3. Lucas
THREE
Lucas
“Oh god,” Frank whines as the scarred fighter staggers across the ring. Around us, the crowd chants, “Beast! Beast! Beast! Beast!”
He makes it through the gate on his feet, but then he falls on the stairs. The guards rush after him, but it’s all beyond my line of sight now.
“He won,” Frank mutters, close enough to my ear that I can hear him over the crowd. “How the fuck did he win?”
I don’t have the whole picture, but a few things are obvious. Frank paid that guard to drug the collared fighter so he’d lose. Frank must have bet on the other fighter, probably a lot. And now, because the collared fighter won, Frank must have lost a bunch of money.
But that’s his problem. It has nothing to do with me.
So why the hell did he bring me in the first place?
I have no idea, but there’s a bad feeling squirming around in my gut that says there’s a reason, even if I don’t know what it is. I edge away from him, gauging the distance to the exit.
The doors were barred and guarded by the time Frank and I emerged from the locker room. There was no chance to escape then, but I need to get out now. Walking twenty-some miles in a dark drizzle is looking more appealing every second.
But Frank shadows me like he’s been doing since before the fight. When I try to duck away into the crowd, he grabs my sweatshirt hood.
I spin and knock his hand away. “I don’t know what the fuck you want with me but—”
“I put a roof over your head for fourteen goddamn years,” he cuts in like he’s been holding onto the words all night, waiting to say them. “Do you have any idea how much a kid costs? You’re not even mine.”
“Yeah, I fucking know that. You’ve told me a million times. So why did you fucking call me if—”
“Because it’s time for you to pay me back, you ungrateful little shit.”
I stare at him, dumbfounded. “I mop floors . I don’t have any fucking money!”
Frank looks me up and down sneeringly. “Obviously. But you have your pretty face, which is worth something, just like your mother’s was.”
I recoil. I don’t know exactly what he’s getting at, but it feels off. Bad. I have to get out of here. Away from him.
“Mr. Prescott,” a man says from behind me. “You need to come with us.”
I spin, catching sight of two men, both dressed in black, both bearing guns. I definitely want nothing to do with this. I bolt.
Frank lunges for me but misses.
“Grab him!” he shrieks.
I only make it a few strides before a hand catches my sweatshirt. I try to twist free but freeze when a gun nudges my back.
“Don’t make this ugly,” the guard warns.
“Whatever this is has nothing to do with me!”
The only answer I get is the gun bumping my spine and the order, “Walk.”
I don’t have any choice but to let the guard push me through the crowd to a set of stairs. My heart is pounding so hard I’m dizzy, but somehow I make it to the top.
There, I try to stop because I don’t like what I see, but the guard shoves me forward.
I stumble across a balcony set up like a lounge. I glimpsed the balcony when Frank and I first walked into the converted warehouse. I assumed it was some kind of VIP seating but didn’t think much of it.
But this is more than VIP.
The well-dressed men seated on the leather couches with drinks and cigars aren’t businessmen like Frank. They’re not weaselly, low-level schemers.
They’re organized crime.
Frank gets dragged past me and forced to his knees in front of a man with salt and pepper hair wearing jeans and a black t-shirt. He’s the most dressed down of the men, and clearly in charge.
“Well, Mr. Prescott,” he says with a slightly lilting accent. “You owe me quite a bit of money now, don’t you?”
“It was a mistake—”
“That it certainly was.” The man’s fingers drum on the leather arms of his chair. “The word is, you have other debts. How do you plan to pay this one?”
Frank gulps visibly. “I-I do have a plan. The boy. Seventeen. A virgin. With that face—”
Whoa, whoa, whoa. My brain skips straight past Frank’s lies. The fact that I’m twenty-four and not a virgin doesn’t really matter right now—because what the fuck ?
I stumble back. The gun bumps my spine. I jump forward. Then I jump away. I don’t think. I just run.
I only make it a few steps before a huge body tackles me to the ground. I flail and shout as I’m hauled to my feet, grabbed in a hold from behind. My arms are pinned to my sides, but I kick my legs desperately. Something solid thumps me in the head. White light bursts. My thoughts scatter.
I’m not out completely, but I’m loose and sloshy inside myself as I’m hauled back to the gathering.
“I’m willing to sell him,” Frank is arguing frantically. “Brothel work or private use. You don’t find a face like that just anywhere.”
The man in charge, who’s been sitting back and watching all this like he’s mildly entertained, leans forward in his chair, getting businesslike. He nods to one of the guards, who grabs Frank. Frank scrambles a little at first but quickly stills when a gun prods his skull.
The man in charge now wears a cold, unamused expression. He says, “You tried to have my Beast drugged, Mr. Prescott. You tried to cheat me.”
“What! No, I’d never—”
“My man Briggs told me all about it, and of course you were seen entering the locker room. You see, I’d kill you for it, slow and painful, creatively, but then I’d never see a penny of your debt. So it’ll be one finger tonight—”
“No! Mr. Crowley, please —”
The boss, Crowley, grabs Frank’s hand and yanks it forward. “Be a man about it, Mr. Prescott, or I’ll take your cock instead.”
“Oh my god!” Frank shouts as Crowley pulls a pair of bolt cutters from beside his chair. None of the men around him react, but Frank wets himself, staining the front of his trousers dark. Crowley only shakes his head.
“I’ll be taking the lad as well, Mr. Prescott, but not for his pretty face. Pretty or no, he’s too old, nowhere close to seventeen. But his hands can serve me. He’ll still have ten fingers, see, and he’d better use those to keep my Beast alive. Because if the Beast dies, the boy dies. And I can see you don’t care much about his life, but you might care about his murder—when I frame you for it.”
Frank is blubbering now, beyond words, maybe beyond understanding what Crowley is telling him. I’m not sure I understand either. On a certain level, I do. But on another, I simply can’t see this as real.
It’s a dream. A nightmare.
I’m so numbed by that I barely even wince when Crowley uses the bolt cutters to lop off one of Frank’s fingers. Frank screams. Crowley sets the bolt cutters on an end table and tosses a handkerchief at Frank as the guard lets go of him. Frank collapses, still wailing.
Crowley says to one of the guards, “When the doc is finished with Beast, have him cauterize Mr. Prescott’s finger. Consider it a courtesy, Mr. Prescott. It’ll save you a trip to the ER, along with all the uncomfortable questions.”
Crowley looks at me. “As for you, lad, you’ve got some work to do.”
I seem to have frozen in the guard’s hold. I’m watching but not seeing. This isn’t real. It can’t be.
The hold releases me. My knees wobble as I’m forcibly turned. The gun nudges me in the back. I stumble forward. Somehow I find my balance. Somehow I start walking.
I only sort of register that I’m heading toward a closed steel door. I only sort of hear Frank crying behind me and the more distant thump of the techno beat. I’m half outside myself, numb. Disbelieving.
I stop at the closed door. The gun nudges me again. “Open it.”
I obey woodenly, then my heart jumps. A concrete stairwell, brutally lit with bare bulbs, yawns before me.
I don’t want to go down there.
“Move,” the guard orders. “There’s no point in fighting.”
I know that.
It doesn’t matter that this has nothing to do with me. I don’t even bother saying it. I have no protection from this. No one will shield me.
No one ever has.
So when the muzzle of the gun prods me forward, I go stumbling down the stairs. I go down and down into the dimmer space of a basement.
A long row of steel bars divides the room in half.
On one side, the guard from the locker room—Briggs, Crowley called him—stands watch. His open half of the room ends in a cinderblock wall with another door. Between that closed-off room and the stairwell, a long corridor runs away into the darkness.
But I’m not heading toward that room or that dark corridor, so none of that really matters. What matters is what lies on the other side of those bars.
A cell.
Within, the fighter is lying unconscious and nude on a mattress. Another man, a doctor I guess, is kneeling beside him stitching a wound.
The cell is large and rectangular, like half the room was sectioned off to form it. The fighter and doctor are at the far end along the narrow wall.
Bloody gauze litters the ground around the doctor. A medical kit lies open at his side. At the head of the mattress stands an IV pole hung with a bag, and a line runs down to the still figure.
The doctor doesn’t look up from his work, but the waiting guard, Briggs, speaks to the guard who brought me.
“What the fuck is this?”
“Boss wants him tending the Beast after the doc is done. Took him off Prescott.”
Briggs narrows his eyes at me. Maybe because I know there was a syringe in his pocket? I wonder if it’s still there. I wonder if it’s empty. Probably. If he hadn’t intended to drug the fighter, there would’ve been no reason to have the syringe with him at all. He could simply have taken Frank’s money.
So Briggs might have told Crowley that Frank simply tried to bribe him to drug the collared fighter, but the truth is likely that he actually did it.
And the fighter won anyway.
The doctor stands up and starts gathering up the bloody gauze. He puts it in a disposal bag along with his bloodied latex gloves. He zips his kit and hauls it to the gate. Briggs unlocks the gate and lets the doctor out.
The doctor eyes me coldly over the top of his glasses. “You have any medical training?”
“Huh?”
He sighs. “I’ll take that as a no.”
The guard who brought me says, “You’ll have to give him instructions. Unless you prefer to tend the Beast yourself once he wakes up?”
The doctor pushes his glasses up with a finger. “You know I only visit when he’s doing his Sleeping Beauty impersonation. I’ll bring supplies though.”
The guard who brought me informs him, “You have another visit to make.”
“Finger?” the doctor guesses.
“What are you, doc, psychic?”
“Call it an educated guess.”
Briggs holds the gate open and gestures me inside. Adrenaline spikes. I back up, bumping into the guard who brought me. He shoves me toward the opening.
I stumble forward, catching myself against the bars. “Please!” I cry out, unable to stop myself from protesting despite knowing it won’t do any good. “I don’t have anything to do with this!”
Briggs kicks me in the hip and sends me crashing to the concrete floor inside the cell. “You do now.”
The gate clangs shut. I fly to the bars.
The doctor and the guard who brought me here are leaving.
“I know you drugged him,” I whisper desperately at Briggs, my eyes darting between him and the others as they reach the stairs. “Let me out or I’ll tell them.”
Briggs snorts. “Your word would mean as much as the Beast’s. And you’ll be dead by morning anyway.” His head tilts as he takes a good look at me. “Kind of a shame really—pretty boy.”