“Oh, I’m sure someone like you won’t exactly have to live on the street tomorrow because you lost a bet,” I said.
He ignored what I said.
“So you’re one of Benicio’s fighters.”
“Who’s asking?” I wanted the name of the guy who was with her.
“Aston Roberts.”
I repeated it in my head, committing it to memory. He looked like he expected me to recognize his name, but I didn’t know who the hell he was. I hadn’t exactly been around Vegas long enough to know who the important people were and besides, I wasn’t exactly having drinks with the mayor.
He waited a minute, then asked. “And you are?”
I opened my mouth, “Joe” on the tip of my tongue. Instead, I heard myself speak. “Hammer.”
“Hammer,” he said, nodding. “What you did to my guy out there, you were a beast. Better than anyone I’ve seen in a long time,” he said. “You get the right training and you could do well for yourself.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But I’ve got a job.”
Aston laughed. “I’m sure whatever it is you do, the purse on these fights will be worth it.”
Whatever it is I do. I stifled a laugh. I wasn’t exactly in the poorhouse, doing the kind of security work I was doing. “I don’t need a job.”
He scowled, and I was certain it was because he wasn’t used to being told no. He reached into his pocket and withdrew his business card, handing it to me. I didn’t take it.
“I don’t think I stuttered,” I said. “Did I? I said, I already have a fucking job.”
He glared at me through narrowed eyes, then slipped his business card back into his pocket. This pretentious douchebag rubbed me the wrong way, and not just because he was with the girl from the casino. I didn’t fucking like his attitude, walking in here like he owned everyone and everything and could purchase me. Especially at one of Benicio’s places. Fuck him.
Aston’s eyes drifted around the room to each of the men standing there, and then toward the door. “I’ll be seeing you around, Hammer,” he said.
“Count on it.”
When he exited, I looked past him in the doorway, searching for a glimpse of her. It was an automatic response, something I did without even thinking about it. I knew I didn’t like that guy, and I liked the idea of her being with him even less.
It was my weekly ritual, one of the few things in this life that gave me a moment of peace. The monastery stretched out before me, the grounds a reflection of their Thai and Burmese influences. The buildings were trimmed in gold, characteristic of the temples that were so common in southeast Asia.
The first time I'd come here to the monastery, it had seemed strange, the idea of a Buddhist monastery in Las Vegas, a city dedicated to everything that a monastery was not- sex, gambling, drugs, and alcohol. But I quickly realized that all of those things were precisely the reason this monastery existed in this town. It was a refuge, an escape from the harsh, gritty, ugly realities of life in Las Vegas.
Of life in general.
At least, this is what it was for me. Even though I had never come here for a retreat, and only rarely to meditate, I still thought of this place in much the same way I suppose people view their own houses of worship as a place of refuge, a sanctuary from all of the things in life trying to harm me.
For me, it was also a place to atone.
I did not believe in the idea of heaven and hell. To me, there could be nothing worse than the hell through which I had already been, the hell through which my sister and my son had been put through. If there was a hell, it didn't scare me. I had already been through far worse, and I was still alive.
Even so, I felt the need to atone for the things I had done, the things I was forced to do while being with Aston.
And the things I planned to do.
I hoped that all of the good deeds I might accumulate might somehow balance my karmic debt, might somehow push the balance in my favor.
But no matter how many good things I did, it would never be enough. It would never erase the fact that I'd been responsible for my sister, and that I'd failed to protect her.
The same way I couldn't protect my son now.
I looked up to see Tayza Sayadaw, the senior monk, walking toward me. He was a constant source of goodness in my life, a life that was ever changing, chaotic, frequently filled with acts of depravity and darkness.
His saffron colored robes swirled around him as he moved, his feet bare on the gravel except for the minimal sandals he wore. He was an older man, but like most monks, seemed to possess an ageless quality that I'd always thought was because they spent their lives in pursuit of enlightenment.
I bowed my head slightly as he approached me.
"Meia," he said, his voice soft.
"Tayza Sayadaw," I said, holding my donation and offering of food for the monks. It always seemed like a pittance, compared to what I took from coming here, the soothing this place did for my soul. He took it wordlessly, our routine perfected by a hundred weeks of practice. It was a strange choreography, our dance, the monk and the sex slave.
“You look worried, Meia,” Tayza noted. He noticed everything. He'd said something, once, about the bruises. I didn't answer, told him I couldn't answer, and he stopped asking. I think he understood that I wouldn't.
“I am worried, Sayadaw,” I admitted, addressing him by the deferential term for his position as the senior monk. “I cannot calm my mind.”
“Why are you worried?” he asked. It sounded like a simple question, but everything with Tayza was laden with more meaning than the surface would indicate. He wasn’t asking for information; he was asking why I felt the need to be so attached to my worry. He was asking why I wasn’t letting go.
“Things are becoming complicated,” I said. “I’m not sure if I am on the right path.”
We walked in silence for a long time, until I began to feel my heart rate slowing, the same way it always did when I was here. Until all of the thoughts, swirling and racing around in my head, finally calmed down and the storm of emotions began to subside, replaced by the sound of my breathing and the padding of our feet as we walked the grounds. When Tayza did speak, I had become so used to the silence that the sound of his voice startled me.
He stopped and turned toward me, looking at me from behind his glasses, his eyes bright. “Meia,” he said. “You suffer because you are grasping at things beyond your control.”
I felt a transient flash of irritation. I already knew this. Suffering was caused by failure to let go. I couldn’t do that. It was one of a million reasons I was a bad Buddhist. I would never be able to let go. “There are so many things from the past, things I don't think I can ever let go. Things that have not been brought to justice. And things now...that cannot be let go."
"Letting go does not allow others to escape justice, Meia," he said. "It allows you to have peace."
I looked down at the ground, turned over a small rock with my foot. What did Tayza know about how to help me feel peace? Then I asked the question, the big question. “What if I can’t ever get peace, Sayadaw?”
He turned to me, his expression unchanged. But his voice was firm, intensity in his words. “Then it will destroy you,” he said.
It already has, I thought. I'm already dead inside.
It was two weeks later, and I'd put thoughts of that prick Aston - and of the girl I'd seen - out of my mind. I was going through the motions at work, unable to stop thinking about fighting again. I'd had a taste of it, and I wanted more. The rush was over too quickly, the only thing that added a tiny breath of life to the existence I was otherwise barely eking out.
And it wasn't just that. I was stopping by the clubhouse now, more regularly after work. Testing the waters, hanging around like I'd done in the beginning. The President there, Geezer Jake, was a solid guy, at least he seemed that way. You never fucking knew, though. I wouldn't have expected Mad Dog to go the way he had.
Well, that wasn't tru
e. Mad Dog always had it in him, from the very beginning. He had that capacity, and I knew it. He just always kept it in check...until he didn't anymore.
I wondered if, years from now, someone would say the same thing about me.
Even so, despite my reservations, the thoughts about coming out of retirement kept creeping into my mind. It was a new chapter. It wasn't Mad Dog's club. I could keep the day job, do the bare minimum at the club. I'd be like a fucking weekend warrior, right? No big deal. It didn't mean I'd have to turn over my soul to the club.
These were the things that kept going through my head.
But I knew they weren't true. I knew myself. I knew that if I came out of retirement, I'd take it seriously. And that was something I wasn't sure I was ready to do.
Even so, I sat out in the garage yesterday with the bike, just thinking. I still hadn't ridden yet, afraid that if I got on the bike, it would flip a switch inside of me that I wouldn't be able to turn off.
It felt like I'd be closing the chapter on April or something.
Even if I knew in my head she'd want me to move on - fuck, she'd chew me a new asshole if she knew I was this wrapped up in memories still - I couldn't quite bring myself to actually do it.
“Watch yourself up there, Mr. Holder,” Mark, the security guard, said.
“You make it sound like I’m walking into something dangerous, Mark,” I said. “I think I’ll be all right installing this system on some rich guy’s penthouse, thanks.”
He shrugged. “He’s a special kind of rich guy, that’s all I’m saying.”
I opened my mouth, about to ask him what exactly made this special snowflake different from all the other fucking rich shits here in Vegas, but Mike’s radio squawked and he picked it up. Without taking the radio away from his mouth, he waved at me as he walked down the hall, his pace brisk.
I was already irritated with this whole thing. It sure as shit wasn’t my job to install security in a goddamn penthouse. But it was a special task from the casino owner, and what he wanted, he would get. My boss had given me no details, just told me this was a security system issue with the penthouse owner. Some dude with too much money who was used to having people jump through hoops for him. Which was what I was fucking doing now. I didn't even know who the owner was.
So to say I was irritated as I stood here was an understatement. I wasn’t irritated. I was fucking livid. At this douchebag for insisting on a goddamned specialist to come up and do what a regular garden-variety tech could do. At the casino owner, for readily agreeing to pimp out my services. At my boss for insisting it was me that had to come here on a fucking weekend.
Mostly at the world, for the way things had turned out in general.
I rung the penthouse doorbell, half-expecting it to be answered by a butler. But this was no butler.
She stood there, in this all-white outfit, these flowy pants and top made out of some kind of silky material that almost shimmered, the way the light glinted off it, making her look other-worldly somehow. A look of surprise flitted across her face when she saw me.
He stood in front of me- the fighter. The man who’d run into me in the casino, held me in his arms. The one who'd delivered the beating in the fight, that took my breath away, kept me on the edge of my seat, my hands clenched tightly as I watched him fight the way a man fought when he didn't care whether or not he lived or died.
Even when I'd seen him in the casino the first time, in slacks and a collared shirt, he was rough, there was no doubt in my mind about that. His business clothes, the ones that hung on him like the most ill-fitting garments in the world. They didn't suit him. He was cut from a different cloth.
He was out of place there in the warehouse, too. I recognized the drive, the intensity I saw there, the darkness in him. But whatever was driving him, it was a compulsion, something that didn't quite seem to fit him even though he was obviously skilled at it.
Now, he stood in front of me, dressed the way he was that first time in the casino, the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up on his forearms, revealing the expanse of tattoos that covered the length of his arms. I briefly wondered what he might look like completely out of the dress clothes, then put the thought immediately out of my mind. This was not the type of man I needed to wonder about naked, this man with the darkness in his eyes.
"You," he said. If his words had not, his expression would have betrayed his surprise. He did not appear easily able to hide his emotions.
"Me." I opened the door wider, not bothering to hide the smile that played at the corners of my mouth. I wasn't sure why it made me happy to see him here. I didn't need him here. I didn't need any complications in my life, not now.
He cleared his throat, and the look on his face passed, a more professional demeanor taking over. "I'm here to do the software installation. I'm Joe. Joe Holder.”
"They called you Hammer at the fight," I said. "I heard them."
He looked down at the ground, his head low, almost as if he was embarrassed by the name. "Yes," he said. "It's what they call me."
“I'm Meia," I said. "Come in." I gestured to the open expanse of room, and he walked inside. I saw him try to keep his gaze from wandering over the suite. It was hard not to look; it was impressive, even to someone like me who was jaded from being around money so long now.
"Wow."
"Yes," I said. "It's...something."
I watched as a puzzled look came over his face. "Are you the...owner?"
I shook my head. "No. That honor belongs to Aston."
"I met him," Joe said. Joe. This man standing here before me, this man in the ill-fitting shirt, was definitely not suited to be called Joe. The name Hammer, even if it was only a fighter nickname, fit him much better. It seemed to fit with who he was, with how dangerous and explosive he might be.
"Yes," I said. "He was displeased that you couldn't be bought."
"I get the feeling that he's used to being able to buy everything he wants." Hammer looked at me, his eyes intent, his gaze focused on me. For or a moment, I thought that what he was saying might be an accusation of some kind, an indictment of my willingness to be for sale. But then his face flushed, red rising to his cheeks, and I realized that he was embarrassed. The thought made me feel good about him somehow, as if someone who would be embarrassed by the potential misstep like that couldn't be entirely bad.
"Not everything," I said. "Even if it might seem like he can."
Hammer opened his mouth to say some something, then closed it again. He shook his head. "I just need to see where your computer is," he said. When his eyes locked with mine, I felt heat flood my core, and then a flash of embarrassment at the sensation.
"Follow me." I led him to Aston's office and watched him as he began to open his briefcase.
"I just need to attach this drive and upload the software real quick." He paused when I didn't move, and his face flushed again. Did he think I was standing here, watching him work in Aston's office, intentionally treating him like the help? A man like him would find that insulting, I knew that.
A man like him. I didn't know what kind of man he was. I had the sudden impulse to tell him what I wanted to say a moment ago, that I could not in fact be bought. I wanted to tell him that the reason I was here with Aston was for a greater purpose, a purpose bigger than myself. I had never felt shame about what I had done in the past. Guilt, yes – but shame, no. I had not chosen this life. I had been forced into it. And the men who did that were responsible for the monster I had become.
But standing there in front of him, hearing him intimate that I had been bought by Aston, in that moment I felt shame. In that moment, I felt regret. This man, the one I knew nothing about, had the ability to make me feel that way.
That was disturbing to me.
I watched as he pulled equipment from his briefcase and busied himself with it. "Do you live here?" he asked, bending toward the computer, his back turned toward me.
"Now and then," I said.
H
e looked up, his brow furrowed. "What's that mean?"
"I don't live here full time," I said. "Sometimes I stay here."
"With Aston," he said.
"Yes."
"So you're with him," he said.
"It's complicated," I said. Not by choice, I wanted to scream. What the hell was I doing, lingering in the doorway, talking to this man as if he was any other guy? As if I were not possessed by Aston. As if I was not one of Aston’s belongings.
And if there was anything Aston cared about, it was that his belongings were his and his alone. It would not be good when he found me talking to Hammer. And I could not afford to make Aston angry.
"The marks on your arms before," Hammer said. "Did he do that to you?"
"It's complicated," I said. Hammer was silent, busy with his computer, but I suspected he was paying more attention to me than he let on. "If you need something, let me know."
“I’m finished.” I looked up from my book to see him standing in front of me, his expression unreadable. "Do you know if Aston will be back soon? I'll need to show him how to work some of this."
I stood, smoothing my slacks. “He should have been back by now. He should be here any minute. Do you - want a drink or something?” I didn't know why was asking him to stay for a drink, I just knew that there was a part of me if that didn't want to see him leave. There was another part of me that knew how it would look if Aston came home now, to see him here alone in the penthouse with me, talking casually, having a drink. He would be livid.
Hammer hesitated, then shook his head. “I shouldn’t,” he said.
Shouldn’t drink or shouldn’t stay? I wanted to ask, but didn’t. Shouldn’t drink was probably the right choice for someone who looked as haggard as he did. He looked like he hadn’t slept in ages. I found myself wondering why.
He opened his bag, balanced it on the edge of the sofa. “I’ll give you my card. If you need anything - and I mean anything - no matter the time of day, just let me know." He paused. Whatever he's got over you, whatever's keeping you here, it's not worth it.”
Breaking Hammer (Motorcycle Club Romance) (Inferno Motorcycle Club Book 3) Page 8
