Strong Hold

by Sarah Castille

Zack

  New York hadn’t changed in the six years since Zack had visited for his Newark fight. It was still as noisy, dirty, and busy as he remembered. As a kid, he’d always dreamed about leaving Glenwood and living in the big city, but now he longed for the peace of the mountain trails, the whisper of the wind in the trees, and a future with the woman he loved.

  After he reached his hotel, he went straight to the gym to check out the fighter Kip wanted him to see. He never told anyone who had caught MEFC’s interest. Over the years, he’d discovered he could learn more about the prospective fighters by watching them train and socializing with the team than he could by watching them fight. At the end of a boozy evening, he called Kip and gave his report. The fighter had a serious drinking problem, and Zack pegged him as a wasted investment.

  With the day’s work done, he called Shayla.

  “How’s New York?” she asked.

  “So far so good. I have one more thing I need to do tomorrow, and then Kip wants me to fly to Cape Town.”

  Silence.

  He liked it. A lot. It meant she cared, and although she had showed him in a variety of different ways how she felt before he left, she hadn’t said the words he longed to hear.

  “I’m not going,” he said. “I told Kip I wanted to stick around the West Coast for a while.”

  He heard a soft sigh and then a laugh. “West is best.”

  “How was training today?” They hadn’t talked about what was happening with her fight career, and Zack didn’t want to push. She was on CAMO ill for another two weeks, and she had voluntarily pulled out of the competitive circuit. They had decided last night that it would be best for her to find a new full-time coach. She needed someone who could keep an emotional distance, and that clearly wasn’t him.

  “Torment was an ass. Fuzzy was his backup bitch. And Stan just added to the pain. So nothing unusual. But I do have some exciting news.”

  His heart squeezed in his chest at her upbeat tone. When she was happy, he was happy. “Tell me.”

  “I’ve been helping Cheryl out with Amber. She’s still not feeling great after that hit she took to her head, and she asked me to take Amber to her ballet class. Madame Rambert recognized me from the recital, and we had a long chat. She’s been looking for a new teacher for the little ones, and I agreed to teach part-time. The pay isn’t great, but it means I don’t have to take the promotion at Symbian, which I was considering to cover the costs of hiring a new coach. I really don’t want to leave Joe and Cheryl, and this way I get to do two things I love.”

  “I can’t think of anything better than reconnecting with something that was such a big part of your life,” he said. “It must not have been an easy decision, but you’ve always been brave.”

  “I’m scared,” she admitted. “But I’m going to do it anyway. Just being in the studio watching the class brought back all sorts of memories, and I want to focus on the good ones and push away the bad.”

  Her courage put him to shame. What the hell was he doing traveling across the world looking for fighters when he should be in the ring?

  The next morning, he headed out to the first of the two addresses the Predator had taped to the back of his new Redemption membership card. He hadn’t asked how the Predator had found Damian, and he didn’t want to know. Apparently, the bastard had opened his own ballet studio in the Hudson Valley after he’d been blacklisted by the ballet community for his attack on Shayla, and when he wasn’t there, he was at his condo only a few blocks away.

  Although Zack desperately wanted to grab Damian the moment he saw him and give him the beat down he deserved, he had made a promise to return to Shayla, and that wouldn’t happen if he wound up in jail. He had to approach this the way he approached every fight. First, he would do a little recon, then he would form a plan, and finally, he would attack.

  In theory, it made sense, and the recon part went well. The ballet studio was housed in a small, run-down brick building at a crossroads with windows facing both streets. Posters of dancers in various poses lined the tops of the windows, and a neon sign above the front door flashed “Peters’ School of Dance.”

  After walking around the block a few times looking for alleys and back exits, Zack sat across the street with a protein shake and watched the young dancers go in and out over the course of the afternoon. Although there was no receptionist, a young woman in loose dance wear came out each time the door opened to greet all the dancers and parents. When the flow of dancers into the studio trickled to a lonely few, he called the number stenciled on the window and arranged an appointment for the end of the day, ostensibly to discuss his fictitious daughter’s interest in starting ballet.

  “I’m June Peters. We spoke on the phone.” The young woman he had watched all afternoon held out her hand to Zack as he walked in the door at his appointed time. She had the lean, toned body and narrow hips of a young dancer, and with her smooth, rounded face and her long, blond hair tied up with a pink flowered hair tie, Zack figured her to be no older than twenty-five. But her eyes told a different story, and when Zack drew close to take her hand, he could see the bruises on her face that she had clearly tried to hide with makeup.

  “I understand you have a daughter interested in ballet.” Her gaze fixed on Zack’s nose, now without the bandage but still badly swollen and bruised after his fight with the Predator.

  “Car accident,” he said quickly, making her blush at her indiscretion. “And yes. As I said on the phone, her name is Amber, and she’s five.” He sent a mental apology to Cheryl for using her daughter as an excuse to get close to the man who had hurt his Shayla.

  “A little old to start, but I’m sure with a little extra effort, she can catch up.”

  “Who teaches the younger girls?” Zack moved forward, forcing her to step back down the narrow hallway as he searched for Damian. He could hear music coming from one of the studios and the sound of a man’s voice.

  “I do.” She forced a smile, but her consternation was clear in her face.

  “And when they’re older?” He kept walking, and she kept stepping backward. Zack knew he should stop, but he couldn’t help himself. Now that he was inside, he needed to see Damian with his own eyes, and he needed to see him now.

  “Damian Peters. He was a dancer with Joffrey and the artistic director of the New York Ballet, along with many other accomplishments. He is an excellent teacher, very demanding, and he works the girls hard, but he gets incredible results.”

  “I’m sure he does.” Zack stopped a few feet from the door and stared at the girl in front of him. From the way she held herself, he suspected she was hiding more bruises beneath her clothes. The thought of Shayla suffering during her marriage made him sick inside, and he took a deep breath to calm himself down. He hadn’t been there for her, but there was another woman he could save.

  Unable to wait another moment, Zack pushed past her and opened the studio door. There was only one person in the room, a tall, blond man standing beside the barre. Zack had only seen Damian at a distance when he had come to New York to find Shayla, but he recognized the harsh, square jaw and heavy features of Shayla’s ex. He was shorter than Zack by about three inches, and his stocky body was thickly muscled without an ounce of fat.

  A growl rose in Zack’s throat. This was the man who had hurt his Shayla, broken her bones, crushed her fingers, and destroyed her dreams. This was the man she feared, who made her scared to open herself fully to love and life. He could redeem himself by defeating this monster. He could avenge Shayla, eliminate the threat, and make the horror of her past go away.

  “Are you okay, sir?” June’s forehead creased in a puzzled frown.

  “Pain.” He touched his nose. “From the accident. It comes and goes.” His gaze flicked to the barely concealed bruises around her eye. “It looks like you were in an accident, too.”

  June’s face heated, and sh
e dropped her gaze. “I could get you some ice.”

  Although it was tempting to send her away, he didn’t want to be left alone with Damian just yet. He needed to get himself under control, and right now, he was too close to the edge.

  “Thank you, but I’m fine.” He studied Damian as he warmed up. He wore knit warm-up tights and a tight white shirt as he did his barre. He would have stamina and strength but no skills as a fighter. Still, Zack could see he wouldn’t go down easy, which meant he’d have to find somewhere to avenge Shayla where they wouldn’t be disturbed.

  “June.” Damian barked without turning around. “You know better than to disturb me during practice.”

  “I’m sorry. This is a…new client. He has a daughter who is interested in joining the studio. He just wanted to look around.” She turned to Zack. “I didn’t get your name.”

  “Slayer, isn’t it?” Damian met his gaze through the mirror that ran the entire length of the wall. “Or do you go by Zack now that you’ve retired?”

  Only years of learning how to hide his emotions in the ring saved Zack from showing his shock. The bastard knew him.

  “You can go, darling.” Damian said, not unkindly. “This doesn’t concern you. I’ll lock up after I’m done and meet you at home.”

  Zack closed the door after June had gone. There were no windows in the dance studio. And the door he was now leaning against was the only way out. “You don’t seem surprised to see me.”

  “I’m surprised it took you this long.” Damian did a slow tendu, extending his left leg to the front, side, and back. For the first time, Zack hated that he knew the standard ballet barre warm-up routine.

  “I thought she ran right back to you after she left me.”

  A growl escaped Zack’s lips. “It’s not that easy to run after you’ve been beaten and pushed down the stairs.”

  Damian sighed and changed position. “Is she still telling people that story? The doctors thought her memories might come back after a year or two. The hospital psychiatrist said the mind will create plausible fictions after a traumatic event to deal with overwhelming emotion. She was very distraught after I told her I was leaving her that night, and she couldn’t cope with the fact that she had ruined her dance career when she tripped and fell down the stairs when she ran after me begging me to stay. I stayed beside her for three days at the hospital. When she woke up, she told everyone I had assaulted her. It was soul destroying. I hadn’t stopped loving her, and to be accused of hurting her…”

  “You ended the marriage?” He didn’t want to ask, but he did.

  “It was time.” Damian moved to a fast tendu. “We’d grown apart. Our age gap was becoming a problem. We wanted different things out of life. And, to be honest, she was becoming obsessed with you. I told her it was over. She begged me not to go, clung to my legs when I tried to leave. She was hysterical. Screaming and crying as I walked down the stairs. We lived two flights up from the street at the top of a concrete stairwell. She ran to catch me, tripped on the top stair, and then she fell.” He drew in a ragged breath. “I was already in the foyer. I turned when I heard the noise, but I couldn’t catch her.”

  Zack didn’t buy it. The Shayla he knew was reserved and not at all demonstrative. He hadn’t known her feelings toward him had changed until one day, when she was fourteen, he’d told her she looked pretty, and her cheeks had flamed. He’d waited until she was fifteen to hold her hand, and even then, he hadn’t known whether she’d accepted it out of friendship or something more. When he’d left her in Glenwood, her voice had shaken, and tears had filled her eyes, but she hadn’t begged him not to go. There was no screaming or crying or hysteria. No declarations of love. Looking back, he wondered if such an extreme show of emotion would have changed his mind. Her poise and self-possession had made it easy to walk away.

  “That doesn’t sound like her.”

  “You clearly didn’t know her well.” Damian changed position into a slow dégagé, the foot of his left leg sharply brushing through the floor. “But then you weren’t married to her, and I was.”

  Zack’s skin prickled in response to the challenge, and he made a quick, mental reassessment of the man in tights. He clearly still felt he had a claim to Shayla, and his total lack of fear at Zack’s presence in the gym suggested he shouldn’t be underestimated.

  “The police and the district attorney clearly didn’t believe your story. Nor the ballet community, or you wouldn’t be working here. If she made it up, why were you charged and convicted of a crime?” Along with the name and address, the Predator had dug up the details of Damian’s conviction plea bargain and sentence.

  A shadow crossed Damian’s face so quickly, Zack wondered if he’d seen it. “A total miscarriage of justice. People are inclined to believe young pretty ballerinas even if they’re telling lies. Even I had trouble believing she had been so badly injured from a fall down the stairs. But the idea that I had hurt my wife…” He increased the speed of his dégagé, his foot pointed at forty-five degrees to the floor.

  Zack’s gut clenched. Wife. She had been this man’s wife. Not his. “Shayla wouldn’t lie.”

  “I misspoke.” He extended his leg to the back in a way that made Zack wince. “She believes her fabricated story. Her mind just couldn’t cope with losing me. That’s why she ran away.” He did a rond de jambe, tracing out the letter D in the air. The cool detachment with which he discussed the end of his marriage, his wife’s horrific accident, and her supposed brain injury was disconcerting and no small bit alarming. Did he feel nothing for the woman he professed to love?

  “I wanted to go after her and tell her I was prepared to work on our marriage,” he continued. “I hadn’t realized the depth of her feelings until then, or mine for that matter. But the hospital psychiatrist told me it was better to leave her alone. He said until she accepted what really happened, we could never be whole. I hoped someday she would come back me. But as I suspected, she went running back to you.”

  “Damn right.” He wasn’t about to tell Damian that Shayla hadn’t come running back to him at all. Instead, she’d forged a new life out of the ashes of her childhood dream. She had been beaten, but she had gotten back up. Why couldn’t Zack do the same?

  “I don’t know what she sees in you.” Damian placed his left leg on the barre and grabbed his toes, his chest flat on his thigh, demonstrating the kind of flexibility that was every fighter’s dream. “She was a shell of a girl when she came to New York, and all because of you. It was only after she was mugged and I helped her pick up the pieces that she began to shine. She was my creation, my muse, so young and beautiful, I was the envy of other men.” He lowered his leg and raised the other for a stretch. “As I suppose you are now.”

  Zack grunted as he studied Damian. He had come with a plan to beat on Damian until he felt the bastard had suffered enough that Shayla would have true justice. And yet, as he watched the dancer bend one leg and lower himself into a fondu, he wondered what that would truly accomplish.

  He had learned to read people as part of his training—thought processes could be telegraphed by the subtlest signals, and the ability to predict a fighter’s next move could make the difference between a win or a loss in the cage—and what he read from Damian was a total lack of feeling. Whatever had broken Damian, and turned him from the caring man Shayla had married, to the vain, self-aggrandizing, delusional, and fundamentally insecure man he was now, had never been repaired.

  Zack could beat him. He could break his legs so he could never dance again, but looking around the small, run-down studio filled with children’s costumes and drawings, a battered piano, and a barre worn smooth by hundreds of tiny hands, he doubted he could punish Damian more than he had been punished already. He would never have the power and prestige he’d had as the husband of a young, beautiful prima ballerina and artistic director of a world-famous ballet company. Instead of being treate
d as a star, traveling the world, and attending lavish balls and parties and hobnobbing with the artistic elite, he had become ordinary. Given what Zack knew of the man, this was the equivalent of Hell.

  “How is she?” Damian turned and bent to do the fondu with his right leg.

  “Good. No great. Fantastic. She’s a fighter now.”

  Damian laughed. “So you turned her to the dark side. It’s for the best. Her career was already on a downslide when the accident happened. She was a classically trained dancer, but she wanted to do modern dance, and she just didn’t have what it took to succeed. It was just a matter of time.” He straightened and studied Zack. “Much like you coming to visit.”

  Zack’s hands curled into fists. “What did you think would happen when we met?”

  “Given you’re the kind of man who could destroy a young girl who loved you for the betterment of your career and then kill a man with your bare hands to win a fight, I suspect you came here with violence on your mind.” He brushed a flexed foot from cou-de-pied, resting against the side of his ankle, through the floor, the ball of his foot tapping lightly on the wood in a double frappé.

  In Zack’s state of heightened anger, the move had the hallmark of a bull pawing at the ground in challenge, and he fought the urge to respond with the violence Damian was clearly expecting despite his seeming lack of concern.

  “Or maybe, now that you’re retired, you’ve forgotten how to fight.”

  C’mon, Slayer. This is pathetic. I’m getting bored punching your ugly face. The Predator’s words rang in his mind, and then Okami’s, Fuck you, goading him into throwing that last punch.

  Damian was goading him, he suddenly realized. The nonchalance. The casual conversation. The seemingly unaffected air. Only when Zack hadn’t risen to the bait had he finally showed his hand with the comment about forgetting how to fight.

  Why?

  Jealousy? Revenge? Did he really think he could beat Zack in a fight? Or did he have some advantage? A weapon? There was no way he could be hiding anything under those skintight clothes. What about video surveillance? Did he think a leaked video of Zack beating on him would destroy Zack’s career as a recruiter? Or did he think such a video would tear Zack and Shayla apart?