Crescendo (Beautiful Monsters Book 1)

by Lana Sky

  “What?” I demand.

  “I win, and you come to work for me. Prison’s probably taught you a few new tricks, Kitty,” he adds with a malicious tilt to his mouth. “I could make a lot of money off you.”

  “You’ve kept up with the Cage,” I surmise, once again un-fucking-surprised. Arno may have left Dino’s meal ticket behind, but Mack seemed to be living large off the methods of our old master.

  “Cage?” He echoes on a deadly soft chuckle. “Dante, I run the Kennel.” He turns and jerks his head for me to follow.

  I step forward. I know my expression reveals nothing when I stoop on one knee and toss the woman over my shoulder first. It’s an action that goes unmissed by no one, but as light as she is, I can almost forget.

  Almost. Her scent floods my skin, equally as potent as the drug seeping through hers. It’s not out of any kindness that I intervene in Mack’s plans for her. It is simple retribution. A man owned by no one had to keep his fucking promises, after all.

  Regardless, the simple act of shouldering her body makes her a target. A pretty little bone caught in the jaws of a rival dog. No man can ignore her scent. Mack won’t ignore my claim.

  I should have stayed in fucking prison. At least the invisible lines we bastards drew in the figurative sand were somewhat clear. In this domain, anything goes. It’s a familiar, if hostile, territory as I follow Mack across the barroom and through a door that opens onto a fenced-in yard. A few paces ahead is a small, level building that appears to be a shack at first glance. A man guards a metal door, chained with a padlock, for show of course. The real security comes in the form of at least twenty pit bulls all herded into individual pens just on the inside of the building. They bark and snarl, gnawing at the chain-link pinning them in.

  Mack expanded cage-fighting to dogfighting, it seems. He doesn’t comment on the animals as he leads the way past the kennels and into an open space with concrete walls and two other men posted on either side of a pair of heavy metal doors.

  “Welcome to the Playhouse,” he says, flashing his teeth. “Ladies first.”

  Ignoring the insult, I stalk forward with one hand pinning the girl in place. The other, I brace against one of the doors and push it open. For a second, I’m almost glad I took the challenge and went first just so the bastard wouldn’t be able to see my face.

  He emulated Dino down to the very last detail. It’s a set-up almost comparable to the dog kennels in the other room but larger. A giant chain-link cage, shaped like an octagon, is in the center of the room. The floor is cement, coated with gray sand in the pit, making it easier to clean the gore and bloodstains after each fight. Around the cage is a rectangular placement of bleachers, at least twenty deep in every direction. On second thought, this isn’t like one of the old gambling dens Dino used to run out of a garage with maybe a few hundred spectators a fight at fifty bucks a head. The bastard’s built himself an arena.

  “It’s nice, right?” he wonders, appearing at my left side. “Reminds you of the old days.”

  I certainly didn’t need a reminder of the “old days.” I still wore the scars. On the nights that I felt like it, I still had the nightmares. More often than not...I still wished I could live them again.

  “When?” I ask, my voice hard. Being here brings back the old, steady pulse I used to feel in my core right before a fight. Only then would the buzzing die off, like a wild animal that knew it would be sated soon. “When do we get this over with?”

  “When?” Mack steps forward, raising his hands toward the gray ceiling—a gladiator in his colosseum. It’s only when he looks back at me that I see the true beast lurking underneath the human exterior. This man isn’t a gladiator. He’s the fucking lion, sent in to crush the hopes of a mere mortal slave. “We do this now.”

  He snaps his fingers, and one of the men guarding the door appears, his posture erect like a soldier in jeans and leather called to war.

  “Well, go rile up the masses,” Mack commands with a wave of his hand and a wink. He’s cocky again, the swagger returning in full force. It’s not bravado that swells him this time though. It’s confidence. While I’ve been in prison, he’s been sharpening his claws and honing his skills. I have no doubt who the star attraction of this cage is.

  If there was one thing that Mack loved more than money, it was the spotlight.

  Within minutes, people start to trickle in, men and women, their expressions wary. At first, I assume that they must have followed us from the bar, but there seem to be more than that. They fill the seats, streaming past Mack and me; I can already sense bets being laid and stakes being raised. Whether he gets Stacatto’s woman or not, Mack will make a tidy profit from this event.

  I intend to make him work for every goddamn penny.

  After nearly ten minutes of waiting, I glance around at the corners of the room, anxious. Doors lead off at random intervals throughout the main arena—most likely to rooms where each fighter can warm up in private. My muscles tense, aching to do just that. I almost start to approach one, eager to find out for myself where they lead, when a voice rings out. Soft. Honeyed. A woman’s.

  “Dan...Dante?” I turn and don’t have time to catch the figure who throws her arms around what little of me she can. “Oh, my God! I thought you were in prison!” She pulls back, beaming. Five years did little to the petite blonde who still sports the same fiery smile that’s equal parts seductive and charming. I wonder if she’s still “working” her old profession. The shit she’s wearing now supports that theory: tiny black shorts and a tight red top.

  “Darcy.” She looks good. Almost like the girl I left behind. Almost. But there’s a maturity in her gaze that wasn’t there before. She holds her head high with a confidence that comes only with a position of power. Then I catch Mack staring at her ass, and I realize why.

  “You’re with him,” I say. There’s no emotion in the observation. It’s just fact.

  Darcy doesn’t answer. Her gray eyes flit up to the woman slung over my shoulder instead. Whatever questions she has she knows better than to ask. She sighs instead and forces her smile wider. “So, when did you get out?”

  I shrug and trail my gaze from her over to Arno who watches me with an expression that even I can’t decipher. “About a week ago.”

  That timespan triggers something; Van Hallen owed me money, the fucker—and I intend to collect in full.

  “A whole week?” Darcy shakes her head in disbelief. “And you couldn’t even come say hi?” She’s still smiling, but I don’t want to dissect the look that distorts her features for merely a second. I don’t have the time.

  Apparently, neither does Mack. “Baby.” He jerks his head as if calling a trained pet, but to her credit, Darcy takes her sweet time turning to face him, her hands on her hips.

  “Yes?”

  Mack grins. “Show Dante’s...friend to the best seats in the house—” he points to a bench at the highest point in the arena with the clearest view of the cage below. “It’s gonna be quite the show. The little kitten returns to the cage.”

  “Show?” Darcy frowns. Apparently, she wasn’t around for the excitement, but I don’t fill her in, and neither does Mack or Arno. She’s left to suspect the obvious from my stance and Mack’s excitement. Eventually, her gaze turns to the woman slung over my shoulder.

  “She okay?”

  “She’s high,” I grunt, shifting so that the girl’s feet hit the ground, but she can’t even hold herself upright. Darcy has to slip an arm around her shoulders just to keep her from falling, but she murmurs something, her gaze focused in my general direction.

  “Don’t. No,” she slurs, the words running together. “Don’t. Don’t. Igobackto—”

  I turn on my heel, cutting her off. Irritation runs down my spine when I realize that Arno is within earshot, watching me, his expression still unreadable, for once. Mack, the fucker, is already strolling down the center of the arena, toward the cage.

  “Twenty minutes per warm-up, Kitt
y?” he suggests without turning around. “Just like old times.” He wiggles his fingers toward a door that’s directly parallel to the center of the arena.

  “Fine.” Already I can hear murmuring about how quick of a fight it should be. Mack the Mad Dog. Mack who fights dirty. Mack who has never lost a match since he opened his own Cage.

  I shrug hard as if that might brush off the doubt. Some of it even trickles from the back of my own mind. Prison games were a little different from the fights in the cage. There was no entertainment factor. No money on the line. When some upstart punk came at you with a shiv, there was no boss waiting to step in and pull the match. I was a show dog who’d been thrown from the stage and into the bowels of the pound where a battle became less about glory and more about survival.

  I flex my fingers, feeling them sting. The truth was that the “Kitty’s” claws had been worn off scratching at the concrete walls of a prison cell. He’d been forced to shove new weapons into the gaps—whatever tricks and skills he could learn from men with more body counts to their name than the people standing in the cafeteria line every day. How well would those makeshift weapons stack up against a well-fed, regularly trained mad dog?

  Well, we would just have to fucking find out. I head for the door while Mack approaches another on the opposite side. I barely make it a step before a voice, low and mangled, calls me back.

  “Wait.” Stacatto’s girl is watching me when I look over my shoulder. Her eyes drift up and down my body as if she’s trying to decide which end is which. “Tic-tac-toe,” she says finally, her tongue wrestling with the words. I can barely understand her through her accent, and Darcy shoots me a worried look.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of her—”

  “Tic-tac-toe,” the woman insists, stressing every word as best she can. She’s fighting the high, trying to resist the pull of the wave sweeping her under. I know from experience that she doesn’t stand a fucking chance.

  I jerk my head in a nod and turn on my heel without responding out loud. Tic-tac-toe. She certainly loved her old games—the strategy she’d laid out had been simple but effective: split the board. Allow your opponent to set the first piece and then draw them into opposite corners of the grid while you skillfully lay your trap. By the time you finally spring it, you’ve taken the center of the board before they knew what hit them.

  The little bitch thought that one lucky round with a batch of hired guns made her an expert on battle plans. I laugh darkly to myself as I skirt the end of the cage and pull open the door to a small room that contains only a row of blue training mats lined up lengthwise against the wall, a set of weights, and a flickering light bulb. Closing the door behind me, I strip off my coat and shirt and then approach a mirror hanging near the back corner of the pen. I don’t recognize the man staring back at me compared to the boy who first cut his teeth on the cage at the age of sixteen. The Kitty’s grown up. He’s lost his love of chasing the bloody ball of yarn for scraps. He’s honed his skill in the alleys, and he doesn’t like to play with his food as much anymore.

  Nowadays, he prefers to grind it down into a pulp to make it easier to swallow.

  So, this is hell: a cage of gleaming metal, built high upon a sea of ash. Countless demons spectate from the shadows, their growls, and roars proclaiming their hunger for fresh blood.

  It all creates an intoxicating atmosphere in this playpen for the damned. The Kennel, according to a row of black paint depicting the letters against a concrete wall. I’m on a perch high above the pit down below, seated on a long bench beside a woman who smells like the pies Mamãe used to make. A metal bar sits in front of me, meant to pin the spectators this high up in place, lest they plunge down the long row of seats that lead like steps to the bottom level.

  Splat!

  The world drifts in and out of focus while faceless men dart to and fro, preparing the ring for battle. I’m not sure how much time passes before Lucifer himself appears at the mouth of the ring, stripped naked save for a gray pair of boxer shorts that hug his domineering frame. Scars and ink mar his body—the shackles of the humanity he’s left behind. His eyes remain the only divine part of him now, possessing a single sliver of his soul. They, more than anything, strike the most fear, those eyes. They prove that at some point, this beast was once human.

  He’s joined by another devil who appears at the opposite end of the cage, only he’s entirely naked. The muscles rippling beneath his skin catch the light from nearly every angle; the hard strips forming the bulk of his shoulders and the curves of his ass. He’s stone, through and through, except for his cock. It hangs between his legs, semi-hard like a snake, but I don’t snicker at the comparison. Even Vinny’s knife had never seemed like a more terrifying weapon.

  “Jesus Christ, Mack,” I hear the woman beside me scoff, her voice a cadence of a million different sounds and syllables. “Show off.”

  Shooowwww Offfff. I mouth the words. There’s a show taking place, all right. Two fallen angels fighting over scraps it seems. Some poor, demented soul is the prize of this battle—but glory is the true cost. Neither demon wants to lose this fight. They eye each other, prodding their opponent’s invisible armor for weaknesses—even before a man marches to the center of the pit, a pistol in hand. He mouths words that barely nibble above the din of bloodthirsty howls. Get ready! Grinning wildly, he raises the gun, pulls the trigger, and fires off one shot into the ceiling.

  Bang! Just like that, the angels become monsters. Shadows feed on their corpses, corrupting their broken wings while the ashen ground they stand on streaks their skin, betraying the evidence of sweat.

  My Lucifer is no match for the devil with dark eyes who paces like a true caged animal as the man who sounded the gun quickly exits the pit. If Lucifer still clings to a shred of his humanity, then this other man has already gleefully ripped his out.

  The moment the doors of the cage slam shut, they’re threaded with metal chains and then padlocked. For show, of course. Neither monster will leave without proving his point. The dark-eyed one wants power. Glory. His cock stiffens beneath the shouts and chants bellowing from the stands. He feeds off it, his body rippling as he flexes his fingers and considers when to strike.

  My Lucifer...

  Well, I don’t know what he wants. His motives are a mystery. His eyes reveal nothing—not even pain when the dark-eyed devil lunges and catches him unguarded with one punch to the chest. The crowd explodes in howls, but my devil lands his own blows in the blink of an eye. Two quick jabs to either shoulder.

  They part. Then lunge toward each other again, but they’re too fast. My eyes struggle to catch up with the motion, and I only see colors. Black, when the darker devil lands his carefully placed strikes. A dash of red for Lucifer, a punch to the gut and another blow to the hip.

  Black. Red. Black. Red.

  Black, black, black.

  The walls bleed in celebration of the violence. It drips down, washing over the hungry demons avidly watching the events in the cage and lapping at the ashen island encased in twisted veins of metal. Lucifer spits out droplets of it after taking a punch to the face. He starts to feint to the left, but the darker devil is already upon him.

  Black. Ebony. Gray. Grunting, Lucifer lands on his knees amid a cloud of ash. It rises up to claim him while the darker devil plants his foot against the center of his chest.

  No! I think I shout it out loud, my voice echoing brokenly amid the cheerful jeers. All of a sudden, I’m weightless, falling forward against a hard bar of metal that my fingers struggle to grasp. My body melts, dribbling over the top of the railing, my arms dangling over it. I’d fly down to him if I could. Slap him. Say things to him that I could never say to Vinny. Get up. Fight. I need you to...

  As if he can sense my thoughts, his head cocks and his eyes seek mine out. I don’t know what I expect to find in them when I pick them apart and probe the blue irises. Defeat? Pain? Certainly, not anger. It sparkles between us, a hot, molten amber. He’s furi
ous, in fact, insulted by my lack of faith. After all, he’s using my very own strategy...

  The cage takes on a new shape as blood paints the corners of the cage like a makeshift grid. When the opposing devil attempts to deliver his finishing blow, my Lucifer bucks out of reach and counters the blow with one of his own: a fist to the ankle and then a deliberate hook with his right knee to bring the other man to his knees. It’s a dirty, vicious, brutal tactic, and the crowd roars their approval. With yet another punch, Lucifer has him flattened, and before the man can even muster up a counterattack, Lucifer’s foot is on his throat.

  Just like that, the final ‘X’ is placed. Three in a row. Tic-tac-toe.

  The other devil is cold in defeat, his eyes like coals. However, Lucifer is almost bored in his triumph. He holds his dominant position just long enough to make his victory clear. Then he steps back, swiping the blood from his chin with the back of his hand.

  He doesn’t bask in the shocked murmurs and grudging glares of respect from the unsatisfied demons. His gaze finds me again, and he hammers home just what his victory means, driving every implication into my skull. I’ve done this for you. Vinny would utter those same words gleefully, expecting my gratitude. This man hates the lengths he’s been forced to go through on my behalf.

  Because of me. In spite of me.

  Vinny would expect me to be grateful for his supposed gift. For this man, I will bear the burden of his sacrifice. It’s a mark that I wear deeper than any tattoo. It’s engraved onto my soul, somewhere Vinny’s taint doesn’t reach.

  The devil went into hell for me. Like lingering smoke, I taste his presence over my skin. His possession. I’ll wear it only temporarily—he won’t own me for long...

  But for the moment his heat fuels my blood, gathering between my legs until I have to writhe just to smother the ache. That blue-fire gaze lays me bare, his for the taking. Piece by piece. He strips me of everything even before he stalks toward the gate and waits until it’s opened. Sweat drips down his body as he surges into the crowd, his eyes on me, hunting me.