Wicked Heartless (The Elites of Edgewood Prep #2)

Prologue

The smell is always the first thing.

Not blood. Blood comes later—after the first clean hit, after the adrenaline cracks open the capillaries and the iron taste coats the back of your throat.

Before the fight, it’s sweat. Stale, sour, layered into the concrete walls of this converted warehouse like a hundred bodies pressed their fear into the cinder blocks and left it there to rot.

Sweat and cheap beer and the chemical bite of whatever they’re using to clean the mats between rounds, which isn’t much, because nobody here gives a shit about hygiene.

Or safety. Or the fact that half these fighters are under twenty-one and the other half have warrants.

I push my earbuds in. Drown it out.

The playlist is the same one I’ve used for the last three fights.

Heavy. Low-frequency bass that vibrates in my molars and pushes everything else to the edges—the shouting from the main floor, the kid two chairs over cracking his knuckles like that’s going to help, the particular hum of a room full of men who paid cash to watch other men bleed.

The music doesn’t make me calm. It makes me narrow.

Funnels whatever’s thrashing around inside me into a single channel that points forward and doesn’t look at anything else.

I need the narrowing tonight.

Because without it, I’m in a closet. I’m always in a closet now.

Not this one—not the cinder block room with the folding chairs and the taped-up fighters.

The other one. The one in my house. The one with the door I pushed open sixteen days ago because my mother hadn’t answered her phone in nine hours and the house was too quiet and the silence had weight to it, the way silence does when something has happened that cannot be undone.

The rope. Her bare feet. The stillness that wasn’t sleep.

I close my eyes. Push the bass louder. Let the vibration eat the image before it finishes forming.

Focus. Calm. Focus. Calm.

The words don’t work the way they used to. They used to be a switch—flip it, go empty, step into the cage clean. Now they’re more like a hand over a wound. They don’t stop the bleeding. They just keep me from looking at it.

I open my eyes. Roll my neck. Crack the knuckles on my right hand, then my left.

The tape across my palms is already darkening with sweat.

Good. Sweat means the body is awake. Sweat means the adrenaline is doing its job.

Sweat means I’m still here, in this chair, in this room, and not in the closet with the rope and the bare feet and the silence that had weight.

My phone buzzes against my thigh. I pull it out. Kaiden. Third text in an hour.

Kaid: Where are you. Not a question. Answer your phone, X.

I lock the screen. Pocket it. Kaiden has been texting every day since it happened.

Since I showed up at his kitchen door with blood on my shirt and told his parents my mother was dead and his dad almost put my father through a wall.

Kaiden texts because Kaiden solves. That’s what he does—he looks at the mess and starts organizing it, putting the broken pieces into categories, assigning someone to each one.

He’s been trying to organize me for two weeks and I keep slipping through his system because I don’t fit in a category.

I’m not a problem that can be solved. I’m a fire that’s still burning and the only thing that makes the heat bearable is getting punched in the face by strangers in a warehouse in Bridgeport.

The shitty speakers crackle. Feedback whine. Then the voice—raspy, bored, the cadence of a man who’s been announcing cage fights since before I was born.

“Anderson and Hayes to the cage. Anderson and Hayes to the cage.”

I stand. Pull the earbuds out. The noise of the room hits me like a wall—crowd roaring, bass from the overhead speakers, the clang of the cage door opening.

I roll my shoulders. Bounce on the balls of my feet.

The body knows what to do even when the mind is somewhere else.

That’s the thing about fighting—you can automate the violence.

Train the muscles to respond without permission from the part of your brain that’s busy dying.

I’m halfway to the cage when I see her.

Teal-streaked blonde hair. Combat boots.

A denim jacket two sizes too big with band patches sewn onto the sleeves—Ashes of the Kings on the left, some underground punk act I don’t recognize on the right.

She’s standing near the south wall with her arms crossed and her chin up, looking at this filthy, dangerous room like she’s evaluating a venue for a concert she’s producing.

Penny.

The narrowing shatters. Everything I funneled into that single forward-pointing channel explodes sideways—Penny here, Penny in this building, Penny surrounded by men twice her size who have been drinking since six and fighting since eight and would look at a five-foot-six blonde in combat boots and see something to take.

I cross the distance in four strides. Grab her arm. Slam her back against the wall hard enough to rattle the pipes running overhead. “What the fuck are you doing here, Penelope.”

Not a question. A demand. Her full name—the one I use when she’s done something that could get her killed, which is more often than any one person should be capable of.

She doesn’t flinch. That’s the thing about Penny MacHale.

She doesn’t flinch at anything—not at underground fight clubs, not at boys twice her weight slamming her into walls, not at the particular brand of fury I specialize in when I’m scared and converting it to anger because anger is the only emotion my father ever taught me to speak.

“Watching you make a fool of yourself.” She shrugs against the wall, casual, like I’m holding a door for her instead of pinning her to cinder block. “Though honestly, the decor could use some work. Very murder-basement chic.”

“This is not a joke. You need to leave. Right now. It’s not safe for you here.”

“Oh, and it’s safe for you?” She tilts her head. The teal streaks catch the overhead fluorescent and throw color across her cheekbones. “I’m a big girl, X. I can handle a room full of sweaty dudes.”

“You can’t handle what’s in this room, Penny. These aren’t Edgewood guys. These are—”

“Dangerous? Scary? Unpredictable?” She counts them on her fingers. “Yeah. So are you, lately. And yet here I am.”

The sentence hits somewhere I don’t have armor.

I let go of her arm. Step back. My jaw works around words that won’t form because she’s right and she knows she’s right and the fact that she came here—tracked me to a warehouse in Bridgeport on a Friday night in October—means she knows about the fights, which means somebody told her, which means I’m going to kill whoever that was later.

“How did you find this place.”

“Reece mentioned it when I was at Danny’s.”

Reece. Fucking Reece Hall. The name lands in my chest like a fist.

“Why the fuck were you talking to Reece?”

Something flickers across her face. Too fast to catch. She covers it with the smile—the Penny smile, the one that deflects everything, the one she’s been perfecting since we were kids and she figured out that if you’re funny enough nobody asks if you’re okay.

“Relax, Dad. He was at Danny’s with Daisy. He mentioned the fights. I put two and two together.”

The speakers crackle again. “Anderson. Final call. Get in the cage or forfeit.”

“Fuck.” I grab her arm again—gentler this time, my hand finding the spot between her elbow and wrist where my fingers have always fit, since we were small enough that holding hands was just what you did.

I pull her through the crowd toward the cage, bodies parting because I’m six-two and shirtless and bleeding from last week’s split above my eye and nobody wants to be in my path right now.

I stop in front of the cage. Turn to her. She’s looking up at me with those eyes—grey-blue, enormous, the eyes that have been watching me since before I knew what watching meant.

“Stay right here. Right here, Penny. Where I can see you. Do not move. Do not talk to anyone. Do not—”

She puts her hand to her forehead in a salute. “Aye aye, Captain X.”

“This is serious.”

“So am I.” The smile dims. Just for a second. Underneath it, I see something I don’t want to see—worry. Real worry. The kind that lives in the eyes of a person who has known you since birth and is watching you dismantle yourself and doesn’t know how to make it stop.

The ref shoves me through the cage door. Chain-link rattles shut behind me.

I point at her through the fence. “Don’t. Fucking. Move.”

She blows me a kiss and I want to kill her. I shove the mouthguard in. Pull the gloves tight. Bounce.

The kid across the cage is maybe nineteen. Lean, wiry, the build of someone who fights hungry. He’s bouncing too—too fast, too much energy in the legs, the kind of tempo that burns fuel before the engine’s warm. I’ve seen this before. Anger fighters. They come in hot and flame out by round two.

Except there aren’t rounds here. There’s a bell, and then there’s a body on the mat, and the space between those two things is whatever happens.

The ref steps between us. Bored. A cigarette tucked behind his ear that he’ll light the second this is over. “You boys know the rules. There are no fucking rules.”

He laughs at his own joke. Nobody else does. He steps away. The bell sounds.

The kid comes at me like he’s late for something. Full sprint, arms wide, the recklessness of a fighter who thinks speed is a substitute for strategy. I sidestep. He crashes into the chain-link. The fence rattles and the crowd roars and I roll my neck, waiting.

He turns. Face red. Embarrassed. Embarrassment is worse than anger in a fighter because it makes you stupid and desperate simultaneously.