Authors: Courtney Lane
“I can protect her, sir,” I told him. “The guy you sent to watch over her, he’s been talking about disrespecting you by taking advantage of her. He can’t be trusted. I can.”
“When?”
“When what?”
He spun and spat at me, “When did that fucker say he was going to stick his cock into my…my…”
“Your daughter?”
His inflamed cheeks shook with anger. “All right.” He exhaled and brushed his hand over his salt and pepper hair. “You want to work for me? I’ll give you a job. Don’t worry about her, it’s not your job, and the cunt doesn’t matter to me. This man disrespecting me? He does. So if you happen to catch him tripping up…” He made a frown and rolled his shoulders. “Do this right, then we’ll see about what else you can do for me. Come on. Follow me.” He led me into his den, to what I assumed was speak on it more. When he closed the door behind me and three muscled guys began to approach me, I found out pretty quickly that I was wrong.
I backed up for the door but Michael caught me. “Don’t worry, kid. I’m not going to kill you for trying to fuck me through the back door. But what I am going to do is beat the ever loving shit out of you. Every day you’re breathing, I’m going to kill someone you love, and I’m going to keep killing until you’ve got no one else left to love.”
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T
HRILL
K
ICKS
Sugar
Present Year
The rain turned into a misty drizzle, swelling my shoulder-length mane and transformed it into a frizzy mess. My thick lips trembled, reminding my body it was November in the desert climate cold when I wanted to pretend it didn’t affect me.
I stuffed my hands in my faux leather bomber coat, holding it closed. My outfit did less than shit to keep my body warm in the chilly night air.
At the beginning of every weekend, I’d make a trip to the Goodwill and pick out a few items to help me blend in with everyone else on the street. At the end of the weekend my hotel room had been broken into, ransacked, and my newly purchased belongings were nowhere to be found. I knew who to blame for it: Temple, the same man who gave me a busted lip.
I committed a sin on the streets. Temple lorded over the block and had his hand in everything: drugs, prostitutes, and illegal fighting. I dared to turn him down when he approached me about working for him. He made me pay for my choice every weekend.
He’d either send someone to my shitty hotel room to clean me out, or had his girls harass me on the street. Temple’s scare tactics worked very well on others; it never received the same outcome when he used them on me. The women who worked for him jumped the second an order was snarled from his mouth. It didn’t matter how much he ran them down or mistreated them; they were too scared to leave.
Temple wanted me to be one of his girls, and not the kind who fought in the ring. He continuously pushed me to sell my body on a corner—known to be a place where girls met a fate worse than death or disappeared—and give him a cut of the profits.
Since his previous attempts hadn’t worked, Temple had taken to sending women to fight me in the cage matches. The girls he sent weren’t anything to sneeze at. They were hand-picked from the streets or recently released prison inmates.
In the arena, wealthy men and women paid a high entry fee to watch amateurs fight in the seedy area of L.A. called The Bottom. Trained fighters, retired fighters, fighters hoping to get experience, or those with deferred dreams and an axe to grind were all found in the ring. For the male fighters, sometimes it wasn’t by choice.
The ones without a family or a place to call home were usually the toughest to beat. They had nothing to lose and everything to gain. They fought to the death.
Saturdays were ladies’ night. The ring owners would wrangle up women against their will, or women who were crazy—like yours truly—to entertain the crowd. Women’s matches were the biggest draws and highest money-makers.
I tugged on the band of my pleather leggings and wrapped my coat, with a broken zipper, over my cut up midriff T-shirt in a last ditch effort to keep warm. Looking down my legs at my mangled shoes, I shook my head at the sad state of my clothes.
The day moved slower than usual. Cars seemed to speed up when they drove past the street full of liquor stores and closed discount clothing shops. Excluding the convenience store I stood in front of, most of the businesses on the street had shut down; their lights dim and their gates were down.
I checked the burner phone clutched in my hand for a message. The phone was provided by the fight organizers. It was the same situation every Saturday night. They would text me with a time and a location, and I would show up and hand the burner phone to the bouncer at the door.
If my performance went over well, I was given another phone to hold onto until the next match. The matches usually occurred around midnight—it was already a quarter past.
I walked backward and leaned against the nearest building, hoping to steal warmth from the only open store in the area. The window was dressed in garish blue, green, red, and white Christmas lights, celebrating the season a month and a few weeks ahead of schedule. The cashier gave me a dirty look the instant I spotted him through the glass.
Calling the cops on my loitering meant calling the cops on Temple’s girls. The last time the cashier contacted the authorities, Temple destroyed the interior of the store and parts of the manager’s face. Since then, he could only cast disparaging glances at the vagrants in front of his store.
I blew him a kiss, balled my fist, and shot up my middle finger. With a shake of his head, he disappeared into one of the aisles.
Tires pealed against damp concrete, attracting my attention back toward the street. A black sports car worth more than the real estate valuation of the entire block pulled up to the curb and stopped in front of me.
I stepped forward, skeptical. A person who frequented the neighborhood with enough disposable income to waste a hundred thousand dollars on a car was either someone who wanted to get their depraved kicks off with someone who wouldn’t be missed, or an idiot. Men with money had the means to obtain girls of better quality to do what they wanted. If it were drugs they wanted, they probably had a personal dealer.
Figuring it was a deranged serial killer and not a client for one of the women on the street, I kept my distance.
A tall, broad-shouldered man stepped out of the driver’s seat and rounded the vehicle. He halted once he had both feet firmly planted on the sidewalk. His jaw turned hard enough to cut titanium and his expression was less than inviting. The strong-lined features, the heavily structured nose, deep set eyes, the sharp angled jaw, broad chin, and stark gaunt in his cheeks could’ve deemed him unattractive. It worked to put together a man I would’ve looked forward to waking up to in the morning.
Blue eyes with a violet hue were shaded by the shadow cast from his dense eyelashes. He glanced down either sides of the street like a smart man should have. Not a single stitch of fear marred his face; he surveyed the block as though he owned it.
A prominently veined hand combed through the front of his widow’s peak and raked through hair dark enough to be considered off-black, styled in a grown-out undercut, to manipulate the unkempt style away from his forehead.
Dressed in all black—a T-shirt, a butter soft motorcycle jacket, and straight-legged jeans—he could’ve easily fit in on the corner as a criminal with temporary business in the neighborhood. The shoes and the watch screamed the truth; whoever he was, he came from smart money. A dark branch-like tattoo peeked out of the open lapel of his black jacket and a dark V-neck shirt.
He walked past me, only glancing at me briefly with a hint of a smile prior to disappearing inside the store.
Settling back into my staked spot on the sidewalk, I studied the stranger inside the store through the window. He traveled straight toward the register and pointed to the cigarettes in the back.
I questioned why he’d come all this way for cigarettes.
The man exited the store, blowing past me swiftly, sending my hair, made frizzy by the drizzle, flying into my face.
A sudden need to gain his attention coaxed me into reacting. “Hey?” I flipped up my hair from my face with my palm.
He paused but didn’t fully turn around. From over his shoulder, he squinted at me, studying me as though I was an apparition.
I gave him a constipated smile while running my fingers through my hair in the midst of reverting from straight to curly, admitting without a word that he’d caught me on a bad day for good appearances.
I shoved my hand back in my pocket and checked either sides of the street. “Can I bum one?” I asked of the black pack of cigarettes clutched in his hand. “I’ll pay you.”
He held up a pack, revealing a box of e-cig refills. “I doubt you have a stem.” The lilt in his voice held strongly to disinterest and was deep, husky, and methodic. “And I doubt”—his gaze skirted over my clothes—“you can afford the refills.”
My hazel eyes rolled in their sockets. “Judgmental dick,” I muttered.
A dark shadow draped over me calling my attention to the man who now stood in front of me, gazing down at me from his taller height. “You like attention, do you?” he goaded me in a low register. The command fogging his eyes said he meant business. “You’re going about gaining it the wrong way.”
“Looks like I went about it the right way,” I rebuffed with a grin, pretending his eyes didn’t threaten to unwind me. “I have your attention. So what now? Do you want to hit me for calling you a dick?” I pointed to my split lip nearing the final stages of healing. “I’ve had my share of men beating my face—or try to. You don’t fucking scare me. You were rude, and therefore, a dick. Don’t worry about the strange girl on the block who called you out on the truth.” I pointed inwardly. “Go back to your safe, cushy penthouse and forget all about it, because I’ve taken down assholes bigger than you.”
His soft, contagious laugh reverberated through our dissipating personal space. I caught the sight of gleaming white teeth that lifted the years from his face and took him from intimidating into pretty-for-a-man territory. A pretense of innocence eased into his features, catapulting into another category; he could’ve been the hot boy next door who bent over backward to help anyone in need. Somehow, his ability to look completely disarming one minute and formidable the next sent a jolt of unease to my core.
“You won’t last long on this corner with your mouth. How long have you been out here?”
“I’ve been out here longer than you think.” I bit into my smile, reveling in the art of fucking with him.
No longer smiling, he readopted an intimidating expression. An invisible cloud of darkness dimmed the lightness in his face. “You don’t know what I think.” The shadow over his eyes made them appear a darker shade of violet. “Whom do you work for?”
The question mildly shocked me. Did he think I was a prostitute? “Myself,” I replied curtly.
“Doubtful.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “What’s your name?”
“Sugar, and if you want more than that you’re going to have to pay me.” I held up my hand and rubbed my fingers together, half-joking and half-serious.
He reached into his pocket and retrieved an object, cleverly hidden by his slight of palm. Holding up his hand, he inched closer to me. He rolled his fingers, revealing a hundred-dollar bill.
My surprise was a streaming ticker tape across my hazel eyes. A man willing to extend cash because I asked piqued my interest. Sweeping it away, I found my composure. “That’s more than enough. Do you want change?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t matter. He”—I jerked my head back to the store—“won’t let me go in there.”
“Brand?” He asked it in such a low voice, I wasn't sure whom he was speaking to.
“Doesn’t matter.”
Taking his marching orders, he disappeared inside.
The hundred-dollar bill cut into my hand with the force at which I balled it in my fist. I studied the man in the store, wondering what his angle could’ve been.
He was young, maybe mid to late twenties. He was well groomed. His choice of clothing was simple in its sophistication. If he wasn’t in the neighborhood for casual business, he was there for a far more shady reason.
From inside the store, he held my attention through the window as strongly as I held his. Unlike most men I’d met, he wasn’t boldly undressing me with every small glimmer of his eyes. If I hadn’t known any better, I could’ve sworn he was looking for someone, and he’d found her.
“Here.” Stuck in my own world, I snapped out of it when he exited the store and shoved a box of cigarettes in my hand. “There’s a man on the corner who could use them more than you.” With a curled lip smile pressed into his pout—a prelude to things he knew and wasn’t going to share—he was gone.