by Piper Rayne
“What the fuck. You know nothing about me.”
“I know enough. You’re out of your depth here. You can’t just decide you want to slum it because mommy and daddy aren’t giving you any attention.”
Her eyes narrow at me. “You didn’t seem to be complaining last night.”
“I’m not talking about me. That date you went on, he could have…” I tail off. I’m not explaining it the best way. Probably best to just come out and say it. “You should be at school. This is no place for someone like you.”
I’m no guy for someone like you.
Like a storm cloud rising, her eyes darken. I can almost taste her fury. “Go fuck yourself.”
“I’m just calling it out as I see it. You know I’m right.” I say, wanting to kiss the anger out of her but stopping myself in time. This is what it must feel like to be in the eye of the storm. She can’t stay. This world would break her, and I won’t let that happen.
She glares but the anger is evaporating quickly only to be replaced by a cool assuredness. “You’re so far from the truth you can’t even see what’s right in front of you.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. What am I missing? Why are you really here?”
She stares me in the eyes. “It’s none of your fucking business.”
I cock a brow.
She considers me for a long moment. At last, she lets out a defeated sigh, looking up at me again, her guard slightly lower.“Fine,” she says finally. “If you must know I’m looking for my brother.”
“Your brother?” I ask, intrigued.
“Dylan Hunter, a pit fighter like you. He used to fight in the eastern arenas until he got himself involved with the Twins. His last fight was at The Pit. I knew he lost that night; I just don’t know if he survived. He disappeared without any explanation after.”
And it all starts to make sense; her questions, her innocence.
“You came here to find him.”
She nods, and then lifts her eyes to mine. “Don’t say anything to Elias or Alexei. They have no idea.”
“What does your family think about this?”
“Screw them, it’s their fault he was fighting in the first place.”
I rack my brains to think of a fighter called Hunter but all I see in my mind’s eye are dead bodies. I could’ve been the one to slaughter her brother.
I toss her ID at her. “And how was it that you managed to sneak into the fight club as a qualified doctor in the first place?” The Twins won’t take lightly to her lying her way in.
“I guess I got lucky,” she says with a shrug. “Once I managed to fabricate a fake ID, I got the job easily. I’m top of my class.”
I’m pretty sure the short skirt helped more than her being top of her class, but I don’t say that.
“Fuck, Rae,” I say, admiring her audacity yet feeling exasperated at the same time. “We need to keep a tight lid on this. If anyone finds out…”
“Trust me, I know. That dickhead from last night—”
“You mean the guy who tried to mug you or date you?” I start.
“He wasn’t your average mugger.”
“So that fucker was your date.” The fury is back, making my voice raise.
She frowns and lets out a breath. “Stop saying that. He wasn’t a real date. He was just some guy who said he could help.”
“Help find your brother?”
She sniffs, clearly annoyed with me for some reason. “I’ve been asking around as discretely, you know, probing for information as to the whereabouts of my brother. I got a message from an ex-fighter; said he knew what I was looking for. When I got there, he straight up tried to rob me. When I screamed and kneed him in the balls, he tried to steal my bag.”
I can’t help but shake my head. “You’re lucky I came along.”
“I was handling him.”
“You were doing shit and you know it. You need to go home.”
She glares at me, shaking her head. “Not without my brother.”
I sigh, why did I think this was going to be easy. “If I help you find out what happened to your brother, will you stop digging and just go home?”
She nods and relief washes over me.
“It’s not going to be straight forward,” I say. “A lot of people go missing in The Pit all the time or decide this life is better than the one they came from.”
She sucks in a breath. “Is that what happened to you?”
I give her a look. Now is not the time to talk about my pitiful past.
“I just told you everything about me. If you wanted to rat me out to the Twins, I couldn’t stop you. Don’t you think it’s only fair to share your secrets with me?” she urges.
“What do you want to know?”
She shrugs. “How did you end up working for those two assholes? Did you wake up one day and think… oh I’d like to kill someone and get paid to do it?”
Her words are like fucking arrows, going straight for the heart. “Who the fuck knows. My memory only goes so far back a few years or so. Before that, there’s absolutely nothing.”
She gives me a dubious look. “What? So nothing, as in completely blank nothing? You honestly don’t remember who you were before this at all?”
“I know I was a fighter; I can’t deny my body knows how to move. And I have these scars…” I gesture to my chest.
She traces the faint lines with her fingers and then stares at me with eyes like two bottomless pools; if I’m not careful, I’ll fall so far and so deep into them and I won’t come out again.
“Do you think…it’s like amnesia?” she asks after a pause, her brow furrowed, hands still upon me.
“Maybe. It’s possible,” I croak. Trying to ignore the feel of her fingers and what it’s doing to my groin. Now is not the time, Darius. “Retrograde amnesia is the closest thing I can think to compare it to. When I woke up at the clinic a few years back, Elias was there when I came round to tell me I’d been knocked out during training with him, and had been unconscious for days. Apparently, they’d been worried sick. I had no idea who he was. It turns out, the drugs the docs gave me to help reduce the swelling of my brain, wiped my memory.”
“And you didn’t think to check out this for a fucking fact?” Rae exclaims.
“Why would I?” I say, feeling stupid for even saying it. She has a fucking point. The Twins do not worry about anyone but themselves.
“Oh my fucking God, so you really don't have no clue who you are?”
I grimace. “It doesn’t matter, I’ve given up on my old life anyway, whatever it was. It’s enough that I know what I enjoy and don’t enjoy. I’m still me however you look at it.”
Rae continues to glare for a moment, seemingly deep in thought, and then sits up in the bed.
“We need to go down to the clinic,” she says.
“What, now?”
“I want to check something in the club medical database.”
“Why the fuck would you want to do that now?” I ask, pissed off at her reaction to what I’ve never told anyone.
She nods as she slides off the bed. I watch her traipse naked across the room, temporarily forgetting about any of our problems as her glorious, perfectly pert butt cheeks dance for me with every step. I’m hard again as she bends to retrieve her clothes from the floor. She looks at me as she starts to get dressed, eyes shining.
“I want to get some spare clothes. I can’t turn up for work like this.” She gestures to her half naked body. “And I want to try and look you up and see if your record history has the blow to the head Elias said you had. If it’s there, then…”
“The Twins might be telling the truth?” I say, brow raised.
“Exactly!” It dawns on me then, just how much of a genius she is.
First thing I notice as we get down to sub-level one, is that the door to the clinic is already open.
“Did you lock up last night?” I say, slowing down my pace.
“Yes, why?” She looks over and falters. Befo
re she can rush toward the door, I make a motion for her to stop and be quiet. It’s still early, too early for the Twins to have arrived or any of the night staff.
I step cautiously until I’m level with the frosted glass, and peer around the door. The whole place is trashed. As I move inside, all I see are box files upturned, papers littering the floor, and broken glass almost everywhere—someone was looking for something.
“Shit! What the hell?” Rae appears in the doorway, eyes wide and horrified.
“Don’t come in just yet,” I say to her as I pick my way across the debris. I check the back room and bathroom to make sure the place is completely empty before coming back to the main examination room.
“Whoever it was is long gone. Looks like they were looking for something. Is anything missing, do you know?”
Rae shakes her head. “I don’t know, maybe. Shit! How did they get in?”
“All the windows and doors are still intact. It looks like they had a key.”
Rae frowns and then rummages around in her bag. “My keys, they’re gone.” She sighs and rubs her hand her over face. “Oh fuck, that guy from last night… we forgot to call the police. He must have swiped them? Shall I call Elias and Alexei?”
I think about it for a moment, then shake my head. “No, let’s keep this to ourselves for now. Let’s just clean up, see if anything is missing.”
* * *
It doesn’t take long to straighten everything out and right the room. Nothing seems to be missing, strangely. Rae gets changed and then sits at her desk, turning on to her computer.
“Are you checking the database?” I ask, coming up beside her.
“Yes,” she says, continuing to tap as a search bar comes up on the screen. “We're supposed to record each and every injury sustained, and treatment recommended for every fighter that comes into the clinic. If your injury was caused at the club, it should be in here.”
She types my name quickly and hits enter. A picture of me shows up on screen along with various data points. A lot of it is blank. She scrolls down to the section showing medical history and selects ‘all archived records.’ “The system defaults to the last year of data so I need to access the archives for anything earlier,” she explains.
She clicks a few more buttons and then she frowns.
“What the hell?”
“What?” I ask, craning my neck to look over her shoulder.
“I found you,” she says. “Except... it’s not letting me access your archived files.”
ACCESS DENIED, HIGHER AUTHORIZATION NEEDED flashes up in red.
“Is that normal?” I ask, a sinking feeling beginning to spread in the pit of my stomach.
“No,” Rae says, shaking her head. “I’ve never had it happen to me before until now. Not once... I have only been here a couple of weeks though.”
“Maybe the system is down?” I offer, grasping at straws.
“Maybe.” She starts tapping again.
“What happens when you look up your brother on there?”
“No results,” she says with a sigh. “Trust me, I’ve tried”
“Do you have a picture of him?”
She grabs her phone, swipes a few times, and then turns the screen toward me. Smiling into the camera, with his arm around Rae, is a man around my age with steel blue-gray eyes and hair as jet black as Rae’s.
“Do you recognize him?”
I shake my head. For a moment, I felt something, a familiar thread of memory. But as soon as I tried to bring it to the surface, it dissolved away.
I sigh and run my fingers through my hair. Inside, I feel like I want to punch something. Usually at this time of day I’m training, burning the excess energy away on the bag. All this talk about my nonexistent past is pissing me off.
“Okay,” she says, standing up and pacing the room. “So, something is up. My brother is missing, and I was attacked by someone promising to deliver information about him but instead they wanted the keys to the clinic. Your entire life looks to have been erased and the medical information we need to prove it is being held under lock and key…”
“My entire life hasn’t been erased,” I snap at her. Why the fuck is she so intent on digging up my past? I don’t see how this connects to her missing brother.
“We don't know that. Someone out there doesn’t want us to know what happened to you.”
“Or this could all just be a coincidence?” I say, maybe a little too coldly. I’m tired and I need to train. I can feel my body starting to buzz with the need to hit something.
“No. It’s not. Whoever is orchestrating this has something to lose,” says Rae. “Otherwise, why go to all the trouble?” She rubs her chin, deep in thought. “At least we know it’s not the Twins.”
“Because?”
“They don’t need to break in here. They have a key…” Her eyes narrow and lose focus. She’s ignoring me now, in some kind of place in her head that I can’t reach. “I need to check out the Twins’ apartment. I saw someone strange driving into their garage last night.”
“No fucking way,” I say, more forcibly than I mean to. “No more snooping around. After what happened last night, you need to lay low, keep on doing your job. If anyone should do the investigating, it should be me.”
Her brow furrows. “Because I’m a girl?”
“Because…” I try to come up with an answer she’ll accept. “I already know what the Twins want. I can use that as leverage.”
“What do they want?”
“Bigger, bloodier fights. They draw in more of a crowd.”
“Bloodier? No, that’s too dangerous.”
I elevate one of my brows. “Hardly…And they’ll owe me if I agree to it. I can use that to find out about your brother,” I say, brushing off her dangerous comment.
She narrows her eyes, her nose doing that cute wrinkling thing. “Why would you do that for me?”
I shake my head, breathing out any frustration building.“Just let me do this for you. I want to help.”
She pauses, looking at me as though considering me for a long moment. “Darius Reyes, you’re not at all what I expected.”
It’s my turn to look at her strangely. “Wait… Who?”
6
Rae
Another Friday night comes around quickly. I’m thoroughly exhausted at the end of my shift when I receive a text from Zac—a less threatening, more concerned text.
Rae, if you ever want to come home, you can. No questions, no recriminations.
I should call him and my mother, I really should. But with everything that’s happened so far, I’ve been preoccupied. Like with seducing Darius.
I still can’t get over that I let him taste every part of me. It doesn’t feel real. It’s almost like I imagined it. I mean, Darius isn’t chasing me for another repeat. He’s stone-cold been avoiding me ever since. It shouldn’t have happened in the first place but I expected something to change between us and it hasn’t. If anything he’s more distant than before.
To his credit, Darius has laid off doing some serious damage to his opponents, much to Elias’s annoyance. Tonight’s fight could have been bloody; a triple feature, three fights back to back. They made it bigger and bloodier alright. Some of the injuries I’d treated on the other fighters will be sure to give me nightmares. But Darius didn’t kill them. He just knocked his opponents clean out. Another condition of the new format. Darius’s idea.
Why do I like that he’s trying to change?
Fuck. I’m so screwed.
I keep messing up here. Like letting it slip that I know Darius’s real name.
“Reyes?”
Shit. My heart feels like it's dropped into my throat. He does know his own last name, right?
“Oh, isn’t that your last name? I thought you said it was?” I say, in what I hope is a light and breezy tone.
He furrows his brow, blue orbs threatening to see through my lies. “No. Not that I know of.”
“So, tell me, wha
t is your last name?” I try to deflect.
“I don't have one.”
“How can you not have one?”
“Maybe I did. It says Archer on the fight card every Saturday night, but that’s not my name. I honestly don't remember it,” he says, curtly.
I give him a blank look. “You’re kidding me, right?”
He shakes his head. “No. I needed one, so… Reyes where have I heard that before?”
Fuck. “Hmm, ignore what I said, I must have heard wrong.” I collect my bag and spare clothes, then head to the computer to switch it off, only too aware of Darius watching me strangely while I chat about what I need to do for the rest of the day, how hungry I am… anything to change the subject.
I wait for him to bring Reyes up again, but he doesn't. He seems different though now we’re no longer in his room, colder than this morning.
I've known him as a Reyes my entire life, if only he knew it too.
The memory of that strained conversation has me cringing at best. How was I to know he didn’t know his own fucking name. He must see himself as the one and only ‘Darius’… like ‘Cher’ and ‘Prince’. It’s ridiculous. He’s a grown man, how did he not try to regain his memories.
Hell, Rae, why don’t you just tell him already? He knows about Dylan anyway.
As much as I want to tell him, I’m aware it will open up a can of eels. He might remember what happened and side with the Twins, like he did the first time around. Or if he doesn’t remember, he might change his mind about helping me. We hardly know each other if you discount the first fifteen years of my life when he was practically part of the family. Trust isn’t something that’s grown over night, especially not on the coat tails of amnesia.
I will tell Darius…just not before I’ve done what I came here to do.
I need to find my brother first and get the hell out of here before Zac gives into my mother like he always does and hunts me down, and I inadvertently start a war.
Crap, I should really message Zac. Although, war is probably what’s needed here.
