Fucking coward.
It wasn’t the first time some big talker failed to live up to the noise, backing down at the last second because of some bullshit excuse.
I finished my whiskey and hollered around the curtain for another, tapping my empty glass on the cement wall as I swiped the back of my hand over my mouth.
Lighting my last cigarette, I went back to the benches in the private room, inhaling deeply until my lungs were filled with the sweet tarry taste of tobacco.
Grey held up his phone, showing Ava Jade a video of Alpha; the female fighter Diesel had wanted to acquire for a fight here since we started the events.
“See how she uses her legs,” Grey was saying, pointing to the screen, and Ava Jade nodded. “She weakens your stability like that so when she strikes up top you go down harder. She’s good on the mat, too. Don’t let her bring you down. If she does, you won’t be able to get out of it.”
Her cheekbones flared. She disagreed.
I couldn’t say whether she was right or wrong about her ability to take Alpha. I’d only seen her fight once, but she was a lethal combination of speed and size. The other girl, even one in the same weight class as her, didn’t stand a chance.
And Ava Jade was at least a full weight class down. Possibly two weight classes. But then again, she’d almost had me that night out behind the apartment buildings. She hadn’t needed her blades then, just the incentive of getting her winnings from betting on me in the fight and the rush of a challenge.
As twitchy as I was that I wouldn’t be smashing heads tonight after all, at least I got to watch this fight. It was the best alternative, and maybe I’d get a second hand release from watching her take Alpha down.
It wouldn’t lift the heavy burden pressing down on my soul, but it might soothe it. For another day. Another hour. Another minute at least.
If Julia didn’t call soon…
I finished off my cigarette and stomped it out beneath my boot.
“How are you on the ground?” Grey asked my Ghost, and her lips pressed together tight.
He took her silence and expression to mean something they didn’t. It wasn’t that she wasn’t good on the ground, it was that if she got stuck in a hold, unable to move with someone on top of her, she panicked. It was that panic that would be her undoing someday.
It was a scar that we needed to help her heal. It could save her life.
“Focus on what you’re good at,” I found myself saying.
Her gaze flicked up to meet mine, burning eyes boring into me. “Too bad I can’t use my blades,” she said with a smirk that didn’t reach her eyes.
“You don’t need them,” Corvus said, entering through the curtain with my fresh whiskey in his hand. He passed it to me, going to kneel in front of Ava Jade with thin strips of torn cloth to wrap her knuckles. “She might have more skill than you, but it’s at a professional level. She won’t fight dirty, and she won’t be expecting you to.”
“She also won’t expect you to be able to take a hit as well as you can,” Grey added. “You need to outlast her and wait for your opening.”
“She’s weak in the knees,” I put in. “During the fight I saw last year in Lodi, she took a hit to her inner right knee, not even a hard one, and it almost put her flat on her ass.”
Ghost nodded, taking it all in.
The noise and light from the main floor pushed into the private space as Diesel and Pinkie entered, throwing the curtain back shut behind them. “Alpha’s here,” he announced. “Fight’s in fifteen. Is she prepped?”
“Almost,” Corvus growled.
“Put this on,” Pinkie said, and I noticed the tiny ass top and shorts in his mammoth fingers. He tossed it to Ava Jade, and she caught it in the fist Corvus wasn’t currently wrapping.
Corvus snatched them from her fingers before she could get a good look at them. He pushed to his feet, holding them out to Diesel with murder in his eyes. A smile found my lips.
“The fuck is this, Dies?” he asked, holding the tiny shorts and sports bra between his fingers like they personally offended him. He shoved them back at Pinkie. “She isn’t wearing that.”
Ava Jade didn’t hide her amusement at the exchange, calmly offering her hand to Grey for him to finish the job Corvus started.
“She is,” Diesel said. “She can’t fight in a skirt and a baggy band tee, son.”
“That’s fucking lingerie,” he argued, jabbing two fingers to the outfit lying on Pinkie’s palm.
“It’s sport shorts and a sports bra,” Diesel corrected him.
“Her tits and ass will be all over the place in that. She isn’t wearing it.”
Diesel took the outfit from Pinkie and strolled over to Ava Jade, holding out the bits of dark cloth for her. “Ava Jade,” he said, making a spectacle of asking her permission. “Would you mind wearing this for your fight. Not only will you be able to move more easily, but its effect on many of the dimwitted rich in attendance will make for a better monetary gain.”
She looked between Corvus’ quickly reddening face and our father’s, taking the skimpy outfit with a tip of her head. “If it’ll help,” she said, sharing a meaningful look with Diesel that I wanted to deconstruct. If my brain wasn’t swimming in whiskey, I’d have been doing just that.
One thing was clear though, she was behaving. Doing as she was told. She agreed to this fight at the very last minute. Agreed to fight someone well above her weight class. Agreed to wear that.
And I got the sense she wasn’t doing it for herself.
Corvus wiped a palm over his mouth, physically holding back whatever else he wanted to say.
Ava Jade sent him a wink. “Let them look,” she said. “That’s all they’ll ever do.”
“If any of them touch you, I’ll fucking kill them.”
Diesel raised a brow at his eldest son, but Corvus’ hard gaze never left Ava Jade.
She smiled sweetly at him. “I would expect nothing less, Bones.”
In a move not even I could’ve predicted, Corvus sidestepped closer to me and took the whiskey from my hand, draining it in one long swallow, a sneering grimace on his lips as he stared down Diesel.
“The match is five, five-minute rounds,” Diesel told Ava Jade. “It’s best if you can last at least until the third.”
“So you’re betting against me?” she asked him.
He didn’t reply.
It was the wrong move. Even more so to let on that he had. It would only push Ava Jade that much harder to win. And win she would. Not without injury. But I felt bad for Alpha, she wouldn’t have a soul left once my Ghost sucked it clean from her bones.
“Winner will be determined by submission or knock out.”
She nodded her understanding.
“Or by climbing to the top of the cage.”
The room went collectively still.
“You’re dropping the cage?” I asked, something churning beneath my ribcage. “I thought we weren’t doing that anymore since—”
“Since you killed your opponent?” he finished for me. “I don’t think there’s any risk of that happening tonight, and it adds something extra to the excitement.”
“You okay with this?” I asked my Ghost. If she wasn’t, Diesel wouldn’t be dropping the cage. Period.
She shrugged. “At least she won’t be able to get away.”
She flexed her fingers, feeling out the wraps as she stood, holding my stare with a wicked gleam in her eyes. My cock thickened in my jeans as I realized what I was seeing in her stare. She was excited.
No. Not just excited.
She hungered for this.
Lusted after it.
An opportunity for her to quell the same darkness that lingered deep inside of her. A darkness that no doubt was on the verge of chaos with all the shit she’d had to go through, and continued having to go through, since she first arrived in Thorn Valley.
She wouldn’t be getting what we knew she wanted out of tonight—to find the King who took out her father and start planning how she would take him apart—but this was a good consolation prize.
Corvus pushed my empty glass back at me before turning to Diesel. “I don’t think the cage is—”
“She’s got this,” I interrupted, biting my lip ring as I looked over Ava Jade, seeing the readiness in every one of her muscles.
I nodded to Diesel. “We’re good here.”
“We’ll give you some privacy to change,” Diesel offered, pausing before he and Pinkie left. “And Ava Jade?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for filling in. The income from this match will be much needed in the weeks to come.”
For the war to come, he might as well have said. I expected we’d be meeting as soon as this match was through to go over the plan.
Ava Jade inclined her head, and he was gone, back out through the curtain with Pinkie on his heels.
“This is bullshit,” Corvus groaned, turning to pace a short stretch of concrete floor. “She hasn’t had enough time to train. Even after all that shit, he clearly still wants her dead.”
I stopped him, slapping a hand down on his shoulder, gripping tight. His nostrils flared. “She has this. She wouldn’t have agreed to it if she didn’t.”
“She didn’t know who she was up against.”
“Doesn’t matter, Brother. You can’t beat a ghost.”
The sound of Ava Jade’s knife belt clattering against the bench drew our attention back to her. She removed her t-shirt and bra without a second’s hesitation, wiggling her hips as she worked to get the skirt over her round ass to let it slip down her thighs to the ground.
The mark of my teeth in her flesh from rally night made my hard on jump in my jeans, and I pawed it, the phantom taste of her on my tongue.
Her nipples pebbled in the cool air under Sanctum, and here, under the lights, it was easier to see the evidence of all the shit she’d endured during the trials. Her body was riddled with bruises in all stages of healing. Some a purple so deep they bordered on black. Others so pale yellow they were hard to discern from her unmarked flesh. And cuts.
The ones in her hips, nearly healed now, put there by me, didn’t bother me. The other did.
More than I ever thought I could be bothered by seeing a wound.
She was mine to mark. To mark in the ways she wanted me to mark her. In the ways the dark, deprived part of her craved.
No one else was allowed to mark her.
The darkness I’d been working to drown in whiskey and tobacco came back with a violent resurgence, making a heat lick up my back like flames.
Ava Jade pulled on the black shorts and the sports bra before pulling her hair back to twist it into a tight donut shape on the top of her head, securing it with an elastic.
She squatted, rolling her shoulders back and then jumping to get limbered up, her tits bouncing. No fucks given that we were all drooling in her direction with unconcealed chubs.
She widened her stance, striking an invisible opponent, light on her feet.
This was going to be good.
She’d already gone through some drills with Grey and a full body stretch. She was as ready as she was going to be.
Outside, the volume of the crowd turned up, and the sound of a mic turning on marked the start of the event.
“Shit, did someone pick me an entrance song?” she asked.
Corvus and Grey shared a look.
“Don’t worry, Ghost. I got you.”
Pinkie cleared his throat into the mic before starting the opening of the show, using his best Rogan copycat voice.
Ava Jade jumped on the spot, loosening up, and as the opening tone of Primal Ethos’ Gravedigger came over the speaker and Pinkie shouted her name, I yanked her in for a viscous kiss, biting her bottom lip hard. She grunted into my mouth before pulling away, licking the small droplet of blood there with a malicious gleam in her eyes and a smile making the tiny cut open more.
“We’re right behind you,” Grey assured her, and she stepped out of the curtain, and all proof of her excitement or nerves gone in the blink of an eye. She stalked through the crowd, dead-eyed and with her chin raised. I wished I could’ve seen her face.
Not a single man in attendance dared reach out to touch her. Instead, they backed away as she walked, parting like the red sea. Going silent as the song I chose grew to a loud crescendo of violence all around us. Promising blood. Promising violence. Promising the show of their fucking lives.
Ava Jade. My ghost. Tonight’s gravedigger.
Distantly, I could hear Corvus cursing at my back. Could see the distaste on Diesel’s expression as he watched from his high top table near to the bar. Didn’t give two flying fucks about either. It was the perfect song for her entry. And now that everyone knew it was Corvus, why hide it?
He needed to own that shit.
Take control of it before it suffocated him.
Ava Jade stepped through the ropes, the long line of her body bending in the most delicious way until she stood next to Pinkie, waiting, entirely immobile even though I could sense the latent power pulsing beneath her flesh and muscle.
“And in the opposite corner,” Pinkie hollered. “Andrea ‘Alpha’ Stone!”
Gravedigger faded into another song, one I didn’t recognize, but had to admit was pretty badass.
She swaggered out from the opposite curtain, and I watched her approach as I took the petroleum from Grey. I was always the one on the other side of these ropes. I wanted to be the face she saw when she got through her first round. Her second. Her third.
I would take care of her.
Alpha stepped up through the ropes, unfurling to her full height, and a sour taste filled my mouth. It’d been a minute since I’d seen her in the flesh, and she’d clearly gone up a weight class since then. Standing at about six-two with a frame damn near as wide as Grey’s, she looked like a monster beside my Ghost. Her thighs roughly the size of Ava Jade’s waist. Her blonde hair pulled back into a low bun at the nape of her neck.
Her lips twisted. Every muscle flexed.
“This is so fucking lopsided,” Corvus growled, throwing a clawed hand through his mussed hair.
“She can handle it,” I reminded him. “And Diesel knows it. It’s why he set it up.”
“He bet against her,” Grey reminded me.
“Did he?” I challenged him, slipping a curious eye his way. “Or did it only make it seem that way to light a fire under her ass? Because he knows exactly what she’s capable of.”
Grey’s brows drew, considering that.
I didn’t even realize I’d be considering it until the words left my mouth, but there it was. And I’d be fucking shocked if it weren’t the truth. She’d bested everything Diesel had thrown at her. If he thought she’d be taken down by this bitch, he wasn’t the wise man I always thought him to be.
“…winner by submission or knockout,” Pinkie was saying as the lights in the underbelly of Sanctum went low, all save for the ones above the ring. “Fighters, ready!”
My stomach fluttered, and I clenched my teeth against the sensation as it went straight to my cock.
Pinkie stepped back as Alpha’s entrance song quieted and the metallic groan of the cage overhead sounded. Pinkie exited the ring as the cage clanked down, locking Ava Jade in with Alpha.
I gripped the cold metal, pushing up on a crate to make sure I didn’t miss a thing.
“Ghost,” I called through the bars, and she turned, her face so hard it could’ve been cut from marble. I pointed at her opponent with two fingers, never losing my hold on her attention. “End that bitch.”
She nodded once and rolled her shoulders back, widening her stance as Pinkie lifted the shining metal whistle to his lips.
The sound of it rang through the room, sending Alpha into an immediate feral attack. I grinned, watching Ava Jade deftly avoid the advance, landing a solid jab to Alpha’s ribs, and she rolled out of the way and sprang back to her feet, ready.
Alpha bared her teeth, the knot between her brows telling me she’d misjudged her opponent. It wouldn’t be the last time.
Ava Jade blocked Alpha’s next blow with her forearm, but failed to see the nasty kick coming, the blow to my Ghost’s shin nearly sending her down.
The crowd roared at the hit, cheering for Alpha, and I wanted to eat each and every one of them for breakfast.
I settled for snatching up the nearest Armani shirt, yanking the fucker to me to knock my skull into his, rendering him a mess of unmoving muscle and flesh on the soiled cement floor. I spat on him, feeling Grey’s arms tug me back a step to stop the kick I’d been about to throw into his abdomen.
Grey pushed me back to the metal bars, back to the fight, and I growled as I watched Alpha land another kick to Ava Jade’s thigh, bringing a bright red tint to the surface of her skin.
If it weren’t for the fact she took it with a smile, I’d have been tempted to rip through these bars and snap Alpha’s neck.
Fuck, I wanted to.
Watching her wasn’t helping.
It was making my need that much worse. My violent soul longed to go to war with hers. To be at her side. Fight as one.
Watching was a form of torture, but when Ava Jade landed the next beautiful hit, forcing Alpha to stagger back two steps, her hand reflexively going to her mangled jaw, I almost came.
“Yeah!” I screamed through the bars. “Take that bitch, Ghost!”
My hand found my cock through my jeans, and I pushed against it, trying to fix its position with a snarl on my lips.
Pinkie blew the whistle for the end of the match, just before Ava Jade was about to strike.
“No!” I growled at Pinkie, slamming my palms against the bars.
“Rook,” Corvus growled beside my ear, but I was already climbing up, pushing and unlocking the cage door to step through, hollering back over my shoulder. “Get me a fucking whiskey.”
Ava Jade came to the corner and Grey stepped through behind me, setting the stool down for my Ghost, but she didn’t want to sit. She paced back and forth in the corner like a caged tigress, only stopping when I forced her, shoving her against the bars. I scooped the petroleum onto the back of my hand and held her against the bars as I swiped my fingers into it to run it over her forehead and cheeks. Over the cut on her brow to stop it leaking into her eyes.
“She hits like a fucking truck,” Ava Jade said between panting breaths.
“Then you hit her harder.”
She opened her mouth to allow the straw through as Grey pushed it in. She pulled greedily at the water, and I knocked the straw from her lips.
“Not too much,” I cautioned. “You’ll cramp.”
Her jaw clenched, but she nodded, breaking free of my hold to storm back to center ring as the next round was announced.
“Rook, come on, man,” Grey was saying, but his words were swallowed up in the roar of the crowd as Pinkie lifted the whistle to his lips and Ava Jade squared off against her opponent.
I let Grey pull me back through the cage door and slam it behind us, the whistle sounding for the second round. I jumped down from the ledge, fingers latched through the metal bars as they circled one another.
Fuck, she moved like liquid, dancing around Alpha as though there weren’t bruises the size of bread loaves blooming on her legs. There was no denying it. My Ghost was bred for this. She was made from different stuff. Maybe the same stuff I was made from.
Something rougher, harder, darker than regular people.
Ava Jade feigned to the left, psyching out Alpha to land an insane hit to her right temple, jumping to throw her entire body weight into the throw.
Blood spattered over the floor at their feet as Alpha tried to regain her balance, but Ava Jade wasn’t having it. My Ghost closed the gap between them, sweeping her legs out to knock Alpha to the ground. The big bitch went down hard, but she got hold of Ava Jade’s ankle, twisting it to take my Ghost down with her.
“Get off the floor!” Grey was shouting.
“Fuck,” I heard Corvus curse behind me.
My teeth locked in my jaw, watching as Alpha dragged Ava Jade close, grabbing hold of her when she sat up to try to get free. The next bit happened so fast I couldn’t be sure how they got there, but Alpha’s arm snaked around Ava Jade’s neck, her arm trapped beneath one of Alpha’s knees, the other punching uselessly at Alpha’s shoulder.
Ghost’s face started to turn red, her light eyes bulging as Alpha choked off her air supply with a vicious sneer on her lips.
Corvus shouted uselessly, threatening murder if Pinkie didn’t blow the fucking whistle, but I locked my eyes on Ava Jade, and when she found my gaze, I lent her the strength she needed. My head tipped in a small nod.
You know how to get out of this, I told her. Stay calm.
Her body sagged on cue, and Alpha immediately let her go, standing with a triumphant gleam in her eyes, but before Pinkie could blow the whistle, Ava Jade flipped, sending a kick upward into the bottom of Alpha’s chin, coughing as she finally allowed herself to breathe.
Teeth rattled to the mat, and blood smeared over Alpha’s mouth as she fell back, choking on it, spluttering as she blinked to get back full consciousness.
“One,” the crowd started to shout.
“Two.”
If Alpha didn’t get up, it was over. Ava Jade got unsteadily to her feet, spitting onto the mat between heaving breaths, her entire body gleaming in the lights as she gathered what remained of her strength and staggered toward Alpha.”
“Three.”
“Four.”
Alpha groaned, flipping uneasily onto her stomach, using her arms to push herself up.
The crowd called her name. Chanting.
I’d rip out all their voice boxes if they didn’t stop, the only reason I didn’t—couldn’t—was because I didn’t want to miss a second of what would happen next.
I licked my lips, teeth dragging over my lip ring.
“Finish it,” I whispered.
Alpha lifted her face, and Ava Jade took two running steps and plowed her knee into Alpha’s cheek, sending her back down.
“Stay the fuck down,” she screamed at Alpha, every muscle in her back puffed up, her hands claws at her sides. This was her restraint. She didn’t want to stop.
She needed Alpha to stop so that she could stop herself.
But Alpha rolled back to her knees again as the crowd started a thirty second countdown for the round to end.
Alpha pushed to her feet and began climbing the fucking cage, trying to get away. It was the coward’s way out; if she made it to the top, the match would be over. Forfeited. Unless Alpha was trying to get higher to put power behind a hit.
Ava Jade bent her head and cursed, her upper lip curling as she went after Alpha before she could get high enough up to do anything useful.
“Get that cunt down!” I shouted, my pulse pounding in my ears.
She grabbed Alpha’s bun and ripped her from the bars, making her fall with a resounding thud to the mat and roll over, coughing at the air that was knocked from her lungs.
Ava Jade was on her in a second.
“Ten, nine, eight,” the crowd chanted, while others moaned and griped, calling for Alpha to get up. But she wouldn’t be getting up. Not any time soon.
Ava Jade straddled the bitch, laying hit after hit after hit to her face.
“Seven, six, five, four,” they chanted.
“She’s killing her!” someone screamed.
And they weren’t wrong.
“Three, two—”
Pinkie blew the whistle, and I launched through the cage door, racing to Ava Jade, hauling her off Alpha before she could finish the job she started. She fought against my hold, spinning to land a brutal blow to my jaw that I felt all the way down to my cock.
“It’s me. It’s me!”
She blinked, thrusting away from me, her breathing erratic and eyes full of dark stars.
She bent over her knees, almost gagging from the exertion, her head tipping slightly to one side to see the evidence of what she’d done. Alpha, lying bloody and broken, but still alive, in a puddle of her own blood.
Two of our men rushed in to tend to Alpha, fixing her with a neck brace, pouring cold water over her bruises and cuts before pressing bags of ice there instead. One shone a flashlight into her eyes.
Pinkie entered the ring, snatching up Ava Jade’s arm to drag her nearer to the fallen Alpha. Alpha, who was trying to say something to the Saints helping her, and a moment later was helped to stand, her gaze distant, the whites of her left eye filled with blood.
“And the winner by knockout is…AVA JADE MASON!”
Pinkie lifted her arm, and she lifted her chin in turn, looking out over the faces in the club.
Alpha stumbled closer to my Ghost, and I stepped up, ready to cut her down if she tried anything, but she extended a shaky hand to Ava Jade.
She took it, swallowing past a lump in her throat.
“You’re a fucking animal,” Alpha slurred.
“It was a good match,” Ava Jade replied, her gaze catching on someone behind me. I spun to find Diesel just outside the cage, clapping for her. His grin wide.
