by Ashley, Ava
I know that objectively, she’s a babe. She has big lips, big boobs, long lashes, long legs, and a waist you can wrap your arm around. But I just don’t see it. All I see is how she fails in every way compared to Savannah. She tries so hard, where Savannah doesn’t seem to try at all, but all the effort isn’t enough. It can’t change the fact that Savannah is a one-of-a-kind girl and Friday’s girl just is no Savannah.
“Cooper? Earth to Cooper?” The chick is looking up at me expectantly from under her thickly mascaraed eyelashes.
“What?” I ask. “Oh, yeah. Listen, I gotta go. I got this.” I slide some money toward the bartender for her drink and the beer I didn’t even touch, and get up.
“Wait—you don’t want company?” The chick looks confused. “But, but...” She pushes her chest out more, like that’s going to change my mind.
“No, I gotta go.” I don’t look back as I walk out of the door and across the parking lot to my car.
I do not go backwards. I do not downgrade. When I have made it to first place, I do not settle for second in the next round. When I have had the best, anything less isn’t worth the effort. I don’t want some okay, hottie-tottie in hooker heels and hot pants.
I want Savannah. I want my girl.
Chapter Forty-Six
Cooper
I’m awakened sometime after one in the morning by a loud crash that sounds like it’s coming from the second bedroom. I’m immediately awake and on alert. I sit up quietly and silently slide the covers off. I swing my legs over the side of the bed and walk slowly and silently towards my door. I hear a thump. Someone is in the apartment. Then another thump. Thump, thump, thump, thump, and another thump. Seven guys and, by the sound of it, big ones.
My mind is racing, completely free of the grogginess of sleep, and I’m in mission mode. Issue: the premises have been infiltrated. Cause: unknown. Judging from the direction of the noise, however, I can speculate on a probable cause. She’s petite, dark haired, sweet, and currently on the run again.
I had already concluded that desperation, not flakiness, had driven Savannah away and thus that I would find her and help her. But this unexpected night time visit reinforces my decision all the more. How dare these fuckers come after Savannah? Seven full-grown thugs on one tiny little woman? They’re a pack of overgrown wusses to come in the middle of the night, in a big gang, to take a woman somewhere against her will. They make me fucking sick.
“The fuck!” A man’s voice yells, and something shatters. It sounds like he threw something. “Where the fuck is the bitch?” Hearing someone refer to Savannah like that, even after she ran away from me, makes me see red. Only common sense and military self-discipline keep me from storming out there and knocking some heads around.
I don’t need to restrain myself for long, though, because the thugs loot through the apartment quickly and end up kicking my door in just minutes later.
I jump on one of them, kneeing him in the groin and socking him in the eye. I don’t recognize him. He’s a redhead with a jagged scar down his face and botched tattoos on his clearly juiced-up muscles. He goes down with a groan while I’m already on a second, bashing his head against the meaty head of a third. Their heads thunk against each other with a satisfying crack and the men stagger, holding their heads as they crumble. I’m hugely outnumbered but I’m fueled by rage and adrenaline. How dare these fucking worms think they have any right to so much as lay an eye on Savannah, much less break into her fucking bedroom in the middle of the night! I think of them coming in through the window and seeing Savannah lying innocently in her bed in a thin tank top, pushed up a little over her boxer shorts. I’m seeing red. I want to take every single one of these men out.
I grab a brute with a buzzcut and a cheesy ‘I LOVE MOM’ tattoo and wrench his arm behind his back, flipping him over hard onto the floor. I chop another guy in the stomach, but the first are already recovering. Enraged or not, I’m way outnumbered. And even though they’re not real men—because no real man would dream of ganging up with six other men to go up against a woman, much less when they’re getting her sleeping—they are all big, muscle-bound, steroid plumped, experienced fighters. They eventually catch up to me and just as I’m body-slamming one, another four are on me. I’m kicking and punching and hurting them, I can tell, even as they’re tying me to a chair.
As I’m blinking through the beginning of a bad black eye, rubbing some blood off of my cheek with my shoulder, I start to come back to focus. Noting the injuries the thugs are sporting, significantly worse than my own despite their manpower advantages, brings a little smile to my lips. I smile through the pain, because these little bitches aren’t going to see me hurt.
I do a double-take when I recognize one of them. It’s the kid I fought against a while ago.
“Nate?” I ask in disbelief.
“Where’s Savannah?” he spits.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Cooper
“Where the fuck is Savannah?” Nate yells, vein bulging in his neck. “Where the fuck is she? You better tell us now or you’re a dead man!”
“I don’t know where Savannah is,” I say, calmly. “But I wouldn’t tell you if I did.” I spit at his feet. One of his brutes snarls and lunges at me, but Nate holds up a hand and he freezes. Clearly, Nate is the one calling the shots here.
“Are you sure that’s the truth?” There’s a hard glint in Nate’s eyes, the glint of a desperate man. A desperate man will do anything.
“I am,” I say. “I’m also sure there’s no reason you need to be busting through my girl’s window in the fucking ass-crack of the night.”
“Your girl?” Nate looks absolutely shocked for a moment, then his face twists into a bitter smile and he laughs. “You mean, my wife?”
“You’re married to Savannah?” I don’t believe it.
“Not yet,” Nate admits. “But we’re engaged. She has been promised to me. She has been mine, since we were children. So you should just stick to the ring, pretty boy, and stay out of matters that don’t concern you. There are enough other girls out there. Come on, boys.”
“But boss,” Buzzcut says, “don’t you want us to, eh, take care of ’im?”
“No,” Nate says, coolly. He kicks my shin as he walks past me to the door, but he doesn’t look at me or seem too interested. “We have better things to do than bother camouflaging the hit of a champion fighter.”
There’s a fighter’s code, a man’s code, that Nate knows I won’t break. He knows I’m not going to go crying to the cops to fix my problems for me. And I won’t. But Nate also underestimates either how much I care about Savannah or how capable I am of being a threat to him outside of the ring. He thinks I’m all muscle and fighter training, but he doesn’t know about my intelligence training from my SEAL days.
I’m going to find Savannah. And I’m going to do it before they do.
The thugs walk out and I’m left tied to the chair. I squirm out of my bonds—my SEAL training has been becoming surprisingly useful as of late—and start puzzling things together. I think back to the locker room conversation I had with Vlad after the fight against Nate. He was talking about how Nate needed to find his runaway fiancee, and soon. It clicks into place—Savannah is the Santos girl. Savannah is the runaway motorcycle club princess and that’s why she couldn’t tell me who she was or where she came from. That’s why she was so scared to open up to me and to give in to her desires to be with me. Because she’s a walking mark for anyone who even thinks of touching her.
That’s what you get for getting involved with the mysterious girl with the sackful of secrets, I think to myself. Then I smile and shake my head.
Savannah is worth it. And I’m going to get my girl.
*****
ALPHA FIGHTER
Part Two
Ava Ashley
Chapter One
Savannah
“I’ll take pancakes with two eggs, sunny side up, and a cold mocha latte with one pump of chocolat
e syrup, not two. I will send it back if there are two! And don’t think I can’t tell. I can totally always tell if there are two. But don’t go giving me a wimpy short pump, either. I want one full pump. If it tastes like coffee, not mocha, it’s going back! And I’d love nine ice cubes—no, eight—and a bendy straw.” The potbellied man closes his menu and hands it to me. “That’s all.”
“Yes, sir. Of course, sir,” I say. “One pump, no more and no less.” I’m turning to go as he raises his pointer finger.
“Oh, and leave out the onions on the fried eggs, unless they’re green onions, got it?” He looks at me expectantly.
“Yes, sir,” I say.
“I hope so,” he grumbles. “Or I’ll send it back!”
“Waitress!” a woman at the next table over calls out to me. “We need drink refills over here. We’re waaaaiiiiiiiiiiting!”
I rush to get their refills and put in the picky man’s order, who is, unfortunately a three-meals-a-day regular, before I forget. We’re where he gets his big belly from, but he’s as picky an eater as an anorexic teenager and never orders the same thing twice. The worst part is that he does send things back, just as he threatens, and every single menu item has to be modified to his tastes, because nothing is just right the way it is. One day, he wants a mocha latte with one chocolate pump, one day it’s with three. One day he wants extra crispy bacon, one day it has to be soft. One day onions are the most appalling thing and he starts retching if there is sign of one anywhere near his food, another day he wants onions on everything, including his dessert.
And he never tips. It’s always the diners who are the biggest pains to serve that either don’t tip or just round up to the dollar and act like they’re being incredibly generous. My shifts here range from eight to thirteen hours, because they’re chronically short-staffed and the little staff they have are constantly calling out ‘sick.’ I never call out and I always take the extra shifts, even when I’ve just gotten off from the parlor hours earlier and know it will mean only having three hours of sleep again.
I need the money and, just as much as I need the money to stay over water financially, I need the distraction to not fall into the treacherous trap of thinking of Cooper. Every free moment that I have that isn’t spent dealing with troublesome diners and the perverted middle-aged manager, working at the tattoo parlor, or catching some much-needed deep sleep—the kind that’s more like temporary death than sleep, because of the extreme exhaustion—is spent thinking about Cooper. It hurts like a thousand daggers in my heart, so I do all that I can to get those moments to as close to zero as possible.
But I can’t avoid them entirely. I have to eat, and during those breaks, Cooper’s face is all that I see. I have to bathe, and while I’m standing in the shower, Cooper’s hands on my body are all that I can feel. I physically and emotionally ache for him with a longing unlike anything I have ever experienced before.
I pick up the pitcher of water in one hand and grab three bottles of soda by their necks in the other. Thinking about impossibilities won’t pay the bills, won’t get me closer to my dreams, and won’t help me move on.
Oh, God, what I would give to be able to move on. But I can’t. I just can’t. I wish I had Cooper, right here by my side.
Chapter Two
Cooper
After that night, I am looking worse than I have since some of my first bad fights back in middle school, before I learned how to block my opponents properly. My lip is busted, my eye is swollen under a big black bruise, I have random pound marks and scars all over, including a nasty-looking gash right above my ear. But years of getting pounded on, even if it was not nearly as much as the guys going against me got pounded on, have trained my body to be resilient and I bounce back quick. I nurse my injuries like a bad hangover the next morning, but by midday I’m feeling better and even starting to look less banged up.
I should be at the ring. In the middle of tournament season isn’t exactly the time for a rest day and Vlad is appropriately pissed when I am a no-show at the gym, but I don’t answer my phone when it starts ringing off the hook with annoyed, then concerned, then flat-out livid calls from Vlad. Eventually, my inbox is full, so that quiets things for a while. It’s a good thing, too, because I need to focus. I spend all day on my computer, using all of my ex-SEAL intelligence skills to hunt down clues that will lead me to Savannah.
But skills alone aren’t enough to get into the real business of finding a smart woman who doesn’t want to be found. No, I need equipment, or rather elite, military-grade software, for that—and I know exactly where to find it.
Vlad looks ready to spit fire when I show up at the gym. Then he takes in how banged up I look and looks even madder.
“What the fuck is wrong with you, man?” Vlad yells, “You’ve gone absolutely off your rocker—first throwing a tournament match, then not showing up to training, then daring to show your face here looking like that. What, you blew off your big fight so that you could go get yourself pounded at a bar instead? Man, I would expect that from some of the juice heads the other guys are working from, but not from you. I know you, man, and this just isn’t you! Are you on crack? Be straight with me, are you on crack?”
He stares me down hard.
“No, man,” I say. “And I know it looks bad, and I know I’m risking my career here, but it’s important. I don’t have time to explain, but if you’re my friend and if you trust me, then I need your help right now.” Vlad has an untraceable computer—my old untraceable computer from my Navy SEAL days, with scores of heavy-duty software downloaded on it. The SEALs don’t know I still have it. It was supposedly lost on mission, but I was bitter and was going to keep something from my days as a SEAL when they said I couldn’t go back. When I got back here, sorted myself out, and came back to myself, I didn’t want it anymore. Vlad likes to do some online gambling, which isn’t exactly above-board in our state, so I let him have the computer as thanks for all he did for me.
But now I need the computer. I need the incredibly powerful gigabytes downloaded onto its hard drive.
“Man, I need the computer,” I said.
“What are you doing?” Now Vlad doesn’t look angry anymore, just troubled. “Dude, I know I’m not Mr. Legal or anything, but what are you getting involved in here? Are you sure it’s worth it? I don’t want to see you locked up. You’re too good for that.”
“I’m sure,” I say, resolutely. I am. “I don’t have time to explain, but I need it. Now.”
Vlad and I lock eyes for a moment. Then he sighs.
“Just be careful, man,” he says. “I don’t want to see you get in over your head. This has to do with Savannah, doesn’t it?” I don’t answer and he just shakes his head and sighs again. “I’ll drive home for it now and bring it by your place immediately.
“Thanks, man,” I say.
True to his word, Vlad has the computer to me in less than thirty minutes. As soon as I get my hands on it, I get straight to work. First, I hack into her personal records on a federal site, securing my computer first so that the FBI or CIA doesn’t come knocking down my door. She doesn’t have any active credit cards or debit cards that have been used in the last week, or even the last few months, so that’s little help. So I think.
What could lead me to the girl? What leaves tracks for a woman who travels so light and inconspicuously that all she has is a backpack and the clothes on her back?
Money. Or rather, the lack thereof. I remember the necklace Savannah always wore, a beautiful gold locket that she told me, in a moment of unguarded openness on one of our jogs with the dog, was a gift from her mother. She clammed up right after that and wouldn’t say anything more about the necklace or her mother after that, but I could tell that the necklace was important to her.
I could also tell that the necklace was valuable, however, from the way the gold gleamed. That was real high quality gold that definitely wasn’t pyrite or some metal mix. And knowing Savannah as the practical girl that she
was, even something so sentimental would eventually be sacrificed to practicality in her quest for self-sufficiency in the face of extreme adversity.
It takes thirteen uninterrupted hours of searching the internet using all possible combination of search terms, and sifting through the results the software spits out at me of items that match my description of the locket and the appropriate time window for listing. I feel like my eyes are going to bleed before I hit gold.
But there it is, on the online listing for a Harlem pawnshop called Uncle Johnny’s Treasures and Trinkets. It’s Savannah’s necklace, sure as can be.
It’s early in the next morning and I haven’t slept a wink, and only eaten at my computer, but finding the listing makes me feel energized like I slept ten hours on a bed of feathers and fluff. I found my girl.
Bingo.
Chapter Three
Savannah
I’ve gotten to a place where the days are all starting to run into each other. Sure, I still miss Cooper so badly that it hurts whenever I think of him, which is still every single moment that I’m not actively doing something else, but I’m starting to come to terms with that as a fact of life. I will always pine for what I once had, all too briefly, but at least have the memories.
Right?
Luckily, I’m run so ragged between picking up countless extra shifts at the diner, fending off the advances of my handsy boss, and somehow managing to fit in some time at the tattoo parlor between all of that, that I easily fall into a coma-like slumber every night. I frown. Speaking of the tattoo parlor, I’m exasperated with where it’s going. While the hours at the diner are getting piled on me, my hours at the tattoo parlor keep getting cut back even further. It’s not just me, either, but all of us. There’s a ritzier parlor just a block-and-a-half over and we’re losing out sorely on business to them, because we don’t have curb appeal. Honestly, the situation seems pretty desperate. If we don’t get lucky and have things turn around, and soon, we’ll be shut down before we know what hit us.