“Just got back from Ari’s,” I said, taking my water into the living room. I sat beside him on the sofa and glanced at his screen. He was working on specs for some new gadget.
“Is everything okay?”
I nodded. “For the most part. She was drunk. Apparently her twenty-first birthday was yesterday and we all missed it.”
“Shit. Markie’s been so out of it, I’m sure she has no idea what day it is. I’ll remind her next time she wakes up.”
“Or give it a few days,” I said with a shrug. “We got pizza and a cake.”
Angel gave me a lopsided grin. “Did you sing to her?”
“Fuck no, I didn’t sing to her. What the hell’s wrong with you?”
He chuckled, giving me side-eye as he went back to his laptop. “Markie says Ari’s got a thing for you, you know? Be careful with her. She’s been through some shit.”
Ariana had made her feelings toward me known multiple times tonight, although it sounded more like she wanted to fuck me than date me. She hadn’t opened up to any of us about what had happened to her in the year she’d lived in Vegas alone. Angel and I had run a background check on her, and she had nothing. The night we met her, she was jacked up on some shitty drugs and her organs were in danger of shutting down. I’d found her while looking for her chooch of an ex-boyfriend, Matt Deter.
Some people find rock bottom in Vegas. Ariana found rock bottom’s basement.
The girl was a knock-out, but she made shitty choices and half the time I didn’t know whether to scold her or comfort her. It bugged me that Angel had told me to be careful with her, like I was some asshole who couldn’t see how fucked up she was.
Like I was the kind of asshole who’d take advantage of her when she was drunk and trying to shed her clothes…
Damn, I wish I was that asshole.
“I’m aware, Angel,” I replied. My voice held a little more bite than I’d intended.
“I know.” He shrugged me off, unaffected by my tone.
Glancing at the clock on the wall, I stood. “I gotta get out of here.”
Angel looked up, his mouth open, before glancing at his bedroom door and closing it. My friend had cabin fever for sure. Markie needed someone with her twenty-four, seven, though, and he wasn’t about to pass that job on to anyone else.
We all had trust issues coming out our asses.
“What’s Carlo have you doing?” Angel asked.
I told him as much as I knew about Joey Durante before slipping out of the apartment. Angel promised to look Joey up and see if he could find anything on him while I headed to the fight club one of our informants frequented.
***
Fight clubs always reek of sweat, money, blood, and anxiety. Having done my time proving myself in the cage, the familiar stench welcomed me home, tensing my shoulders and filling my veins with adrenaline. It has been about a year since my name has been on the docket, but I still hungered for the high that came with dominating the cage.
I loved to fight, but I stayed away from this place because it came with risks. Sometimes people limped out of the cage, sometimes they were carried out on a stretcher, and sometimes they left in a body bag.
But the cage made men out of boys.
At least, that’s what Carlo said when he’d signed me up for my first fight. I was fifteen and danced around the cage for the first round. I got cocky in the second round and had my ass handed to me. I’d left a lot of blood in the cage over the years, and then last year Carlo told me to stop. He said I was too valuable to waste in the cage, and if I needed to fight, he’d find me an opponent.
Now, I was back with his blessing.
Carlo considered Joey a threat that he had very little intel on. Despite the way the Marianis had the city wired, Carlo hadn’t been able to provide me with much. Just a few recent pictures of Joey and some dark-haired girl he was with. Carlo hadn’t even been able to tell me their relationship, but he wanted them both dead.
I had a bad feeling about the whole situation, and I never went in blind, so came to the shadiest fight club in Vegas, figuring I’d turn over some rocks and see what secrets came scurrying out.
The place was packed. Greed and desperation danced around the cage on the backs of two fighters. The one in blue shorts was beating the ever-living shit out of the one in the gold shorts. I’d been in both positions, familiar with both the high of kicking ass and the humiliation of getting my ass kicked so publicly. The cage had taught me that training can only take a fighter so far. It takes determination and resolve to dominate your opponent. Thankfully, I had both.
Scanning the room, I found the informant I’d been looking for. Christian Pruitt was a sleazy little man with graying blond hair and a round stomach that hid his thighs and covered the arm rests of his sturdy metal chair. One of the few seated spectators, he sat ringside, watching the fight with a tight expression and a container of heartburn medicine in hand. No doubt Gold Shorts was his fighter, and he’d bet too much money on the kid.
