by Holly Hart
"Hey, Irish – come for photo." A low, gruff Russian voice growled.
Fucking prick – does he really think that’s the way to ask for a picture? Fuck him.
If I’d known then what I would later, maybe I would have acted differently. Hell, who was I kidding. I just kept walking. At least, my body did, because out of nowhere my mind was catapulted somewhere else entirely.
A scent I hadn't come across in years wafted through the air and filled my nostrils, yanking me back through time. It was an expensive scent – Chanel No 5: a perfume that smelled like jasmine and sandalwood – along with a hundred other things I hadn't heard of before I met her.
I turned my head an inch, so I didn’t break eye contact with my opponent, but instead of the heavenly sight of the girl I’d come so close to marrying, all I saw was the snarling, brutish grimace on the face of a thick, scarred Slavic gangster filling my vision – the man I'd just ignored.
And then, behind him, I caught the briefest glance of a woman dressed all in expensive leather and silks, her delicate face turned away. She was the only person in the entire stadium, it seemed, who could have cared less about what was about to happen in the cage. She was better than this, a cut above the filth and muck and assorted human detritus that filled the room. It seemed like there were a million places she’d rather be, and I knew I’d follow her to every one.
An iron band closed around my innards. I wouldn’t flinch if you put me in a cage with a fighter with a hundred pounds on me, or a man who’d never lost a fight. Even now, years later, this girl could reduce me to jelly as easily as she could blink.
It can’t be her.
The hair was the wrong color, was cut short, and now hung around her shoulders, instead of cascading down her back in a shimmering auburn waterfall. It was just a smell, and hell – it was the most famous perfume in the world. My body kept moving, on autopilot and she was gone from my sight.
The lovelorn desire of an eighteen-year-old which had first carried me to America chasing after a girl screamed that I should stop, turn and check.
The relentless, emotionless uncaring machine I'd molded myself into cut that urge off at the knees.
I kept walking.
I stepped through a cage door that swung open ahead of me and, nonchalantly patted the referee on the arm as though he was my employee, not the man who might stand in the way of a bloodthirsty animal hellbent on smashing my head against the mat – and me.
"You've been drinking, punk." My opponent said matter-of-factly, pushing his face up against mine.
I wrinkled my nose and pushed his face away. "Whoa, laddie – how ‘bout you brush your teeth before you get in my face like that."
The thick, muscular Brazilian's right hand jumped toward his face like it was being yanked by the line of an invisible fishing rod, and for the briefest half-second, I thought he was going to check. I had every intention of pushing his temper further, but I already had the piece of information that I wanted – Andreas Pereira was right-handed.
"What the fuck did you just say to me?" The Brazilian growled, lurching toward me with his fist clenched and his ugly, brutish face set in a snarling, hyena-like grimace. The harassed looking referee rushed between us, putting a hand on both our chests and struggled to push us apart.
He was a middle-aged white man in his forties, with an emerging bald patch and the faintest hint of an expanding gut poking over the waistband of his pants, which threatened to split at the seams at any moment. We all knew that if it came to it, he didn't have a chance – we'd bash each other's heads in, and he'd just be collateral damage.
"Hey, champ – leave it for the fight." I grinned cockily. "Anyone ever told you you've got anger problems?"
Pereira's face went puce red and he snarled back, baring his teeth like a feral animal. "If they have, they regretted it…"
I cracked my knuckles, my neck and casually bent over, deliberately taking my time and allowed a deep stretch to penetrate my hamstrings before I stood up to reply.
"Listen, Andy," I said in a faux-serious tone of voice. "This is exactly what I'm talking about. You hold on to all of this anger, you're going to have health problems. Take it from someone who knows, me ma had terrible blood pressure from all the shouting and one day… Poof! Heart popped, and she was gone, up in heaven with her da’, where she belongs."
Actually, I was lying. My ma's a heroin addict, and for all I know, she's still walking the streets of Dublin spreading her legs for anyone who'll give her twenty euros. But Andy wasn't to know that now, was he?
"Who the fuck are you calling Andy?" The Brazilian growled, in a voice so low it could easily have been mistaken for the sound of gravel being crushed in a stone mill.
I pulled myself back, adopting an insulted expression. "Andy, please – I thought we were friends?"
The big, dumb, brutish South-American fighter seemed to know I was mocking him, but true to form, he only had one response – to turn his aggression up to a hundred. "Just you wait till the clock starts, punk. Where the hell are you from, anyway? How's a scrawny little white guy like you gonna lay a hand on me?"
"Listen Andy, if your fighting is anything like your breath, I'll be fine."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
I grinned. Even if it was a cheap shot, and childish, and even if arguing with the big Brazilian fighter was a bit like arguing with a three-year-old with learning difficulties, I was still enjoying myself… "Easy – it'll stink."
Andy blanched as he realized he'd wandered into another verbal trap, but before he had a chance to respond – most likely by barreling into me and knocking me to the floor, the commentator grabbed the mic, and the CFL theme music started blaring through the speakers.
"Folks, it's everything you been waiting for – it's the Champions Fighting League – and IT’S LIVE!"
The referee grabbed both our gloved hands, raised them to the rafters and then turned to face us. "Gentlemen, bump gloves," he requested. It was only polite.
"Sure thing," I said amiably. It bit my lip to stop myself from smiling, and held out my arms. "Andy?"
The Brazilian made a guttural noise that was somewhere in between a lawnmower starting and the sound of trapped wind. "Use your words, Andy," I grinned, dancing loosely from foot to foot. "You remember what they are, right?"
As the Brazilian launched himself toward me, a red mist descending over his eyes, I briefly wondered whether I'd regret taunting the big man. After all, I'd never expected to fight the CFL titleholder tonight. Then again, Andy might be quicker and bigger than the man I'd been hired to battle – but he wasn’t as bright, either.
The referee blew his whistle, retroactively declaring that the fight was on. "Hey," I protested, ducking a wayward fist the Brazilian had sent my way. "Did yer mam tell you it was okay to act like that?"
"You. Shut. Your. Fucking. Mouth." The big, brutish fighter grunted, punctuating every word with a thunderous fist aimed my way. "You're cocky now," he panted, "but just you wait till you're lying on the mat with a broken jaw…"
I stepped back, to the side, and back again, my feet moving in perfect harmony at my brain’s command. My eyes flickered, watching every breath my opponent took, every inch he moved forward, every punch he threw and every kick he attempted.
I took it all in – watching, cataloging and, most importantly, learning how my opponent fought. My buddies used to parrot an old army phrase before going out for the night hoping to pick up chicks – no plan survives first contact with the enemy.
I could say something similar about my demeanor – it's okay to be arrogant as long as you don't get hit. And with Pereira, it'd only take one hit before I was out for the count. The man was a tank – he easily had ten pounds of muscle on me, and it was all located in his midsection – a thick, muscular torso and powerful thighs. The moment I slipped, or he knocked me to the ground – that would be it. The Brazilian was born to grapple, he'd won international medals and nationwide tour
naments.
I…hadn’t.
"What's wrong, pussy?" The Brazilian snarled. "Not so cocky now, are you? Where's that big mouth gone?"
I was busy staring at his feet. Not in a weird way – but as normally as a man can stare another man's feet. There was a pattern to his movement – he invariably drove forward two steps, then took a step either right or left. If I moved so much as an inch, he inevitably took a pace backward and readjusted. It looked like it had been drilled into him in training, probably as a child, and it told me a lot about him.
Some fighters are like forces of nature – unpredictable, elemental whirlwinds of barely concealed aggression, and others are like chess players. For all his big, dumb aggression, the Brazilian fighter currently driving me backward toward the wire frame of the cage was definitely the latter. You learn patterns in chess. There's always a move that counters another and a strategy to beat another player's tactics. So you learn to fight by learning patterns – patterns that tell you how to move, and patterns that tell you when to punch, and when to pivot, and when to duck.
And that works inside the octagon more often than not.
Until it doesn't.
Because sometimes, I thought, you come up against someone like me
"I'm Irish by the way," I offered helpfully as I ducked under another one of the Brazilian's hopeful long-ranged swinging efforts. The tanned brute looked at me stupidly, his mouth hanging open as he pulled back his shoulder for another thunderous attempted punch. My eyes flickered upward – the fight clock read thirty seconds left in the bout.
I had a choice to make, and two options. I could either play it safe and keep moving, keep ducking and keep tiring out the heavy South-American fighter, biding my time.
Or…
I could take the fight to him.
And I was Conor Regan. I didn't know the meaning of playing it safe. It wasn't in my make up, my DNA. The Irish don't do planning – if we did, we'd have knocked that heavy British boot off our throat centuries ago. And I'm as Irish as they come.
"Why the hell do I care." My opponent grunted heavily, taking a step backward, as I'd known he would, before finally responding to me. "Where you're from?"
I took a pace sideways. Pereira readjusted. I took a step forward, he took a step back.
I shrugged. "You asked."
The brute snarled, bared his teeth and took a step forward with his shoulder packed and ready to punch. This time, I didn't step back.
The crowd gasped in anticipation as they saw what was about to happen.
I saw a hint of understanding flare in the Brazilian's eyes as I took a pace forward, packed my own shoulder and drove a thunderous uppercut into his chin. It was too late for him to do anything about it. I stepped backward, my guard still up, but I needn't have bothered.
The Brazilian's legs wobbled, and his right thigh moved as though he were about to take a step forward, but by the time his right foot touched the ground, his consciousness had seeped away.
The three-time titleholder crashed to the ground with a volcanic thud, without so much as landing a punch on me.
I'd knocked him out.
The referee rushed to Pereira's fallen body and knelt beside him, putting his ear to the fighter's lips to check if he was breathing. The crowd was silent, shocked that their hero had fallen, but I didn't take any of it in.
I ran to the walls of the cage, searching desperately for the girl wearing the perfume and the expensive black clothes. The VIP's were surging forward toward the octagon to get a close look at the fallen champion, so I leapt onto the biting metal frame and climbed until I sat atop of it, droplets of sweat dripping off my ridged, heaving muscles and sparkling under the floodlights as it fell to the mat below.
The crowd finally woke up, roaring shocked appreciation, their jeers turned to fawning adoration. They thought I was up there to receive their admiration, and to bask in their acclaim.
But they were wrong.
I was looking for a girl.
My girl.
But if it was her, she was already gone.
3
Maya
The cold, anodyne gray concrete corridors of the old Alexandria Baseball Arena stretched to my right and left as I burst out of the pit and through the heavy stainless steel doors, heart hammering like crazy and lungs working overtime with panic. Dust trickled off the ceiling in tiny but predictable spurts. I took a peek back over my shoulder, checking that no one had watched me tear out of the crowd as I made my hurried, panicked exit.
I pressed my head against the cool concrete, taking reassurance in its solidity. "Jesus Christ, Maya, what the hell are you going to do?"
It was him. He'd packed on another twenty pounds of solid, unyielding muscle as the years had passed, and his torso was inked with another few rounds of impenetrably layered tattoos, but it was undeniably him. The moment I saw the stab wound on his side as he walked past, now covered with an illustration of a single red rose growing out of a bed of thistles, I knew the game was up.
It was Conor. And I was fucked.
A deep, intimidating Slavic accent broke the calm solitude of the concrete corridor. "Maya, where the fuck do you think you're going?"
I spun around, only to be confronted by the ugly, scarred face of the last man I'd hoped to see – The Bull. For a man who was built as thick as an ox, as his nickname suggested, Mikael Antonov could move with surprising stealth when he wanted to. In the midst of my anguish, I hadn't noticed him creep up on me until it was too late. It was no great shock, I guessed, given he'd grown up as a thief in Moscow back in the days when the Politburo still ran the show, and when the punishment for picking pockets was still hard labor in a Siberian prison camp.
Was that what made him this way?
I barely had a chance to begin replying before he cut me off. "I –."
He reached out his short but powerful arms and grabbed me by my left shoulder, squeezing hard and paying no attention to the anguished look of pain that crossed my face. I should have been used to it, but I wasn't, not nearly. "How do you think it makes me look, zaychik, when you storm out like that? Do you think about how it makes me look in front of my clients?"
I bit my lip – biting down on my fear, but also my desire to fight back, to say something I'd only regret. Organized crime was so often a maze of metaphors and doublespeak. How could he call me zaychik – bunny – and also cause me such pain? And why bother calling them clients when we all knew what he really meant?
Criminals. Criminals and gangsters.
Both.
"I'm sorry…" I whimpered through the waves of pain as the Bull dug his powerful, fat thumb into the soft tissue on the front of my arm. "I didn't mean to make you look bad, I promise…"
"But you didn't think, did you, bunny." He said in a sick parody of what should have been a tender, affectionate tone of voice. "You never do. You didn't answer me," he continued, his voice hardening. "Where the hell do you think you're going?"
I looked at him fearfully. The Bull was unpredictable at the best of times, and lately he'd been almost unmanageable.
"It's…" I panted, gasping at the pain still flooding through my arm. The agony seemed to sharpen my wits as I cast around for a lie to get me out of the situation, and my brain finally landed on the one thing I knew would work. "…A woman thing."
The Bull's lopsided, fat nose wrinkled with disgust and he let me go, recoiling as though I was somehow unclean. I sagged forwards with relief, holding my screaming shoulder with my right hand.
"Can't it wait?" He growled. "I've got important guests with me tonight, and I need you to be there to help…host."
My skin crawled. I knew exactly what he meant when he said host, and I wanted no part of it. The Bull hadn't forced me to bed any of the men he made me flatter and fawn over – not yet, anyway, but I knew it would only be a matter of time.
He treated me like I was a commodity – just another of the hookers he used to smooth his path in the world
. I was trapped in a world of his making: a world of corruption, filth and decay, and I couldn't escape, because he controlled the one thing that I could never leave.
I bit down on the rising fear in my throat, embracing a deep well of resolve from somewhere in the unplumbed depths of my soul. "I'm cramping. You know what that means?"
He had the look on his face of a man who wasn’t just entirely ambivalent to women's suffering, but was in fact entirely disgusted by the whole concept.
I plowed forward. "You want me to start showing all over these expensive clothes? How's that going to make you look in front of your clients?" I was careful to say you, not me – because I knew he didn't care what anyone thought of me. Unless, that was, it somehow reflected badly on him. Of course – I wasn't actually on my period, but Mikhail didn't need to know that…
"Don't be disgusting," he spat. "Get yourself cleaned up, then I want you upstairs. There's someone I want you to meet." With that, he turned on his heel and clattered back through the steel doors into the arena, where he was swallowed up by the warm noise of thousands of screaming, punch-drunk MMA fans cheering the name of the victor – a man that, to my knowledge, they'd never even heard of just a few minutes before.
"Co-nor! Co-nor! Co-nor!"
I ran, trembling, to the nearest restroom and slammed the door closed, locking it behind me. I needed to get out – to get away from that noise, the chants of the crowd and what they reminded me of – a few months in Dublin, a long time ago, a man I’d loved, and a man I never thought I'd see again.
I turned on the faucet to drown out the sound of my impending tears and sank back on my haunches with my back against the cool tiles of the restroom wall. There was only one question on my mind.
What the hell am I going to do?
4
Conor
The delicate tinkling of music from a century-old black concert piano wafted through the air in the expensive, exclusive cocktail bar hidden in the far reaches of the VIP section in the old arena – a sound that seemed entirely out of place in a room filled with fighters, mobsters, and cheap, classless, arm candy in bulging dresses that barely contained the fat tits and plump asses that were so deliberately on show.
