur—shurious—serious look at the whole, you know, aliens seeding the Earth with life thing,” he slurred, narrowly missing stabbing the waitress with his fork as he gestured grandly. His other hand came within inches of sending his wine glass flying onto the wall of the cheap Chinese restaurant he had insisted we go to because their crab rangoon was “fucking awesome” (it was not awesome. It was a significant distance from awesome. If it had to walk to awesome, it would crumple down from heat exhaustion and be picked at by vultures who would eventually turn up their beaks at it because in case I have not
made this terribly clear, this was not great crab rangoon. It tasted like someone had stuffed a fish into a sock and left it out in the rain).
“It’s like…obvious. I mean—where do people fucking shink—think the pyramids came from? The pyramids, man.” He shook his head in a way that he probably thought made him look wise and thoughtful, but actually made it look like he was about to topple into his plate of crab rangoon. “The Illuminati, they don’t want you to, like, know. The truth!”
I stared at the lobster tank in front of me, the crustaceans clicking their claws as if pleading for mercy.
Me too, lobsters. Me too.
“Well, that is certainly an opinion,” I replied. This was about a hundred times more diplomatic than I felt like being, but dammit, this was my first date in over a year, and Kate wouldn’t throw me under the bus this bad, right? This was probably all just a hilarious act this guy put on to weed out the girls who were only into his unkempt surfer good looks? There were probably some secret good qualities of his that I could uncover with time, right? At least the time to finish this very expensive and rapidly-becoming-indispensible drink?
“Certainly an opinion—thassa—thassa helluva—did you like, even listen?”
Okay, either this guy was hiding his good qualities with all the skill and dedication of a highly trained CIA operative, or he was just a douche-bag.
“Look, I’m sorry, we’re probably not going to agree on the aliens thing. Can we talk about something else? What about—”
“Well, you don’ have to be so stuck-up about it. All up on your high horse, with that sorority—no, superi—superiorally—ority complex.”