"Who's fighting?" Skyler asks. "Milo? Dacre? Nobody pulled out, right?"
"Nah, they're all here. Milo against a newcomer. Dacre and his twin brother."
With a chuckle, Skyler nods, "Always a popular fight. Those two would kill each other if I let them."
"And it looks like the third fight of the night is..."
"Me," he grins, taking a swig from the bottle. "Against some asshole from across town. That's all. Me and the boss man gotta talk serious, now, Wolfy, go see what Stella and her team need help with.”
As soon as the man vanishes into the rapidly growing crowd, Skyler steers me into an alcove, opening a hidden door that lets us into what appears to be a miniature dressing room.
"That's Wolfy," he tells me. "Julian. Long story short, he got caught up with the wrong crowd until he could no longer find a job with the right one. So he's stuck with us, using his business management degree to correspond with dudes who beat the fuck out of each other for money."
"Like you, apparently," my head tilts, looking at this seeminglytoo-happyguy that certainly doesn't look the type to fight people for fun.
He chuckles, his grin beaming, "Nah. I don't do it for the money. This is all business. Bigger scumbags than us who think they have a right to come into our club to accuse us of fixing the fights. I offered to show them just how real they are and somebody is taking me up on it."
"Seems like a terrible idea."
"It is for him." A manic gleam fills his eyes, "I've only ever lost one fight. And luckily, my bestest buddy was there to back me up."
Something in his tone, hidden beneath the layers of psychotic playfulness, is a dark reminder of the life we really live. That beneath the criminals everyone coming here thinks we are, we are truly so much worse.
A knock at the door draws his attention away from the past and back to the here and now.
"Come in!" he shouts, sinking into one of the chairs. I lean against the wall behind him, kicking up my foot to rest my heel against the wall, silently cataloguing the entrance we came through and the one nearest me, maybe six or seven steps away to my left.
Two men step through the door one by one, wearing matching suits and headsets.
One is slightly taller than the other, though they're both tall and give off an air of authority, if not because of their stature, then because of the pistols hanging at their hips, ready to be used at any moment's notice.
“Beltran, Fomori," the one with blue eyes greets us. "All looks clear out there. The only new faces came with the fighter and they're clean."
The other has gray eyes and a brutal scar running the length of his face, down his left cheek, and he adds on, "Security upstairs is already preparing for a line down the street again. Nothing out of the ordinary for a Saturday night. No troublemakers."
"No troublemakersyet," Skyler corrects them, leaning back. "There's always a few."
He looks at me, "Is your girl coming tonight?"
“I’m not sure,” I laugh.
"What, you haven't checked her itinerary yet?"
My eyes land on him and narrow, wondering, not for the first time, if he knows that what I've done with it comes to Brigit isn't exactly dating. Or maybe in the world we live in and the people we deal with, no one around us is afforded secrets. Maybe Brigit's brief adventures into this place are something he believes Ilether do to keep an eye on her.
Maybe it was.
Fucking hell.
Layers of secrets on top of lost memories.
My life is a labyrinth of deception and missing time. I still have little clue about who I was or who I am.
It's taken me days to clean up my home enough to make it livable.
"No, I haven't," I finally answer him just to keep him from looking too closely at what I'm not telling him.
He checks his watch.
