When she got inside, she stopped at the scene in front of her. She quietly recited the most important rule to herself. What happened in the locker room, stayed in the locker room.
“Baby,” a woman whispered, tears running down her face. “Please! I ain’t cheating on you!”
“Yet, you seemed real interested in Carlos,” the fighter snapped at the woman, who must have been his girlfriend. Sawyer quietly put her bag down and watched. She wouldn’t get involved in a break up, which this obviously was, until she felt it went too far. She had a line where she decided to step in, and she couldn’t do it earlier.
“He’s an old friend from high school!” She cried, and the fighter pinned her to a set of lockers between his arms. Sawyer narrowed her eyes. He wasn’t touching her, yet.
“One you used to fuck,” he snarled. “Don’t fucking lie to me. You’ve been seeing him behind my back.”
Sawyer wished she could say she rarely saw scenes like this one, but when someone was involved in more… criminal activities, they didn’t exactly see the shiny gold stars of society. This was all too familiar to her.
“We just met for dinner before coming here! He’s an old friend, that’s all. I promise,” she begged, and the fighter lost his patience at that. Sawyer didn’t wince at the sound of his hand connecting to the girl’s cheek. It was Sawyer’s sign to step in.
“Girl, get the fuck out,” she growled. Both looked over to her. “Girl, leave. Find Charlie. Tell him to come back here in ten minutes.”
“You don’t get to order my woman around.” The fighter turned to Sawyer fully, and Sawyer slowly pulled off her tank top. “If I think this whore needs some di-”
Sawyer didn’t wait for him to finish. She blinked forward and connected a swing to his jaw, causing him to recoil back. Sawyer had a lot of patience for a lot of things, but this had never been one of them. It was why she went after abusive parents and spouses. People didn’t deserve to get beat on by people who were supposed to love them.
The girl screamed and started running out. The fighter wasn’t a Magi, but Sawyer didn’t care about that as she used her powers to get behind him and kick his legs out from under him. When he hit his knees, she kicked him square in the face. Sawyer was brutally efficient and efficiently brutal, and she never pulled a punch.
He fell on his back. She straddled him and grabbed his shirt, pulling him up just a little to get close to his face.
“You must be fucking new here,” she snarled. “No one fucks around like that when I’m in town, asshole. I don’t give a damn what you think or feel. I don’t give a damn if the other guys here don’t care. What happens in the locker room, stays in the locker room, right? Well, you better start praying to whatever god you believe in that I decide to leave you breathing, because no one is going to stop me while we’re in here.”
She kept hold of his shirt and punched him. Bone crunched. Once. Twice. Three times. She lost count at four, but always made sure he was still breathing. She couldn’t kill him, no matter how much she wanted too. Her temper was cold. Her magic had the room frigid. Her face gave away nothing. She went to the place that had once made her the best assassin on the planet. The place that desperation had created in her mind, so she could handle the violence that her life had been soaked in at the time.
When she felt it was over, she stood up and threw a towel on him.
“Now clean the fuck up like a good boy and get the fuck out of my locker room,” she told him, her voice matching the chilly temperature of her temper. He groaned and tried to stand. Instead, he just sat up. He tried to stand again, but fell back over into a bench.
She waited patiently, looking at her watch. Her right hand was covered in blood, but she was able to hold herself together as Charlie walked in slowly.
“What happened?” He asked quietly, pointing to the groaning man on the floor.
“He slapped her,” she whispered. “I saw it, and I handled it.”
“Okay. Go clean up. Remember, once you walk out there, this didn’t happen. Carly was taken home by one of the regulars.”
Carly. That was her name, huh? She should have asked before sending her out.
Sawyer turned away and went to the small bathroom. She stared blankly at the woman in the mirror. Blood had spattered over her right cheek. Well. She washed it off quickly. This wasn’t the place for her to go into total freak mode over the sight of blood.
When she stepped out of the bathroom, the guy was no longer on the floor. Charlie was still waiting for her though, watching her carefully.
“This can’t keep happening,” Charlie whispered to her. “Since LA, you’ve been different. You’re trying to hide it, but you are failing miserably. I’ve never seen you behave this… cold before.”
“I’m fine, Charlie. This guy just… scratched an old memory that had been a little close to the surface.” She met his eyes, and he shook his head.
“They all scratch old memories for you, but you never-”
“I always do this to them, Charlie.” She smiled ruefully. “It’s why I don’t tell you about it. Not the gory details. Liam’s dad was a one-off.”
She stepped around him as he put a hand on his chest and rubbed his heart. She grabbed her bag and changed as he just watched her.
“One of them is going to call the cops on you one day,” he told her, quiet and stern.
“Why do you think we have the truck without a license plate?” She wrapped her hands without a care. She’d cut one of her knuckles on the guy’s face and she relished in the sting of it for a moment. “Drop it, Charlie. It’s worked for us for years and there’s no reason for that to change now.”
“Of course,” Charlie huffed. She knew he wasn’t mad at her. He was worried. Some part of her still craved the hunt and thrill of being an assassin, even if she didn’t kill people anymore. She had diverted that part to the dregs of humanity, those who deserved to be taught her brutal lesson.
“Let’s get out there before people start to notice that something is going down,” she told him shortly, pointing toward the door out to the main area. She left him standing there as he mumbled that it was too late. She grabbed a ring girl as she made her way into the crowd. With her arm over the woman’s shoulder, she bummed a smoke and let the little Magi woman light it for her.
She took a long drag as she sat down, pulling her new friend onto her lap. She still had appearances to keep, so she reclined back her seat, and the ring girl laughed about something with someone who passed by.
“What’s your name?” Sawyer asked as another fight got started.
“Stacie.” She smiled at Sawyer. “You don’t need to tell me yours. I hear you are pretty secretive.”
“Really?” Sawyer grinned. “Well, you can call me Cambrie.” It was her middle name and one she gave to her hook ups, since it was easy to remember. She wouldn’t be hooking up with Stacie, not Sawyer’s type, but she could at least give the ring girl a name.
“Well, Cambrie,” Stacie leaned into her and kissed Sawyer’s cheek. “Do you want me to get you anything to drink?”
“I’ll take a whiskey on the rocks, but only one. I’ve got a fight later.” Sawyer chuckled as Stacie left her lap and walked away. When Stacie brought the drink back, she didn’t stay with Sawyer. At least I got a drink out of it, Sawyer thought to herself.
She sipped on the whiskey and watched the girls flirt with Liam. He was going to avoid her for the rest of the night now, and she couldn’t blame him.
Charlie never did show up and sit with her, but they didn’t always hang out at these things. At one point, she saw that handsome Italian wandering around. He wasn’t dressed the same as he’d been the previous times she’d seen him. Tonight, it was black cargo pants and a tight black shirt. She wasn’t sure which was better. Him in a well-fitted shirt or him shirtless. Sawyer was mildly impressed that he made a simple black tee look that good.
She slipped between the ropes and looked over at her opponent. She
grinned, ready to get in another fight. She hadn’t expected to get two fights in one night, but then again, what happened in the locker room was hardly a fight.
It was a magicless fight, and it was exactly what she needed. She even took a couple hits.
9
ZANDER
Zander leaned against the wall when she walked in at the start of the night with the large black guy, Charlie, trailing behind her. He remained in the thickest part of the crowd, invisible to her as he observed. She had such a swagger to her walk that he wanted to grin. Some things, he thought, never changed.
They had been watching her for weeks, with Elijah or Vincent closer while Zander and Jasper backed them up. They learned about her work at Charlie’s gym, and, one night around midnight, they found her leaving and tailed her. She was so confident in her privacy in New York, she hadn’t noticed them.
They didn’t intervene when he and Vincent saw her put a man in the hospital that night. What had been said and their own plans to get her into custody deterred them from trying to stop the brutal, back-alley justice Sawyer had a reputation for dispensing. They had only heard the whispers of rumors until that moment. That night, they had a front row seat to the woman Sawyer had grown into.
He remembered the rush of pride and utter terror he felt at the look on her face when she was done. She had blood splattered all over herself. It dripped from her knuckles and was starting to create a pool in the dark summer night, though carefully out of range of the streetlight.
He waited impatiently for her to leave the locker room, wondering why she hadn’t come out within minutes, like she had on other nights. When a young woman ran out with a red, bruising mark on her, Zander tensed. Vincent met his eyes from across the room and gave a tiny shake of his head. They couldn’t reveal themselves. No one else even paid the girl any attention, and Zander curled his hand into a fist. Sawyer hung around some real pieces of shit at these things. She didn’t interact with them much, but she was in their world and they were in hers.
What had led the feisty young teen he’d known to live like this? Zander was confused and a little irked, but Jasper was having a hard time with it. The lack of knowledge on why was eating away at him. She had been so awesome when he and Jasper left for the IMAS, to make a better life for all of them, but then she got adopted and promptly disappeared, never contacting them again. When they got into the IMPO, they started to search. After six years, they had found nothing—until Axel nearly killed her.
He watched Charlie stroll back to the locker room and repositioned himself to get comfortable. People around him had gone a little quiet, except for a few whispers.
“She’s done it, don’t you think?” A guy whispered to another attendee. The other one slowly nodded.
“Yeah,” he mumbled. “She’s why I don’t bring my girl to these things. She jumped out of the ring once and took a guy outside for a beat down when he slapped his girl around a little. She’s got a gnarly temper and doesn’t know how to mind her own business. She’s just scary as fuck.” Zander raised an eyebrow. So, even the people here knew about her. She’d always been the type to go from zero to one-hundred with her temper, but somewhere along her road to this place in her life, something had changed. Zander knew that much.
“Shit, look at that guy,” another person in the crowd gasped. Zander flicked a look back over to the locker room. Holy hell. She had made him unrecognizable. Why weren’t people freaking out more? Why was she allowed here to fight, if she could do that to a guy in the locker room? Surely there had to be some rules.
“I’d fuck her, if I didn’t think she’d eat my head like one of those bugs do,” the first one chuckled. Zander wanted to grab him by his long brown hair and slam his face into the wall. “Maybe that’s what she needs, a strong man to put her in her place.”
Zander’s own temper flared at the conversation happening only feet from him.
“Nah, she’s too muscular for me,” the second snorted. “I mean look at her,” he jerked his head toward the locker room.
Sure enough, Zander had been distracted by their conversation and missed her coming out. She had a fake smile plastered on her face, one he’d seen years before. She was never very good at pretending and had always worn her emotions on her sleeve. He watched her flirt with one of the ring girls and smirked. The Sawyer he grew up with really was still there. Darker, more dangerous, but still there.
He kind of liked the dangerous feel to her now. The toned body, the sharp edge of barely contained violence, and the swagger to her walk. He had been infatuated as a teenager, but something about Sawyer all grown up really got him going. Zander always was a risk taker, and toying with a woman like her seemed incredibly risky.
“Why isn’t she in trouble?” he asked a ring girl who passed by. “For that guy?”
The girl looked him over and smiled. Zander gave a smile back to the blonde, hoping to coax the information he wanted out of her.
“You must be new,” she chuckled. “What happens in the locker room stays in the locker room. If she caught him hitting his girl, then he deserved what he got. Some of the guys here might not like her for it, but she’s got a fan club with the women.” Then she shrugged. “Plus, she’s Charlie’s roommate and business partner. Those two own this gym, so if people don’t like how things are done, they can stop showing up.”
“Makes sense.” He grinned, showing a pearly white set of teeth. She blinked and blushed a little. “I’m glad someone is looking out for you gorgeous women, here. Seems like a rough place.”
She stuttered a little bit, then wandered off, still blushing. Zander smiled to himself as he looked back to Vincent. He was talking to Charlie. Zander wondered how mad Sawyer was going to be when she found out that their contact for getting close to her was the old man she trusted the most. He was cagey with them, but he wanted to get her out of the criminal world and knew only the team could do that. Charlie had been thoroughly freaked by her and Axel running into each other.
When Sawyer got called to the ring, Charlie left Vin and headed towards Zander. Zander shook his hand when he got close.
“Charlie,” Zander smiled pleasantly.
“Z,” Charlie said curtly. “You aren’t going to get her on assault charges, right?”
“We already caught her on a midnight… escapade and didn’t arrest her. We haven’t shut this place down. Why would we drag her off in handcuffs now?” Zander shrugged. “Doesn’t do us any good.”
“Sure. So, Vincent said you all had a plan, but he didn’t elaborate. He told me to come talk to you, away from the ring.” Charlie seemed uncomfortable, but Zander could forgive him for it. Zander was impressed with the guy. He’d been great about not letting Sawyer in on anything going on behind her back.
“Get her to go out tonight,” Zander whispered. “Then, you should stay with a friend for the night.”
“That’s all?” Charlie frowned. Zander nodded, dismissing him. Charlie’s eyes turned hard, and Zander rolled his own.
“We’re not telling you the entire plan. I’m telling you what you need to do,” he growled softly. “Take it or leave it.”
“You are lucky as hell I recognized you from her old photos. It’s the only reason I trust you or your friends in this building. You’re my only option for getting her out of all of this,” Charlie growled, turning to stomp off. Zander ran a hand through his hair, sighing to himself.
They had wasted so much time setting this up that they had no idea if Axel was close to finding her. He didn’t have access to the things they got from the IMPO, but Zander knew that nothing stopped Axel for long. New York might be considered a safe zone for Magi, but that probably wouldn’t stop Axel from trying to get what he wanted.
He heard a cheer rise from the crowd and looked back to the ring. Sawyer was fighting without magic tonight, and she was killing it. She was as quick as lightening, determined, and intelligent. She got a focused look in her eyes, but she always kept a taunting smirk on h
er face unless her opponent pissed her off. She was popular among the crowd, too. She was made for the ring.
But Zander still was haunted by the most important unanswered question. How the actual fuck did she end up as a thief and fighter hiding in New York after nearly getting killed by Axel?
If their plan worked, he and Jasper would be getting the answers they wanted very soon. If their plan worked, he was also going to be out one hundred dollars.
10
SAWYER
Sawyer changed and showered in the apartment after the fight. She was about to sit down when Charlie stomped in.
“Get up. We’re going out,” he told her, grabbing her elbow and pulling her from the half squat she was in.
“Excuse me?” She jerked away, confused. “I didn’t agree to go out tonight.”
“You need it.” Charlie grinned at her. “And I want you to come out with me and all the guys and other fighters. Come on, you haven’t been out with us since before LA.”
She groaned and leaned on him. The night had been interesting enough, and now the old fart wanted to drag her out? It’s one in the morning, she thought, a little cranky.
“Charlie, why?” She considered pouting, but she was too old and much too tough for that. He wouldn’t buy it, anyway.
“Because no matter what I’ve done over the last few weeks, you haven’t gotten out of your slump.” Charlie dragged her to her room. “Get changed. Wear something hot, get laid, and out of my hair for a couple of days. Shit, I’ll stay with a lady friend so you can have the apartment.”
That had her laughing hysterically, even with her aching and tired bones. This wasn’t the first time Charlie demanded that she relax and cut loose for an evening. She was already clean and just needed to change.
“Charlie, are you taking your own truck?” she called out.
The Redemption Saga Box Set Page 8
