When Nothing Is All You've Got

by Kirsty Dallas

  Tonight he stared, as usual, his dark eyes never leaving mine, almost a challenge but a challenge to what? Occasionally, I thought I saw need in his eyes, a want for something a man might seek from a woman. I wasn’t naive to such wants. I’d experienced uncontrolled lust before, and I witnessed it on a daily basis. Rutting in dark corners, and sometimes in open communal spaces usually saved for trading vendors and eating, was a common sight. According to Regan, I was attractive, but I didn’t see it. My nose had a permanent ridge from being broken one too many times. I had scars, my lips were too big, and my eyes? They were dead . . . cold, hard, and dead. No, I was not beautiful. I was a killer, my heart was ice, and my brain was nothing more than a catalogue which saw every ugly part in this world and remembered it with precise detail. As I stared into Shadow’s challenging eyes, I didn’t see lust. I saw something else. Hate? Most definitely, but there was something else there, and I didn’t understand it, nor did I want to. The way he looked at me had always been the same: cold, calculating, and intense.

  My attention was drawn to a figure who stepped forward, coming to stand directly before me, stopping my march towards glory.

  “Rumor ’as it she ’as a bad ankle,” he mumbled as he took my hands and began to methodically wrap them.

  His deep Jamaican accent had long ago become a soothing balm to the chaos in my world. Dejohn never offered me falsehoods, and he wasn’t a man who shared affectionate hugs or sweet words. No matter how aloof he tried to be though, I knew he cared about me. He was honest, occasionally brutally so, and he showed me how to protect myself, made sure I had at least two solid meals a day, treated my wounds, and tried as best as he could to be the buffer between Kingsley and me. He wasn’t a father by blood, but if I were able to choose my father, I’d choose him.

  “She also got on de juice last night, so yuh might find her ah bit slower den usual,” he added with a smirk.

  It almost convinced my own lips to rise and meet his good humor . . . almost. Smiles felt foreign to me, but if there was anyone who could coax one, it was Dejohn.

  He had once been a solider of my father’s elite, delegated to gofer when he reached an age considered unfit to watch the king’s back. I had no idea how old Dejohn was, but his ebony skin was a stark contrast to his shocking white hair. His face was heavily wrinkled, and he seemed to walk slower and slower each day, his shoulders stooped, as if carrying the weight of the world had finally taken its toll. He met my gaze, his eyes filled with worry. “Move like de wind, protect yuh face, keep yuh eyes on de target . . . and don’t get dead.” His words were the steady mantra he had been reciting since I threw my first punch at five years of age. They helped me focus and find the calm, steady depths I needed to reach in an effort to block out everything except my opponent. Dejohn nodded, satisfied with whatever he found in my dark brown eyes, and stepped aside. Then the doors were pulled open, and the heavy scent of alcohol, smoke, blood, and sex hit me right before the thundering noise filled my ears.

  I let it all fall away until it was just me, until my head was clear and my eyes saw nothing but the arena before me. Pulling my jacket off, I handed it to Dejohn and stepped through the giant doorway as the crowd of bodies parted to observe my march toward the cage.

  “No weapons,” called a familiar voice from beside the cage door. I removed my baby from my thigh holster and the smaller knife from my boot.

  “I’ll take them, Nada.” Regan stepped forward, and I reluctantly handed her my weapons. She was the only person, besides Dejohn, who I trusted them to, but I still hated giving them up. As my focus moved from the cage to the young woman beside me, I took in the spilt puffy lip and right eye which was almost closed over from swelling.

  “Jake?” I asked, my voice low and rough from lack of use.

  Alarm spread across Regan’s pretty face, and she shook her head vehemently as she pulled my weapons to her chest. She was dressed in a pair of ratty jeans, worn through at the knees, and a white shirt that was far too big for her much smaller frame. As an innocent, she was supposed to wear white to mark her place in the prison system. She was also meant to live in the innocent sector, with others like her. Stubbornly, she refused , finding some kind of morbid sense of freedom in living outside her sector. While I lived in the red sector, she now lived in the blue sector, only a minutes’ walk from my room.

  “It’s not what you think. I talked back. It was my fault.”

  I didn’t flinch. I didn’t curse. I didn’t do anything that might give away the memory that slipped into my present.

  “What did you say, girl?” his voice boomed, a roar that I’m sure rivaled the fierce, proud beasts I had read about in books. Lions were said to have a roar that you could feel in your bones, even if you were miles away. My father’s bellow was a frightening force of nature. But I stood proudly before him, my hands on my hips and my cold gaze on his furious one.

  “He touched me, they all touch me, all the damn time. They grab my ass and touch my breasts as if they have every right to. If one of them touches me again, I will cut off his hand.”

  My father turned to face his soldiers, who didn’t bother hiding their insidious smirks, and for just a moment, I thought he would save me the trouble and remove the heads from the perverted beasts who dared to call themselves soldiers. Instead, he slowly turned to face me again, his face suddenly a calm façade that had me almost take a retreating step away. Before I could so much as blink, he had pulled a gun from under his jacket and pressed it to my head. Guns weren’t a common place weapon in the Underworld; bullets were hard to come by and manufacturing them by hand was a tedious task, not to mention the steel workers struggled to keep up with demand. I’d seen a gun once but never so close, and I had never felt the hard, cold steel that was currently pressed to my forehead.

  “You dare to talk back to me? You think you can make demands of me and my men?” he growled.

  I could feel the worry tumble from Dejohn who took a small step forward. I knew the eyes of all my father’s men were on us as he stood so calmly before me, ready to spill my brains over his expensive wool carpet. Who the fuck had carpet in the Underworld, anyway? My father, that’s who.

  My hands slipped from my hips, and I stood a little taller. I often wondered when this time would come, when my repulsive presence would reach its limit and he would put me down like a dog. At times, I craved the day would come, the times when every breath I was forced to take seemed too hard, and standing on my own two feet was just too tiring. Right now, I fucking reveled in the opportunity to be gone from the pain and misery.

  “Do it,” I whispered.

  His arm tensed, his trigger finger squeezed, and the gun made a clicking noise that I could barely hear over the roar of my heart. I waited for something to happen, pain perhaps, darkness, anything to suggest he had freed me from this prison. Instead, I heard Dejohn’s breath spill on a relieved sigh and my father’s outrage as he pulled the gun away and screamed obscenities about inferior weapons. I was left with a profound feeling of disappointment. What if this had been my only chance of escape? As my father raged about the injustice of the thirteen unbearable years he had suffered my existence, Dejohn stepped forward.

  “Boss,” his quiet and calmly spoken word gained my father’s immediate attention, “put her in da ring.” The silence in the room was thick, and yet my thoughts were raging and chaotic, drowning out the quiet and filling my head with a piercing ache.

  “What?” my father demanded, though I knew he’d very well heard what Dejohn had said.

  “She be ready. Put her in da ring.”

  “Get moving, girl, or you’ll be stripped bare and whipped. You know the punishment for refusing to fight.”

  Gadget, the doorman on the gate of the fighting cage, glared at me with clear disapproval. His eyes were enlarged and bulbous through the thick rimmed glasses he constantly wore, and his goatee was tied off with little blue beads. His teeth were freakishly white and too straight to be real; I’
d heard he stole the set of false teeth from a deceased inmate before he was sent to the incinerator. Trinkets, tools, and gadgets hung from his dirty old blue vest, which was how the man had gained his nickname. He was a blue, signifying petty crime. For all the bluster and courage he pretended to possess, he was valued as nothing more than a doorman.

  I didn’t bother gifting Gadget with my attention; it was saved holy and solely for Regan. Gadget knew I’d fight; I had never refused to fight, and furthermore, I had never lost. I had filled the pockets of his threadbare jeans for years now, and he’d rather see me five minutes late for a fight than stripped and whipped. If I didn’t fight, my opponent was unanimously given the win, and I knew Gadget had a bet on me, he always bet on me.

  “Get moving, tough girl. How Jake disciplines his property has nothing to do with you.”

  Shadow’s deep voice slammed into my chest, forcing emotions and feelings I didn’t understand to shake my composure. I recognized the anger, though, the rage that simmered over his callous words, and only the fact that it was an unsurprising comment stopped me from turning on him. I was used to such insensitive remarks about the women of the Underworld. Women were few and far between, many forced to work as prostitutes in the Whore Pit, a wide open room littered with thin, dirty mattresses separated by threadbare, filthy sheets erected as an illusion of privacy. The women who worked there were viewed as little more than vessels for men to sink their cocks into. Even the female inmates who had proved themselves with much needed skills, like nursing and cooking, were viewed as nothing more than possessions to the men.

  Regan was different, though. She was an innocent, born into this world, not thrown into it like rubbish. The innocents were to be protected, even if they refused to live in the safety of their own sector. Living apart from the whites meant she needed protection, and Jake was supposed to offer her housing and protection, not be the fucking source of her pain and fear. He wasn’t a soldier, who were made up of murdering reds, he was a blue, petty crime, thrown into the Underworld for selling drugs, and here he was quickly recruited to continue his lawless career. It seemed as though he had expanded his criminal record to beating women.

  I didn’t glance at Shadow, proud that my focus remained solely on Regan, even though Shadow’s voice stirred a perfect combination of attraction and hate. Regan was nervous as she shifted from one foot to the other, her long blonde braids swinging around her waist. She was a beauty, even undernourished and gaunt as she was. Her pretty amber gaze tried to look anywhere but at me.

  When her eyes did finally find mine, the resignation was clear to see. She knew Jake was as good as dead for touching her with a harsh hand, and I could see the mixture of sorrow, relief and panic behind those amber gold irises. I didn’t have much in the way of friends, but Regan was definitely one, the best one. I’d fix her problem with Jake, and it would leave Regan without shelter and protection, but I’d fix that, too. I could claim her under my own protection, but the men would only see that as a challenge and use Regan as a tool to hurt me. She would be better off under the protection of another male, one who wouldn’t take a harsh hand to her. Turning my attention back to the cage, I walked away from that problem for now and prepared to take down the next obstacle in my way.

  2

  SHADOW

  The fucking girl was getting too cocky. I’d warned Kingsley, and he’d grunted a noncommittal acknowledgement before burying his hands in the hair of the latest whore sucking his dick. Too much time and effort had been invested in training her, and now they had a true fighter on their hands. A girl with a brain who knew how to use her body and fists was a dangerous combination. Nobody believed me when I said she was smart, except for Dejohn, of course; he knew her real potential, which is why he’d put a pair of gloves on her when she was five-years-old and started training her. The only way she could survive this world was to fight, and fight she did. That’s what drew me to her, that belligerent attitude that dared anyone to fuck with her. I hated her for it. She made me remember things I had left behind the moment I had been thrown into the Underworld. Something had changed, though. The look in her eyes was new; it was even fiercer than before. Lately, when she entered the ring, her eyes became filled with an intensity that bordered on terrifying.

  The girl was angry. Mind you, she’d always been angry, but now her demeanor towards Kingsley and his organization was one of cool indifference, which meant she was either stupid or really fucking smart. I voted for the latter. It was more than that, though; there was a glimmer behind her eyes that reminded me of something I hadn’t seen or felt in too many years to remember . . . hope. The girl had a secret, and I could see it burning behind those deep, bottomless eyes. The puzzle that was her newfound intensity intrigued me. Her lack of fear pissed me off, and her arrogance sent a fiery heat of fury flowing through my veins, but there was something beneath all those layers of damage, something that you didn’t see too often in the Underworld. Defiance, hope . . . and secrets. Defiance got you killed, hope was a pointless emotion in a hopeless world, and secrets only brought you pain. The girl was on a one-way track to meet the hounds of hell, and it would be a painful fucking journey.

  Hell was definitely her destination, just like the rest of us she’d butchered and maimed, all in the spirit of survival. She was no fucking saint, that’s for sure. But that fucking defiance and those dark, dangerous secrets called to me, pulling at me to dig beneath the layers and see what else lay beneath her cold, hard exterior.

  By Underworld standards, she was quite beautiful. The healthy glow to her cheeks was rare—most inmates here were starving, but the girl was well fed in an effort to make her a better fighter—and that glow made her all but shine as she held herself like a warrior ready for battle. Her skin was smooth and creamy white, her body a perfection of toned curves, and when she walked with her head held high and shoulders pressed back, her hips swayed in a way that begged for a man’s hands. Her eyes were as dark as her fucking soul, and her lips were worthy of the biggest cock. The male in me wanted to pin her to my bed and fuck her senseless. The bitter darkness in my soul wanted to punish her for that want. There was no place for feelings and emotions in the Underworld; if you wanted to survive, you learned to bury your heart and embrace the darkness.

  I watched as she stood like a statue within the ring, her gaze steady on her opponent. Viper had a good twenty pounds on the girl, all solid muscle, too. What she didn’t have though was experience, speed, and the girl’s lack of fucking fear. Viper was a street brawler with a heavy fist, and she was stupid enough to think she had a chance in the cage. I bet a crate of filtered water on a first round knock-out; it was a sure thing.

  Nada . . . My mind rolled the word around. Nada meant nothing, but for some reason my heart and cock jumped at the mention of that simple, insignificant name. I’d tried to think of her as nothing more than ‘girl’ for so long, but this girl was all woman, and her name burned on my lips, wanting to be released. Nada, Nada, Nada, what a puzzle of a female. She’d been trained in boxing, kick boxing, aikido, tae kwon do, and judo. She’d also trained with weapons, mostly blades—like knives, machetes and swords—and she now held a knife with such comfort it made many of the soldiers nervous. The girl was so fucking good that fights were getting harder to find, and people were getting bored with watching the same ol’ shit and the same ol’ fighters; everyone was wary of going up against the king’s notorious daughter. Nada! This time my mind spat the word out with irritation. We were going to have to think outside the box; she was going to have to start fighting the men. Everyone knew it. The men were practically climbing over each other for a chance in the cage with the infamous Nada. They weren’t allowed to touch her outside the cage, so a lot of aggression, anger, and lust would be burned off in the ring. It was going to be a fucking bloodbath, if the girl didn’t snap before then, and both scenarios made me restless and pissed off and I wasn’t sure why. No, that was a load of bullshit. I knew why, and it pissed me of
f just as much of the thought of her damaged and bleeding. Because a part of me was genuinely captivated by the girl, and that small part of me held power. That small, forgotten part of me that dwelled somewhere deep within my chest didn’t want to see her broken. She was on an edge, one that could fall into insanity at any moment, and the secrets behind her eyes burned fierce. Kingsley would see it too if it weren’t for his loathing and callous disregard for the girl. His hate impaired his judgement. It was his one biggest flaw as leader of this hell. At least he was down here, and no longer in the world above. Such a brutal, bloodthirsty, merciless man was exactly where he should be, locked up.

  Kingsley Duke had slit his bosses throat after an argument over his pay, his penance was a deserved life sentence in the underworld. Since arriving a little over thirty years ago, he had ruthlessly taken leadership of the Underworld, killing and maiming his way to the top. He was a rich man in a poor man’s world; therefore, he held all the power here. He owned everything and everyone. Above ground was a different story. They had their own leader who had his own money and his own power, while most American citizens still struggled to put food on their tables. He also had freedom. Maximus Rathmore, America’s salvation, stood for all that was right in the world of light. But his own power created his own form of greed, and the savior of the people was far from saintly. He’d pushed the boundaries of righteousness, and his soul was just as damned as the rest of us. He could be as ruthless and bloodthirsty as the Underworld’s Kingsley Duke when he wanted to be. I’d heard stories about Maximus’s merciless dictatorship, then I’d experienced his wrath first hand, when at nineteen I was captured and sentenced to the Underworld for my crime. It was a moment in my life I would never allow myself to regret, and I was spared no mercy from Maximus. He ordered my flogging before I was dropped into what the inmates affectionately called the Wild Zone. Delivered straight to the door of the Underworld, I’d stood up fighting, my fists swinging at the strangers who tried to restrain me, and I’d been fighting ever since.