Chapter Thirty-Six
Las Vegas was an affront to every aesthetic sensibility Barnaby had ever cultivated.
The heat hit him first, a wall of dry, manufactured warmth that rolled up from the casino floor and settled against his skin like cling film.
The MGM Grand smelled of carpet cleaner, cigarette smoke, and something chemical and sweet that he suspected was pumped through the ventilation system to keep people disoriented.
The noise was even worse. Slot machines shrieked in overlapping key signatures all around him.
Vidal had chartered a private jet and handled the logistics, arranging for a car from McCarran and booking the honeymoon suite at the Bellagio for him and Lex.
Vidal had done all of this without asking for permission, because Vidal operated on the principle that nothing could go badly when he was so obviously right.
He was sitting beside Barnaby now, wearing sunglasses indoors, his legs crossed, his camel coat folded across his lap like a blanket.
“This,” Vidal announced, surveying the MGM Grand Garden Arena with proprietary satisfaction, “is the greatest thing I have ever done for you. Including giving you that dildo.”
Barnaby did not dignify this with a response, primarily because it was true.
They’d arrived late, because the jet had been held on the tarmac at Farnborough for ninety minutes.
By the time they reached the arena, the fourth round was underway and the doors were closed.
Security had been immovable. Two men in black polo shirts had informed them that no entry was permitted during rounds.
Barnaby stood in the corridor with his hood up and his mobile in his hand.
In desperation, he pulled up Linda Murphy’s number on the screen, his thumb hovering over the call button for long enough that Vidal had made a noise of physical anguish beside him.
The thing was, he didn’t know where the two of them stood.
He’d ended things with her son, and the tabloids had made Barnaby the sympathetic party in the breakup, which meant Linda had spent three weeks fielding press coverage that painted Lex as a villain.
She might blame Barnaby for the public dimension of it.
She might simply not want him here, distracting her boy.
He pressed call and Linda picked up on the first ring.
“Barnaby?” The arena noise rose behind her voice. “Everything all right, love?”
His throat closed. The love undid him, the way it was delivered without hesitation, as though nothing that had happened had altered her accounting of him one bit.
“I’m — yes. I’m here. I’m at the arena. We’ve just arrived, my friend and I, and the doors are closed.
Security won’t…” He stopped. He was rambling, which he never did, and the fact that he was rambling told him exactly how far outside his own composure he’d travelled.
“I’m sorry. I should have called ahead. I don’t know if you’d even want me here, given everything, but I —”
“Which door?”
He blinked. “Sorry?”
“Which door are you at, Barnaby? North or south entrance?”
“I — north, I think.”
“Stay there.”
She appeared three minutes later, small and fierce in her sequinned jacket.
Her eyes were dark and quick and absolutely a mirror of Lex’s.
She seized Barnaby by the elbow with a grip astonishing for a woman barely five foot three, and marched them past the security bollards.
One of Lex’s entourage was displaced from his ringside seat with a look from Linda, and a second seat materialised through a process Barnaby didn’t fully follow.
“Oh, I can’t look,” Linda said, her fingernails digging into his forearm through the cotton. “Tell me when it’s over, love.”
“Mrs Murphy, if you look away every time he’s hit, you’ll miss the entire fight.”
“I know, love. That’s the point. I’ve been doing this for twelve years and I still can’t watch.
His nan was the same. She used to turn the telly to face the wall during his amateur bouts.
Just sat there listening to the commentary like it was the shipping forecast.” Her grip tightened.
“Is he bleeding? Don’t tell me if he’s bleeding. ”
“He’s bleeding.”
“Oh, God.”
Barnaby leaned forward. There was a cut above Lex’s left eyebrow, a dark seam that the cutman was working between rounds.
Lex sat on his stool with his head tilted back while Malik murmured at him, and even from thirty feet away Barnaby could read the set of his shoulders, wound tight across the trapezius.
He knew that body. He’d mapped it with his hands in the dark at Chatham House, tracing the architecture of muscle and scar tissue while Lex lay still and let him explore. The bell rang. Lex stood, and Barnaby’s hands clenched in his lap.
Morozov was enormous. The reality of watching a man four inches taller and two stone heavier than Lex throw punches with genuine intent to cause him harm unnerved Barnaby.
Every exchange made the physics of the mismatch visceral: Morozov’s jab covered distance that Lex had to work twice as hard to close, his right hand arriving from an angle that exploited every inch of his reach advantage.
Lex cut inside. He threw a body shot that Barnaby felt in his own ribs, the thud carrying across the arena floor, and Morozov’s mouthguard showed as his jaw slackened. Barnaby’s fist punched the air. Linda screamed beside him, a noise that combined maternal terror with feral pride.
“Get him, Lex! Get him, baby!”
Vidal had removed his sunglasses. His dark eyes were enormous, tracking the fight. “He is very good at hitting people,” Vidal observed. “I slapped him several times when he came to your door, you know. He took it well.”
“You slapped him once, Vidal.”
“It was a very thorough slap. It contained multitudes.”
“He’s the best heavyweight in the world,” Barnaby said, and the pride in his voice was so naked that Vidal turned to look at him.
In the tenth round, Morozov’s left hook caught Lex on the temple with a crack that carried through the arena like a starting pistol. Lex’s body drifted sideways, his balance gone. “Stay up…” he urged. The words came out raw. “Stay up, Lex. Move.”
Lex moved, rolling away from the right hand that whistled past his jaw by inches, and clinching before Morozov could reload.
The referee broke them. Lex reset, shook his head once, and drove a straight right into Morozov’s face.
It split the Russian’s eyebrow open and sent a spray of blood across both men’s chests.
Linda sobbed into Barnaby’s shoulder. Vidal had both hands over his mouth. Barnaby watched, and forced himself to keep breathing, refusing to look away.
The last two rounds belonged to Lex. Barnaby knew it the way he knew when a horse was going to clear a fence.
Lex’s jab was metronomic, and his body shots had slowed Morozov to a trudge.
When the final bell rang, Lex’s arms dropped to his sides, his chest heaving.
He stood in the centre of the ring with blood streaking his face, and yet he was still the most beautiful thing Barnaby had ever seen.
The decision was unanimous. The arena erupted.
Linda screamed and threw her arms around Barnaby’s neck, pulling him down to her height with a strength that should not have been physically possible.
He held her while she cried into his collarbone, her sequinned jacket scratching against his chin.
Vidal was on his feet, applauding with both hands high above his head.
In the ring, Lex raised his arms. Malik was beside him, gripping his shoulders, shouting something into his ear.
Lex grinned, wide and stupid and triumphant.
This was the grin of a boy from Barking who’d just beaten a man four inches taller than him in front of sixteen thousand people, and his first instinct in this moment of victory was to turn toward the third row to find his mother.
He found her wrapped around Barnaby, her sequinned arm locked through his, her head against his shoulder.
The grin dropped off his face like he’d been hit.
Lex’s gloved hand came up and pressed flat against his own chest, over his heart.
He held it there. His mouth moved, but the arena noise swallowed whatever he said.
It didn’t matter. Barnaby knew the shape of his name on those lips.
Barns.
Barnaby was on his feet before he’d made the conscious decision to stand. Linda’s sequinned arm slipped from his as he rose, and she looked up at him with mascara tracking down both cheeks. She pressed his hand once, then let go.
The aisle was narrow and choked with people. Barnaby moved through them. At some point, someone grabbed his elbow and he shook them off without looking. A camera swung towards him and he walked past it.
At ringside, the ropes rose chest-high and the apron was slick under the lights. Two security guards flanked the corner post, earpieces in, their arms folded. One of them stepped forward with his palm raised, and Barnaby stopped.
“Sir, you can’t—”
“Let him through.” Malik’s voice came from inside the ring. He was already at the ropes, pulling the middle one up and pushing the bottom one down with his foot to widen the gap. “Get in here, son.”
Barnaby’s entry into the ring wasn’t elegant.
The ropes caught his jacket and his knee hit the canvas as he ducked through.
For a fraction of a second he was on all fours in a boxing ring in Las Vegas with three hundred cameras pointed at him.
Lex caught him before he could fall face first into the canvas.
His gloved hands closed around Barnaby’s arms and hauled him upright.
Barnaby’s palms landed flat against Lex’s chest. The skin beneath his fingers was slick with sweat and hot to the touch. Blood from the cut above Lex’s eyebrow had dried in a dark rivulet down the left side of his face, and his left eye was swollen half-shut.
He pushed Lex’s hair back from his forehead.
His thumb traced the swollen ridge above Lex’s left eye, then the cut, mapping the damage with his fingertips.
Lex’s breath stuttered under the touch, his battered face tipping into Barnaby’s palm.
Carefully, he put both hands on Lex’s jaw, tilted his face down, and kissed him in the ring, under the lights, in front of sixteen thousand people and however many million more were watching at home.
The arena noise surged, but Barnaby was aware of it only as pressure against his eardrums, because the world had narrowed to the heat of Lex’s mouth and the taste of salt and copper on his lips. Lex’s gloved hand found the back of his neck and pulled him closer.
Lex broke the kiss. His forehead pressed against Barnaby’s, and his breath came in rough, uneven gusts against Barnaby’s mouth. His swollen eye was leaking. “What are you doing here, Barnaby?” His voice was wrecked.
Barnaby’s hands were still on Lex’s face. His thumbs rested at the corners of Lex’s jaw, and he could feel the muscle working beneath the skin, as he tried very hard not to fall apart in front of a stadium. He pulled Lex’s head down until their foreheads were touching. “I’m taking the win, Lex.”
Lex’s face crumpled. He pulled away just long enough to receive the belt from the official waiting at his shoulder, and then, instead of raising it above his head the way every heavyweight champion in history had done before him, he turned back to Barnaby and laid it around his neck.
The belt was enormous. It hung past Barnaby’s sternum, the gold faceplate cold against his collarbone, heavy enough to pull his shoulders forward. His hair was wrecked, and there was blood on his mouth.
Lex gripped the belt’s leather straps on either side of Barnaby’s neck and used them to pull him in.
Their foreheads met again, and Lex’s split lip curved into a grin.
Lex kissed him again. Barnaby let it all happen in the open, under the blinding lights and the cameras, obliterating every boundary he’d ever built to keep himself safe, because he was done with safe.
“I gave up four million, three hundred and twenty-five thousand quid for this kiss,” Lex said grinning against Barnaby’s mouth. “Worth it.”
END