1. Ava
1
Ava
A man’s molar skitters across the concrete floor as frantic cheering erupts. In the sweltering underground, the screams meld into a deafening roar. The fighter drags himself back to his feet, spits blood, and is rewarded with another bare-knuckled punch to the face for his tenacity. His opponent falls on him and takes them both to the ground, sweeping them out of my sight.
By the sound of the crowd, whatever happens down there isn’t pretty.
At only five foot four, I have a distinct disadvantage against standing crowds, particularly crowds of bloodthirsty men baying for violence.
The underground fighting ring is a crude steel cage under smoky orange lighting, encircled by dozens of men with money and pride on the line. A dangerous combination. Inside, it’s a fight for survival. There are no referees to ensure a fair fight, no camera crews to broadcast what happens down here in the city’s underbelly. In a ring like this, everything goes, and for the sinfully rich and morally bankrupt, there is no money better than blood money.
“Hey,” Frankie says suddenly, her sharp words tearing my attention from the cage. “Don’t get distracted, and stay close. Can’t have anything happening to you.”
I nod and follow closer in the shadow of my chaperone. The girl I am with blends into a place like this better than I do. Frankie has a man’s name, a pixie cut, and piercings in her face and ears. More importantly, she’s been blooded into the mob family that runs this very ring, the family she and I both work for in exceptionally different ways.
This is how Frankie spends her days. Upholding shady deals, running drugs, keeping her aim sharp. She fought tooth and nail to have her position, to earn respect in a man’s world. She is a distinguished mob woman, a soldier right alongside the men.
While I…am the family nanny.
My most harrowing act of the day is patting a freshly fed baby on the back.
Compared to Frankie, I’m nothing. A foolish girl making a foolish mistake, out looking for trouble in the dead of night.
We aren’t the only women here, but our numbers are in the vast minority. Some girls serve drinks behind the bar or sell party favors. Escorts lounge with their tricks in the VIP balconies, high seats that keep the elite sequestered from the crowd and, for a price, offer a better view of the carnage taking place below. Women or not, in the middle of a fight like this, we aren’t the main attraction.
“That’s our guy,” she says, motioning toward a booth that has been built into the thick concrete walls. “The bookie.”
The man she gestures to has a bulldog’s frown as he sits behind a thick pane of spittle-stained bulletproof glass, with heavy chains on the steel door shielding him and his men from the rest of the compound. The man’s eyes are spaced so far apart, Frankie and I can walk side by side and still each be the focus of his miserable, heavy-jowl scowl.
Something has been off with the numbers the past couple of weeks, and Frankie has been given the duty of watching the collection and book balancing.
“He looks happy to see us,” I mutter.
“Nothing pisses off a man quite like being told he needs a babysitter. ’Specially when that babysitter is a woman. I don’t mind doing your basic heavy lifting, but being used for mental warfare? That shit’s my favorite .”
She gives me a wink and claps me on the back. “Let me break the ice.” She grins and saunters up to the window, hips swaying.
With Frankie’s attention on her mark, I turn my eyes back to the rest of the compound. I’ve never been here before, and it feels like exactly what it is—somewhere I shouldn’t be.
I begged Frankie to bring me with her tonight. For ten minutes, she preached at me about how that was a stupid, terrible, world-ending idea. Then, she caved and let me come along anyway.
She really only had one question: why ? Why did I want to come here of all places?
Looking around the room, I pretend not to know the answer. Not to see possibility written all over these grimy, crude walls.
Frankie is wrapped up in her conversation with the bookie when one of the fighters collapses for the final time. The reactions are mixed, but all of them are deafening. There are cries of financial devastation and whoops of barbaric, savage excitement.
“ He’s down, he’s down, he’s out !” an announcer wails, the excitement in his voice nearly blowing out the static-filled speakers.
I’m pushed back as the crowd breaks backward, giving room for them to pull the half-conscious fighter out. Two men drag his sweat-soaked body under the arms. I see a flash of his busted face, his bloodied mouth, his crushed nose. I take in the sight like a camera, a Polaroid flash, where it lingers behind my eyes in all of its gory clarity.
My stomach stays solid, my knees firm.
Everything used to terrify me. Blood, violence, men who were just a little too much taller than me. A place like this would have had me weeping in the corner, clinging to Frankie like a lost toddler and begging to go home.
Not anymore. Not since Vinny.
Since losing him, my emotions have been like a bad tooth: first agonizing, and then utterly painless. Killed off by the sheer extent of the damage. I can dig into the places where I once felt happiness or fear or devastation, but I always come up shortchanged.
But down here in the underground wilds, where everything is pushed to the extreme, pushed right to the edge—that speaks to me. Even the simple fact that I am not supposed to be here makes me all the more certain that I should be.
Maybe something bad will happen. Maybe I want it to.
I am convinced the universe can no longer hurt me, and I am playing chicken with it, daring one of us to flinch first.
I glance over my shoulder. Frankie stands on the other side of the glass now, hovering over the bookie’s shoulder as they review something, going through it line by line, like she’s teaching a kid how to read. His face is rage-red and greased in sweat.
A new eruption of cheers fills the compound.
The energy shifts. Electric and heavy. The men lingering in the shadowy corners of the room are lured in, drawing close and joining the crowd. All attention is pulled toward the center of the room.
The announcer’s voice scratches over the speakers again.
“Here it is gentlemen, our final fight of the night! The moment of truth you’ve all been waiting for! You’ve heard the rumors, the whispers...”
In the private booths overhead, spectators get off their couches and come right up to the windows. Something is happening. I sense it like a growing storm as the crowd around the ring thickens like worshippers gathering for mass, circling toward the spectacle.
“Nothin’s gonna be the same after this,” I overhear someone say, to which a thick Jersey accent answers,
“It’s about damn time.”
I’m still piecing together what the big deal is when the new fighters are brought out, the announcer’s voice rising to a frenzy, “And it is my pleasure to welcome back to the ring, the legend himself—”
A thunderous roar shakes the foundation of the room. I feel it in my chest, in the soles of my feet, in the back of my molars. It drowns the announcer’s words into a squeal of sharp interference. The fighter has entered on the other side of the room, and whoever he is, these madmen love him.
Even on my tiptoes, I struggle to see. The ring is elevated off the ground floor, but still, my best view is of the back of men’s heads.
The lights lower until the ring is highlighted in a dramatic, strobing spotlight. One light angles in my direction, casts the fighters in shifting silhouette.
As the man enters the cage from the other side, the room falls into an eerie hush. The silence feels reverent. The skin on my arms prickles with goosebumps.
On my side of the cage, the opponent ambles in. Upon his introduction, no one says a single word. He’s a stocky blonde built like an industrial fridge, but despite his mean mug and solid build, he has uncertainty in his eyes. He makes a show of marching toward the ring, pushing through the silent crowd that has turned to him, but I sense the fear in him. He’s already sweating.
Through the smoke, the lighting, the constant shuffle of the crowd in front of me—I see only the silhouette of the one who caused the stir. He prowls around the cage. I get glimpses of him in flashes, pieces of him here and there. The topography of a powerful back, all rolling muscle. The outline of a chiseled, grinning profile as it catches the light just right. He moves like a caged tiger, limber and sure-footed, always pacing, always moving, keeping his eyes on his opponent.
I wonder who he is. Why he makes such an impression.
There’s something off about it, something I can’t quite shake.
Even my eyes are locked on him. A magnetic pull I can’t resist.
Everyone in this room is dangerous in their own way, and yet it’s only when I look at him that the siren song of danger sings in my belly. I know how to recognize a bad time, and my instincts warn me that this man is darkness in skin. It draws me closer, aching for a better look.
The mystery man and his opponent circle each other, inching closer and closer. The tension in the room reaches a buzzing, mind-numbing frenzy. I feel it in my stomach. The sense that something is about to happen.
The tension snaps with a single, powerful lunge. Like a predator pouncing on prey, the outcome is decided in a single motion. Screams erupt as the crowd favorite pounces, landing a devastating shot. But the men do not fall and disappear into the floor where I can no longer see. The short blonde gets crowded up against the chain-link bars of the cage, pinned there as the hits rain down on him.
My eyes stay locked on the shadowy figure doing the damage, throwing those swings.
What is it about him? The way he moves. The shape of his outline. I’m hungry to see him. It feels almost familiar in some terrible way, the mere aura of him filling me with equal measures of wanting and dread.
I slip forward and merge into the crowd, propelled by that burning curiosity. The need to know, to finally see his face.
Through the crush of bodies, I inch my way, little by little, toward the front of the ring. The fight is briefly obscured as I’m swallowed in the crowd, nudging my way through the men whose eyes are only on the bloodbath in front of them.
It’s already over. I can hear it in the crowd. There’s no coming back from this. Even if the beaten man is still on his feet, it’s only the cage that keeps him pinned there, half-standing and half-slumped. His full bodyweight is leveraged against the crisscrossing metal wire, skin bulging through the grid, the cage rattling like a sentient, snarling beast with every hit.
That nagging uncertainty in my belly doubles, draws me nearer to the front. I squirrel my way through the crowd and push out to the foundation of the cage. I’m close enough now to hear the punches as they land. Knuckles on bone. No breath to be knocked out of him. And they keep coming. The crowd begins to roar in unison with each strike, urging him on, his punches the tempo of their awful chant.
It’s merciless.
He’s not going to stop.
The frenzy in the room is a call for blood, urging him on.
Even in the underground, it’s not often that a fight ends in death. It’s bad for the family, and therefore bad for the business. But the chance must always remain, because it’s that chance that brings money to the table and eyes to the ring.
The crowd’s excitement spurs on the carnage.
When you walk into a ring like this, your life is already on the line. You know that from the moment you cross the threshold. I don’t have much sympathy for someone who puts themselves in that situation, but the reality is if that man dies, the Mori family is going to have to clean up the mess.
“Enough,” I hear myself yell, my tiny voice lost in the chaos. I’m pushed forward by the crowd at my back. My hips dig into the concrete barrier standing between me and the cage. I have nowhere to go.
Another strike, and the beaten man makes a terrible noise. It might be an attempt to surrender.
Goddammit .
I vault the low wall separating the crowd from the ring. The cage towers over me. I am cast in the shadow of the collapsed fighter, who has sunk lower and lower with each hit. I hook my fingers into the chain-link and haul myself up.
“I said enough!” I yell as I pull myself to standing, getting my feet under me and slamming my hand on the rattling cage.
The man’s next punch flinches. He freezes mid-motion as our eyes lock.
The crowd roars unhappily at my interference, a deafening boo that crashes at my back. I barely hear it. My expectations are reeling, reality shattering as I meet that gaze.
I feel as though I have missed a step in the dark. My heart flies into my throat. I was right. It wasn’t just some fantasy or paranoia gnawing at my gut. My instincts hit hard and true.
I know him.
I know those masculine angles, that body thickened by natural muscle. His once wild, dark hair has been buzzed short now, blending down into a tight, clean beard. Deep-set eyes bore into me, and it’s those eyes that I remember most. Eyes that have more cruelty than color, a washed-out gray. Age has sharpened his looks into a fine, dangerous point, as if he was carved out by loving hand that had only a switchblade to work with.
Nico Mori, the former don of the Mori family.
It should be logical that Nico might fight in the underground ring managed by his own family. It’s simple, basic arithmetic that all makes perfect sense—except for one tiny, troublesome variable:
Nico has been serving time in federal prison for the last seven years on a murder charge, and he was not supposed to be released anytime soon. Maybe ever . But here he is, in a much different kind of cell, killing another man.
But Nico is something far worse than a murderer set loose and walking the streets—he is my embarrassing childhood crush.
Universe one, Ava zero.
It feels as if he’s been manifested from those humiliating memories that used to creep into my thoughts right before I would fall asleep, and he recognizes me in the same moment, to the same furious backdrop of men booing and screaming interference.
For the first time, maybe in my entire life, I hold his gaze.
I am no longer the timid little girl barely out of puberty who couldn’t be in the same room as him without blushing, who was so sure that Nico was one of the most handsome men to ever walk the earth. Unfortunately, that part hasn’t changed.
As a teenager growing up in the Mori house, I lived in perpetual fear that Nico was going to notice me. I was awkward and timid, with no curves or charisma, and he always had some comment about how spineless I was. His cruel little remarks buried under my skin like splinters, but they never made him less attractive, less magnetic.
I really hated him, and I really liked him.
Here we both are, seven years later, and my body, my subconscious, they still recognize him. How humiliating, that a man can have that kind of effect on someone. A long-term, chronic condition. Incurable.
The aching heat in my belly still feels that magnetic pull toward him, the first thing I have really felt in months. It’s so powerful and unexpected that it rips the air out of my lungs.
I am so stunned, I do not notice the security man behind me until he tears me down from the cage and then throws me back, straight into the clutches of the furious crowd.