by AJ Crowe
“That’s sweet,” she heard her mother say.
“Can I go to sleep like this?” she asked, though she was really more just letting them know she was going to sleep like this.
“Of course, sweetie.”
Ivy drifted off to sleep with an image of her going to Lucas’s house the next day and solving every problem between them. She knew she just had to tell him how much she cared for him, and everything would be fine.
Chapter Seventeen
The next morning Ivy didn’t feel quite as optimistic, but she still knew she needed to confront Lucas.
“Mom, Jess, I’m going to go check on Lucas,” she said as she pulled on some jeans.
“Do it, honey. Make sure he didn’t choke on his own throw up during the night.”
“That’s a disgusting and completely inappropriate thing to say,” Jess said as she rolled over on the blowup bed that took up almost the entire living floor. “You’re lucky Emma is still asleep.” Jess sat up in bed. “Are you making pancakes?”
Their mother leaned over the partition. “Yes, I’m making pancakes, but your sister here won’t get any because she’s going to check on her strange alcoholic boyfriend…”
“Mom,” Ivy said.
“I’m sorry, hon, I hope things work out between you. I really do.”
“Thanks,” Ivy said and headed for the door with her keys. She left her phone on the couch. “I’ll be back soon, I think.”
“Have fun,” Jess grumbled and pulled the blanket back over her head.
Ivy felt oddly calm as she drove to Lucas’s house. She thought she would be nervous about what he would say –what secrets she would learn –or if he would even say anything at all. But she mostly just felt determined to get things straight between them. He needed to know how she felt. She needed to know how he felt.
And what the fuck was going on.
She was ready to face his demons.
Now a little apprehensive, she pulled into his driveway. She noticed that a slick black car was parked in front of his house but didn’t think much of it until a man got out of the car and walked up to her, standing between her and the front door.
He seemed to be in his forties. His dark hair was speckled with grey and slicked back. He was wearing a dark suit of smooth fabric that looked extremely expensive. His face was thin and his ice blue eyes looked at her appraisingly. He said nothing.
“Um,” Ivy said. She wondered if he was from the IRS or something. “I’m here to meet the guy who lives in this house. Would you mind stepping aside?”
A small smile played at the man’s lips. “You are Ivy Robins, yes?” He had a slight accent that seemed more like a result of extensive travel rather than English being his second language.
“Yes,” Ivy said, wondering if she should be volunteering that information in this situation.
The man took a step forward. Ivy started to feel afraid. She took a step back.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said, laughing softly. “I’m… a business associate of Lucas’s.”
“Oh?” What did that mean? “Does this have something to do with whatever happened a few days ago?”
The man cocked his head. “Yes,” he said after a moment of looking thoughtful. He extended a hand to her. “I’m Alain, by the way. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
She shook his hand. His grip was strong.
He didn’t let go.
“Excuse me?” she said, a little panicked.
He started to drag her toward the black vehicle.
“Please let me go,” she said, trying to remain composed. “What’s going on?”
“I meant it when I said I wouldn’t hurt you,” he said. “So please do not be alarmed by what is about to happen. Igor! Vinnie!” Two muscled men in suits came out of the car. Each one took Ivy by the arm, one on each side and held her still.
“Lucas!” she screamed.
Alain wiped his hands on his suit jacket. “It won’t do any good screaming for him,” he said. “I happen to know that he never wakes up before noon on this particular day.”
Ivy struggled as the burly men pushed her into the back seat of the car. The interior was dark and cramped. It smelled like new leather. The men slipped into the back of the car on either side of her.
She could barley move.
Alain started up the car.
“What the fuck is going on?” Ivy asked, trying to keep her voice calm but completely failing.
“This has very little to do with you,” he said as he pulled onto a main road. “Igor,” he said expectantly, as if issuing an order he had previously explained in great detail.
The man on her left took a cloth out of the front pocket of his suit and held it to her mouth. She bit at his hand and tried to cry out again, but soon found that she was unable to move. Then her vision rapidly deteriorated and she lost consciousness.
* * * *
She awoke in a very uncomfortable position sitting on a chair. That was all she could tell at first.
Slowly, she regained full consciousness. Her eyes opened and feeling spread into her limbs. She looked around.
All she could see was gray concrete stretching for almost a hundred feet in front of her and a small, rusted metal ventilation fan creaking high on the concrete wall across from her. Golden sunlight streamed through the opening in the wall. It was well past noon.
She craned her neck around and gathered that she was in a huge, empty warehouse.
She tried moving further but could not. Her wrists were bound to the chair at her lower back.
“Hello!” she called. Her words echoed faintly throughout the huge warehouse.
“Help me!”
There was silence for a long moment. She craned her ears for any sound.
She could just hear the eerie creaking of the industrial fan high above her.
Faint footsteps echoed through the building, but she couldn’t see anyone. A door creaked open behind her. From the volume and length of the creak, it sounded like a large door. However, since she couldn’t turn all the way around, she couldn’t see it.
“Hello?” she asked. She had a strong feeling that it wasn’t someone come to save her.
She was right. As the footsteps grew louder and the owner of them grew closer, Ivy knew she could see them if she turned her head. She did so and saw Alain. She shrunk back into her chair.
Lucas’s business partner? She tried to figure out what was going on as her mind started to clear. She could think of a few options. Lucas was involved in the mafia, some sort of strange corporate trouble, or perhaps in the FBI or CIA… Or maybe a drug or other crime syndicate other than the mafia?
Ivy swallowed.
Alain came to a stop in front of her. He had a slim, black flip phone in his hand. He flipped it open, then shut, and then open again as he surveyed her.
His gaze felt like an absolute violation. His unabashed ice blue eyes disturbed Ivy to the point she felt like it would be dangerous to protest.
When he moved his gaze to the phone in his hand, it felt like a relief. Ivy let out a ragged breath. “What’s going on?” she asked for the umpteenth time, not really expecting an answer but not knowing what else to saw.
Alain looked back up at her from the phone in his hand. “This is what is going to happen. I’m going to call Lucas. I’m going to talk to him for a moment. Then you are going to talk to him. You may tell him anything about your current situation. You will have only a few moments. Then, I will take the phone, disconnect the call, and we will wait.”
The way he said it made it sound like a surgery.
Ivy now had an idea of what was going on. She had been kidnapped in order to force Lucas to do something. She was leverage.
Alain dialed a number on the phone. It rang a few times. Ivy could hear the tinny noise in the silent warehouse.
Lucas picked up. She could barely hear the low timbre of his voice.
“Ah, hello, Lucas.” The man didn’t pace or barely mov
e while talking on the phone. It unnerved Ivy. “Do you remember what I asked of you?” There was a brief silence. Alain raised one immaculately groomed, dark eyebrow. “Yes, I do have her. How astute of you. … Good question. I would like you to come to the warehouse –you know which one –your very first –and compete for me. One last time. … You win this fight, Panther, and I’ll leave you alone. I request all your profits, of course.”
Ivy blinked, trying to understand what she was hearing. Had Alain just called Lucas “Panther?” And talked about fighting? She tried to fit the pieces together. All she could picture in her mind was some strange Fight Club scenario, but that didn’t seem right. You didn’t get money from that. Men like Alain weren’t involved in fight clubs.
“Yes, I have her right here. She’s fine for the moment. … Yes.”
Alain handed her the phone.
Her heart beat painfully. “Lucas,” she breathed.
“Ivy,” he said. His voice was not the calm, composed, and soothing voice she was so used to. He sounded terrified. “Ivy, are you okay? I found your car in my driveway with the door open. I told you to stay away, Ivy, I told you…” He trailed off.
“I’m… okay,” she said slowly. Alain watched her carefully as she spoke. “Just tied to a chair in a warehouse. Lucas, they fucking kidnapped me. They took me outside your house and knocked me out and kidnapped me.”
Lucas didn’t answer at first. “I know,” he said. He sounded defeated. “I’m going to get you out of there.”
“What’s going on?” she asked, though by now she could predict the question would be futile.
“I can’t explain now,” Lucas said. Even him.
She heard rustling and the starting of an engine. “I’ll be there in a few hours. Just do whatever Al –Alain says. I’m serious. I’ll be there in a few hours.” He seemed to realize he had repeated himself and she heard him take a deep breath over the phone. “I’m sorry, Ivy,” he said. “This is the last thing I wanted to happen.”
Alain saw that she had been silent for awhile and took the phone. “You’re coming,” he said into the receiver. It wasn’t a question. It was somewhere between a confirmation and a demand.
A moment later he seemed to be satisfied with whatever response he had been given. He flipped the phone shut and let it fall into his suit pocket.
Chapter Eighteen
“Well, Miss Robins.” He walked in a circle around her, slowly, each footfall clicking against the concrete. “What to do with you until the matches start…” He had made the full revolution around her and was standing in front of her again.
He leaned in toward her.
His breath smelled like mint. His skin looked powdery up close.
Ivy collected saliva in her mouth and spat on him.
He jerked upwards, his lips curling. “Bitch,” he said, and walked back toward the door that was somewhere behind her. “Igor, Vinnie! I need a tissue!” she heard him yell.
About fifteen agonizingly slow minutes later, the two burly men from before came and started to drag her chair toward a small door on the side of the building. The legs of the chair made a horrible screeching noise on the concrete.
One of them opened the door and the other pushed her into the brightly lit room. Then they let the door swing shut and left her there.
Ivy blinked as her eyes got used to the extra light.
She was in what looked like an office. A Hispanic man around her age with gelled brown hair was sitting behind a beat up desk, going over papers. He looked up at her. “You are the Panther’s girlfriend, yeah?”
“Um,” Ivy started. “Yeah.” She really had no idea what to say.
This man seemed a little nicer than any of the other people she had been in contact that day. She decided to try to get him to let her go.
“What’s your name?”
“Miguel,” he said, and looked back at his papers.
“Miguel, could you please let me know where I am?”
“You don’t know?” He pushed his papers aside and leaned back in his ratty office chair. “I guess they wouldn’t tell you.”
He gestured to the posters on the wall behind him. She hadn’t taken much interest in them before that moment. They showed huge, muscled men roaring, surrounded by crowds of onlookers. It looked like the moment before a fight.
“Fighting,” he said simply.
“Like… Fight Club?” Ivy asked, wondering if her earlier guess had been at all right.
“No, not like fucking Fight Club,” he said, laughing a little. “Like underground fighting. Men from all over the country—sometimes the world—come here to compete. If you win a fight, you win money and move up in the rankings. If you lose, anyone who bet on you loses money and you go home with broken bones.”
Ivy glanced at the shelves that lined the walls opposite the desk. They were filled with plastic bins. “And what’s in those?”
“Money,” Miguel said. “Cash. Tonight there’s a special challenge. Fight the reigning champion and win, well, you get half that.”
“How much would half of that be?”
“Oh, half a million dollars, give or take,” Miguel said. “I’ll be counting it in a little while. It’s part of my job. I keep track of the money and the contestants. I’m the liaison between this underground fighting arena and those in the rest of the country. I send the champions to world competitions.”
“How’d you get that job?” Ivy wasn’t really putting any thought into the small talk anymore. She was rapidly trying to figure out how Lucas fit into this whole situation.
“I was a world fighting champion,” he said. “But then…” He trailed off and stood from his office chair. He grabbed a pair of crutches from under the desk and helped himself into full view of Ivy.
His left leg was missing below the knee.
“My shin was nearly snapped in two during a fight in Japan a few years ago. It got badly infected and I had to get half my leg amputated.” The way he said it, he didn’t sound too concerned. “I had a shitload of contacts and I knew the business, so here I am, managing the Blood Coast fighting arena.”
So they were somewhere along the coast.
“Who’s Alain?”
Miguel made his way back to his office chair. “A manager. Kind of like me, but he focuses on being the representation for world champions. He gets them fights, gets them the proper training and medical care, and gets a cut of their winnings.”
“I heard Alain call Lucas the, um, Panther. What does that mean?”
Miguel was now looking at his papers again, seeming to go down a list and check some things off every few seconds. “Well,” he said, not looking up. “Every fighter gets a nickname once he’s famous enough.”
Ivy decided not to ask any more questions. She felt a little sick. Yeah, she didn’t want to know this. This was a whole other world, one that she didn’t belong in. She was hungry, tired, and her head hurt. Her image on a man she had thought she might want to settle down with and raise kids with was being torn apart.
She felt like shit.
The next hours went by slowly and strangely.
She spent most of the time watching Miguel count stacks of money. Eventually he left her in the office alone. She never worked up the nerve to ask him to untie her.
She started to hear voices outside in the main warehouse. Soon the individual voices turned into a rush of voices, blending into each other. There were a lot of people in there.
Miguel came into his office for a moment to grab one of the papers on his desk. He looked at Ivy and smiled, looking somewhat sorry for her. “Hey, I wanted you to know this isn’t a normal thing for us. Alain needed to go to great measures to get Lucas back here. He lost a lot of money when Lucas disappeared and he’s just looking to make some of it back.”
It sounded like an apology, but it also didn’t quite come off as one. Ivy said nothing.
“The matches are about to start and Lucas isn’t here.” Miguel glanced up at
the clock above his desk. “Hm.”
On that strange note, he left.
The thick metal door of the office offered some relief from the noise of what was going on in the warehouse, but Ivy still imagined she could hear the punches landing on each man. She could sure as hell hear the carnal screams when a fight finished.
Everything about the situation made bile rise in her throat. She hated violence. She hated conflict and confrontation. Displays of physical prowess made her afraid. And all of those were happening just outside the door.
And… And soon Lucas would be a part of it.
Somehow, for some reason, this was her reality. It would happen.
Ivy took a breath in and held it. She counted to three and let it out. She did that several more times. She tried to let the sound of the fighting outside wash by her without acknowledging or processing it.
She was not exactly successful, but she did manage to make time move by more quickly. When she looked up, the clock read an hour later. She started to just watch the clock, begging it silently to move faster, to make this end faster.
Almost a minute later, she heard a voice clearly only a few feet outside the door. She froze.
“I need to see her,” she heard. “Where is she? I need to see that she’s fucking okay.”
It was Lucas.
Chapter Nineteen
“Lucas,” Alain said soothingly, though she could imagine how Lucas would hear it as maddening. “We will of course have her in the audience as… motivation. You can’t see her yet.”
“Let me fucking see her,” he said, but his voice was farther away. She could imagine the huge brawn of Igor and Vinnie dragging him away from the office door.
“Lucas!” she screamed, realizing he could hear her through the door if she could hear him. “Lucas, I’m here!” But she got no response.
She wondered how long it would be until Alain or his men came to fetch her as Lucas’s “motivation.”
The plastic tie around her wrists was tight, but she gritted her teeth through the pain and tried to yank at least one hand out of the restraint. She made no progress other than to scrape some skin off of the back of her wrist.
