Nathan thought about who he was with and what that man might like to do after hours. Nathan liked watching Fury fight, but he didn’t like the idea of getting pummeled himself. That shit hadn’t been any fun in high school, and Nathan wagered the experience did not improve with age.
With a long exhale, Nathan got out of the truck and jogged to catch up to Fury. Nathan channeled the persona he used to appease Laura. He wrapped the pretense around him like armor, trying to be ready for anything.
“How’s it goin’, Fury?” the doorman asked without taking his eyes off the magazine. He had a gun clipped to his belt. Nathan resolutely did not stare at it.
“Ed,” Fury said, grabbing the door’s handle and yanking it open. Music, voices, and jeering erupted from the interior, though it wasn’t nearly as loud as it’d been in the Bass building. Nathan stayed close to Fury’s heels, walking inside and hearing the door click behind him.
Nathan had heard the rumors that Fury fought for less-than-legal groups and circuits. In Nathan’s head, that had always translated to outtakes from the movie
Fight Club
, but in reality, it looked a whole lot like the official scene, just smaller.
On their left was a bar that was little more than a narrow wooden divider between patrons and tender. The bottles behind the bar sat on makeshift shelves, flat boards on cinderblocks. People were gathered around tall tables. With no chairs and no stools, it was leaning-room only. Bare bulbs hung from the ceiling along with a few hanging fluorescent boxes complete with flickering tubes. Off to the right were four wide garage bays and, in the closest corner, there were rooms made out of partition walls. One of the doors was open, and it was guarded by armed men.
The music came from a pile of speakers and wires that sat against the far wall, and in the middle of the room was a crowd huddled around two men wrestling with one another. The fighters wore jeans, not regulated uniforms. There was no ring, no court, no cage, and the gathering had to scatter fast when the men rolled too close. Sitting off to one side in a folding chair was a bored man in latex gloves. A bag sat next to him along with a rolling cart stacked with medical supplies. Nathan got the distinct impression that the guy was there more to keep men from making too much of a mess rather than to keep anybody healthy.
Nathan realized with icy clarity that all his forays into so-called dangerous situations had only been dangerous to himself, and they paled in comparison to this place. If this place got raided, serving liquor without a license would be the most minor of their offenses. There were no dancing boys or girls, no stages or poles, and the security personnel were not the least bit interested in keeping
Nathan
safe.
Nearby, three men and two women were taking turns snorting lines. It was always nice to see something familiar. The men glanced at Fury, dismissed him, and turned granite eyes on Nathan. Trying to remain businesslike, Nathan waited while Fury went to the bar and spoke to an Amazonian woman covered in piercing metal and colorful tattoos.
“Where the hell is my damned drink?” barked a man leaning heavily against the bar next to a couple of his equally drunken buddies.
The bartender gave the patron the middle finger, all her attention on Fury, who bent down to speak intimately in her ear. Nathan cursed at himself for the pang of jealousy. The woman shot a smirk in Nathan’s direction. She shook her head. Neither did anything for Nathan’s sense of unease.
“Bitch, I ain’t got all night!” yelled the belligerent man.
“You want a fuckin’ whiskey?” the woman barked. She grabbed a bottle, and pure, blind fear seized Nathan by the short hairs.
“Here.” She slammed the bottle down on the man’s hand. It crunched. He howled in rage, fumbling at his belt line. The woman pulled her weapon faster, a curved knife that was more sword, and the man stopped reaching for his piece when she wrestled him closer by the hair and pressed the curved steel to his pulse.
Nathan expected gunfire, but what he heard were cheers. “Give ’em hell!” somebody bellowed.
Meanwhile, the asshole’s friend pushed away from the bar. Fury put a fist in that man’s face. One hit, like a wrecking ball striking a rag doll, and blood sprayed. The man went down, boneless, and Fury grabbed the third guy by the balls and throat when the guy ran at him.
“Take ’im to the ring!” a different somebody screamed, but Fury didn’t haul the man toward the fighting circle. Instead, Fury spun, using momentum and the extra hundred pounds he had on the would-be assailant, and the third guy went flying toward the front door. Somehow, Ed the magazine reader was there to greet the guy, who landed in a groaning heap. Ed calmly dragged the man across the threshold.
“Fury, baby, I got this,” the bartender purred at volume, her knife still against the first man’s jugular. Fury took two stalking steps closer anyway.
“Fury, now, last time you got all worked up, we had dead people. You want to be dead people, asshole?” she asked the drunk man trying to swallow without further cutting his throat. He didn’t say anything. “Didn’t think so,” the bartender said. “Fury, here, he got issues. You don’t want any piece a those issues. And you sure as fuck don’t want any a mine.” She let the guy go with a shove. “Now get the fuck out ’fore we stop playin’ nice.”
The man not passed out and bleeding on the floor staggered toward the door. Everything had happened so fast that Nathan only now noticed that the men standing around the tables had stopped snorting lines and feeling up their women to stare at the troublemakers, their hands disappearing under their jackets or behind their backs. They let the guy with the bleeding neck go without incident, and Nathan wanted to pass out in relief, but he didn’t get the chance.
“Fury,” admonished a nondescript man, who had appeared from the office to Nathan’s right and who stood between the two armed guards. “You fuckin’ up my customers, again?”
“They were fuckin’ with Hellabeth,” Fury replied. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stepped closer to Nathan.
The man snorted. “You mean you and she were fuckin’ with them.”
“Damn right,” Hellabeth, the bartender, crowed. She held up a bottle of whiskey and drank directly from it. A line of men slammed glasses down on the bar, and she sloshed more drink into their cups.
The office guy laughed, and as though on cue, the people at the tables went back to their business. Nobody made any move for the drunk man Fury’d knocked out cold; the medic still sat across the room in his chair, the front legs lifted off the ground.
Fury gestured with his chin for Nathan to head to one of the unoccupied tables, and Nathan, shaky and caught between awe and arousal, did as directed. The office man joined them, his bodyguards not far behind. He was thin, shorter than Nathan, and had brown hair, brown eyes, and a neat goatee.
The office guy shook hands with Fury, grinning all the while. “Didn’t think you’d be in tonight,” he said.
Fury lifted a shoulder. “Know how you like surprises, Dennis.”
Dennis kept smiling at Fury. “Who’s the frat boy?”
Nathan started to answer, but Fury beat him to it. “His name’s Hunt,” Fury said, and it took everything Nathan had to remain cool and not demand to know how Fury knew his name or how long Fury had been in possession of it. “He’s here for the action.”
“Ooh-ho.” Dennis clapped Fury’s shoulder. “Better give him some, then, huh?”
“Plannin’ on it.”
Nathan got buried in an avalanche of dirty thoughts detailing exactly what kind of action Fury could show him, and Fury made some of them come true as he shrugged out of his coat. Nathan’s cock decided to err on the side of intrigue instead of self-preservation, and Nathan stood dumbstruck and hardening while Fury yanked off his shirt. He pushed away from the table and tossed both the shirt and the coat to Hellabeth behind the bar. She threw Fury a bottle of water, and when Dennis wandered back to his office without another word, Nathan went after Fury.
The makeshift fighting ring absorbed Fury, ushering him to the center of the circle. The pack divided smoothly into fighters, spectators, and bookies. Nathan got caught up in the press of bodies. It was all elbows, shoulders, boots, bad cologne, and smoke, and Nathan didn’t even get a chance to see Fury’s opponent before Fury swung and connected a fist to the other guy’s flank. Nathan flinched at the
slap-thud
of impact, and he got knocked to one side by a pointy elbow.
Shoving, pushing, and Nathan was reminded of a mosh pit, only with more guns and knives. A cigarette came close enough to Nathan’s cheek that it almost burned him. He got slammed into another man and yanked left and right as everyone moved en masse to follow the fighters. Nathan tried to go with the flow, but it seemed like all directions went against the grain.
Wedging himself between a fat man with sweat stains and a redhead with a beard, Nathan saw a huge guy with black hair dive at Fury and take Fury down. Nathan choked on a yell. He heard Fury hit the floor, snaked closer for a better look, and saw Fury pummeling the other man in the kidneys. They rolled, Fury twisted, and Fury got the bastard’s arm in a lock. Nathan winced, waiting for the elbow to snap, and suddenly the music got louder than the screaming. He realized he was only feet away from the speakers, and the heavy metal screeched like a jet engine.
Nathan tried to retreat. He was having trouble breathing again, and he’d just managed to get closer to the edge of the mob when everybody flung themselves backward in unison. Fury had tossed the other guy into the crowd, and Nathan stumbled. Rough hands caught him, dragged him upright, and a low laugh rumbled in his ear.
“Fuckin’ good, right?” someone said in Nathan’s ear, and a palm covered Nathan’s cock, squeezing. Nathan never got the chance to see who grabbed him or stroked him. He shook the man off and staggered toward the wall.
Clear of the madhouse, Nathan could see that people streamed in from a back door. Everyone who’d been at the bar and the tables was now watching Fury throw fists. Nathan crept along and got to the bar as cheering ripped through the warehouse.
“First timers drink free,” Hellabeth yelled at Nathan. She poured him a glass full of amber and slid it into Nathan’s hand.
Nathan tossed back the whiskey. Hellabeth grinned and kept them coming. They both watched in relative peace as Fury pounded the daylights out of a second opponent. There was no order, no rule… One guy went down, and another one went in. Money flew. People yelled. Fists connected. Bodies piled.
Growing up in a trailer park with a continuous turf war, Nathan had seen some pretty fantastic street fights, but this no-holds-barred shit was some of the craziest Nathan had ever seen. He wanted to crawl back into the mayhem and leave the warehouse in his rearview at the same time. His mind was numb, nicely overwhelmed, and his groin still hummed from the stranger’s grab.
He scanned the crowd, trying to see if anyone sought him out. A moment later, and he found them: a man with white hair and one arm around a kid younger than Nathan. A pervert on the prowl, and both of them disappeared out the rear exit.
Nathan kept drinking, guessing he was supposed to wait. It was a long-ass walk back to the Bass building and his car. He was jittery and twitchy with tension and exhaustion. Going home with Duke’s favors had probably been the safer decision of the night, and Nathan told himself he’d remember that the next time a hot man invited him to go check out some new action.
By the time Fury leaned on the bar, Nathan had lost all sense of the hour. Fury was sweat-soaked, streaked pink with blood, and his cheekbone was swelling. Hellabeth handed over a towel, and Nathan paid way too much attention to the way Fury rubbed it over oak-colored skin. Nathan followed the motion of Fury’s hand retrieving his shirt and told himself that staring was probably not a hot idea. Nathan reeled in his eyeballs, and Dennis appeared like a magic trick gone wrong.
“Enjoy yourself?” Dennis asked Fury, who just shrugged. The man did that a lot. “Stomper too easy, huh?” Dennis pressed.
Fury drank an entire bottle of water in a few gulps. “He went down fast.”
“Knew he would.” Dennis grinned and pressed a wad of cash into Fury’s hand. It disappeared into Fury’s pocket.
Nathan was still trying to figure that out when Dennis squinted at Nathan. “I know you?”
“Don’t think so,” Nathan said, going for casual. It was easy after the four—five?—shots Hellabeth had fed him.
“Nah, now, I never forget a face.” Dennis clucked his tongue, and his eyes went wide. “Holy shit. You’re the guy on the billboards. There’s one on Kingston Pike. What’s it say? ‘Marriage First’ or some such bullshit?”
Nathan forced his groan to become a chuckle before it escaped his mouth. “Eh, yeah. Easy money.”
Dennis laughed, but it rang hollow. “I hear that, man. I hear that. So you’re a fuckin’ model?”
“God, no. I’m—”
“A friend of mine,” Fury finished. “Looking at him to be my manager.”
Dennis whistled. “And how much is that gonna cost me?”
“We’ll work it up after we’re square with what you already owe me,” Fury replied.
“Jesus, you’re a pain in my ass,” Dennis complained. “Come on, Fury.” Dennis waved one arm expansively. “I thought we were friends.
Fury sighed through his nose. “Where’s the rest?”
“Coming.” Dennis put a hand on Fury’s shoulder, and there was something familiar about the gesture. It was a little too friendly, and so was Dennis’s expression.
It faded fast, though, when Fury didn’t say a word. Dennis ran his free hand through his thinning hair. “Got some shit happening. I’ll get it to you.”
Fury slowly shook his head. “I don’t like this.”
Dennis shot a glance at Nathan, though the fake smile never wavered. “You fuckin’ worry too much. You’re out to have a good time, am I right? With your friend here?”
“I’m out to get mine,” Fury said. Without looking at her, Fury took antibacterial gel soap from Hellabeth and slathered it on himself. Nathan winced at the idea of alcohol on the open abrasions decorating Fury’s knuckles. It was impressive how nothing shook him up. The guy was solid as bedrock, and Nathan wondered exactly how much practice Fury had washing blood off his hands.