The F King: A Bad Boy Romance (Still a Bad Boy Book 3) (17 page)

“We actually
can
get them there,” said Dan.

Jace and I looked over at the guy who had turned away from his computer screens for the first time.

“They know how safe that building is. They’ve outlined siege scenarios, remember? If they were threatened enough, the bosses would make a run for the tower. They’ll toss out everybody who doesn’t work for them and then lock it down.”

“OK,” Jace said. “That’s great and all, but it doesn’t change the fact that they’re not wrong. Even I can’t sneak in the kind of firepower through the streets of Highston that we’d need once they close the doors.”

“I have a plan. The question is, can we threaten them enough? You said you’ve got teams around locations covering about half the underbosses?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Pull them out, all except one, and send them to the money and weapon stashes instead.”

“Why?”

“I’ve got a plan.”

T
he elevator dinged
and the man, who had identified himself as a federal agent to people as he marched me out of Cumberland in a black hood, pushed me forward into the unknown. I very much doubted that he worked for the FBI.

In the darkness I heard a choked gasp, followed by the sound of someone collapsing into an office chair. The man kept urging me forward.

“She put up a fight?” somebody asked.

“Fuck yes she did. She’s not above aiming for the nuts when she’s backed in a corner. Found her in her room driving a fuckin’ machete into some Acardi goon’s belly,” the man said. He hadn’t spoken a word since securing my feet and wrists and hurling me into the back of his car.

He whipped off my hood. I was in some half-renovated, but, if the computer workstation was any evidence, functional office. How many floors up, I had no idea.

I saw the person who’d asked if I put up a fight. He was a dark-haired man in a suit with tattoos that snaked and swirled out from under the collar and cuffs. I saw a man at the workstation… and then I saw Ryan.

Ryan was sitting in a chair near the window, looking at me like he’d seen a ghost. Pale and showing signs of having been in his own battles tonight, he sat silently.

He looked like he’d been to hell and back, and I probably didn’t look any better with my bleeding nose, bruised neck, black eye and the slow-seeping wound on my calf. I would have thought we were going to be executed together, if the guy hadn’t just mentioned “some Acardi goon.” If these weren’t the Acardis, then who were they?

“What’s happening? Who are you?” I asked.

“Could you guys give us a few minutes?” Ryan asked.

The tattooed man in the suit looked at Ryan and thought for a second. “OK. Not too long, the cars are already arriving thick and fast. Eric, cut her loose and take a break in the stairwell. Austin, take the elevator down and make sure Stefano isn’t lonely, nobody uses it until I call you back up. Dan, let’s get some coffee.”

Eric cut the cable ties around my wrists, as he had done with the ties that had bound my ankles when we arrived in the parking lot. Everybody murmured their compliance and gave me a wide-berth as they left the room, including a big guy by the door I hadn’t seen.

It was deathly quiet when the door clicked shut behind them. I rubbed my wrists and tentatively walked towards Ryan.

Instead of rising to meet me, when I got too near he pushed the chair back and took a step away from me as if repulsed by my closeness. My heart shriveled up like dead fruit on a vine and stopped me cold in my tracks. I dropped my eyes.

“You’re a cop,” he said, simply.

“Yes.”

“Do you know what happened today?”

“No.”

“The Acardis killed my mom.”

My eyes shot back up to him and tears started pouring from swollen and halfway-normal eye alike. My legs threatened to collapse under me for a second, as I brought my hands to my mouth and sobbed, but then I steadied myself and reached out for him.

He stepped back again. “Don’t touch me, Sarina.”

I halted. My arms dropped to my sides uselessly and I hung my head. My hair fell in front of my eyes, and for a moment I felt the ghost memory of those tugs as Diana had braided it.

“What is your real name anyway?” he asked.

“Sarina Beckett. Ryan, I-”

“You…” He held up his finger like somebody making a point, and shook it in the air a few times as he winced, trying to hold back his own tears. “You… they killed her because they found out I let a cop too close to their cash cow. To the F King. Me.”

“You’re…”

“Yes.”

“Ryan, please… I’m so sorry! I didn’t want this to happen!”

He sighed. “How much of it was a lie?”

“A lot less than you think.”

All I wanted to do was to go to him and feel his arms around me, to pour my love and support into him and feel it flow back into my own body, bouncing between us and getting stronger every time. But Diana was dead because of me.

“Just last night I told you I’d love you forever. It was a lifetime ago… do you remember?”

I nodded, feeling the tears running freely down my cheeks.

“I wondered how I could have been so lucky to have you drop into my life. I guess now I know.” He paused. “But, what I felt for you was
real
. It was real and
good
. Something perfect in a piece of shit world. You made me dream about taking that perfection and taking it somewhere else where all this bullshit could never touch us.”

“I wanted that too,” I said quietly.

“That can’t happen now.”

My head hung again and I felt as if I was melting like the Wicked Witch of the West.

“But Sarina… I still love you. You’re the only thing left in the world that I love. Do you still love me? Was it real to you? Tell me. Tell me and I’ll believe you.”

I looked up at him, my eyes as wide as the swelling would allow, feeling the spark of hope in the middle of the grief and despair.

“Yes, I do.”

Ryan’s face lost any hint of calm and he quickly closed the physically short but emotionally huge distance between us. His arms were around me and I never wanted him to let go. I held him back as tightly as I could and buried my face against his chest, shutting out the rest of the world for what might have been a second or an hour until he put his hands on my shoulders and held me at arm’s length.

“I’m Ryan. You’re Sarina. I know you. You know me. But life is going to be... very different. You have to know what you’re getting into. I’m not some cosmetics entrepreneur, you’re not a college student or a cop. I’m gonna go through hell and do some hellish things. I asked you, once before, to fight with me. If you’re gonna be with me now… you gotta be with me in this. Will you stay with me, Sarina? Will you remind me that we’ll have a life after this shit is done?”

I gulped. The last scrap of my mind that aspired to a law enforcement career tipped its hat and walked out the door.

“I love you, Ryan. I trust you. I won’t ever let you down again. You and me, OK?”

“Yes.”

Ryan kissed me and pulled me into another hug that might have lasted forever, if somebody hadn’t cleared their throat. The tattooed-suit-wearer was standing there with the computer-worker he’d called Dan.

The door to the stairwell opened, and Eric walked through as the lights on the elevator started counting up. It felt like the eye of the storm was moving on and things were about to get bad.

“We good?” the tattooed-suit-wearer asked.

“Yeah. Sarina, this is Jace Barlow. Jace, this is Sarina B… Beckett.”

Jace nodded at me but I didn’t even know how to respond, recognizing the face now that I had a name to go with it. The millionaire from Port Magnus?

“It’s time,” Jace said. “They’re locked down. Dan, get the blinds.”

The elevator dinged and the big guy named Austin stepped back through as Dan pulled on a cord that twisted the vertical Venetians so that we could see through it. I immediately recognized the Trafford Tower.

Ryan guided me towards the closest desk to the window and pulled out his phone. Everybody lined up next to us. He tapped a few buttons and set the phone down.

I looked at it and saw a picture of a big red button there, like the kind you imagine the President might have installed somewhere in the Oval Office.

“This is it, Sarina,” said Ryan. “You press this button and there’s no going back. The old life ends, you’re not a cop anymore. It’s not a symbolic button. You press it and people
die
. The people who did this to my mom, to you… to me. Are you with me?”

My heart leapt into my throat, and I stared at the button with new fear and respect as the weight of expectation poured on top of me from all sides. It was like something out of a science-fiction movie… press a button and change reality as you know it.

I looked up at Ryan, straight into his eyes… and found myself there. His fight was my fight, because I loved him. Everything else came second.

I pressed the button.

The display on the phone was replaced by a countdown.

For a moment nothing happened. Then, through my feet, I felt the shudders like a train going past nearby.

Out the window, I saw flashes of light bursting out through the windows of the Trafford Tower. Floor by floor, in sequence, they went, and I heard the explosions like gunfire, one after the other. The lights ran from bottom to top along each side of the building, and then a fireball burst out from the ground floor… then the first floor… then the second floor.

The rumble of that train grew more powerful with each explosion, but it was nothing compared with the otherworldly roar when the tower started sinking right in front of us, as if the dust cloud that swirled out at street level hid a portal to another dimension that was swallowing the building whole.

I couldn’t have blinked if I had tried. My eyes were wide open, bulging in shock as if they were going to take a vacation from my head. Row after row of blown-out windows flashed by in their race to the dust below. I looked to my right and saw my expression mirrored on four faces, then to my left and saw Ryan looking almost impassive.

“How… how is this possible?” I asked.

“My friend, Billy D. owned W. Darrin & Co Construction. After the earthquake, I gave him enough money to subsidize his bid when the tender went out on the Trafford Tower. That helped his chances of winning the contract to check the building and make any repairs required. He did, and so for the past year and a half he’s been secretly prepping the building for demolition with explosives I provided. I paid him a shitload of money, he got paid a shitload of money for the contract, and he sold his business for a shitload of money because of all the work he had lined up in other contracts around the city. He’s disappeared with all that money now.”

“Remind me never to piss you off,” said Jace.

Ryan put his arm around me as the dust cloud rose high enough to obscure everything out of the window.

“Welcome to our new life,” he said.

I held on to him like a buoy in the middle of the ocean.

* * *

T
his is
a special edition of The F King (Still a Bad Boy #3) that includes Submission Specialist (Still a Bad Boy #2) and a bonus read (Still a Bad Boy #2.5) free of charge! I hope you enjoy them.

~Ada Scott

T
he roar
of the crowd in the arena above rose and fell with action I only caught in brief glimpses as I ducked into each of the dressing rooms. Every time a door opened, the air was hot and thick with linseed and testosterone as people buzzed around either preparing or treating fighters.

I was walking a fine line, trying to be the best employee that No Holds Barred Fighting Championship had, and trying to be invisible all at the same time. At any given moment I expected to get a tap on the shoulder and be told that, with “great” regret, they had to let me go.

Everything I did, I did it fast. Hopefully, if people saw me rushing around and keeping busy, they wouldn’t stop to think that an unqualified nineteen year old girl didn’t really have any business being anywhere near the elite athletes of the most prestigious mixed martial arts organization in the world. They wouldn’t stop to think that they could get somebody more qualified to work for less, or even nothing at all.

If Uncle Malcolm were still around, I wouldn’t have to be so scared. A lump came to my throat at the thought of him as I dodged around all the people scurrying around on their own missions down here.

He was my foot in the door with NHBFC, and I used to just follow him around and do what he said. After he disappeared, I think everybody was surprised that I turned up for work by myself, and too polite to tell me to leave.

That awkward politeness was probably wearing thin by now as the months rolled by. It was anybody’s guess as to whether it would run out before everybody just settled into the status quo, and I could breathe a little easier.

It wasn’t that I didn’t miss him, because I did. I remembered that first day, it felt like I was tearing my soul apart just getting out of bed so I could come in and do all these low-level tasks.

Uncle Malcolm was the only one who knew exactly what he had done for me, what this job meant to me. It was so much more than a paycheck. It was part of my ticket out of my own little hell. It was my one chance to be a part of the only world that had ever given me some small measure of happiness.

He knew that living under my father’s roof was breaking me, especially after Mom died. Dad had always brought the fire and brimstone to the dinner table, but it was worse after she wasn’t around.

Now this job was the only thing paying the rent at Uncle Malcolm’s apartment, and funding my studies to become a sports therapist, and I was
barely
getting by. If I put a single foot wrong, then the golden opportunity he gave me, the brief candle of hope that had appeared in my life, would be snuffed out.

That’s why I worked through my time of grieving, why I
still
worked. The police didn’t ever find a single thing. There was no closure for me, or anybody that knew him.

The crowd screamed and the entire building rumbled like an earthquake as forty thousand people jumped to their feet. Something big must have been happening in the cage, the ten-sided ring the fighters competed in.

On a night like tonight, the fans were getting their money’s worth. The support staff down here had been stretched to their limits, treating all manner of injuries and exhaustion. That was fine by me, the less energy people had to spare to think about me the better.

It was easy to lose track of time, but I guessed that the fight card must have been into the main events by now, the big names. Even when Uncle Malcolm was here, we never worked with the fighters who were so good they were basically celebrities.

NHBFC held them up on the pedestal they earned by bringing in the most paying customers, and the Tier-1 fighters were assigned their own separate dressing room areas, and tended by a different team altogether. I knocked on another door and somebody opened it from the inside.

“Here’s the extra towels,” I said to Gordon.

My team leader looked at me with frustration. Thankfully it was clearly directed at the middleweight fighter who was bouncing around, every bit as excited as the crowd on the other side of the thick concrete above us, as he watched the replay on the screen instead of staying still to get the stitches put into his head.

“Oooooohhhhh!” he yelled. “Anaconda choke! Sick! Grady didn’t see that coming,
day-um
!”

“Stop moving around so much!”

“Sorry, man, did you see that, though?” asked the young fighter.

“Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Skylar.”

I gave a weak smile and looked at the screen, where Austin “The Killer” Aquila was getting to his feet in the middle of the cage. There wasn’t a mark on him, but his opponent was still on the ground.

Aquila was a crowd favorite, who had made some truly talented fighters look like circus clowns over the past couple of years. He would have had a title shot by now, if not for those few surprise losses along the way.

With those looks, he’s my favorite too. He could-

I cut off my own thought before I could let myself go down that path, fighting off a blush. As much as I tried to tell myself that the way my dad used to terrorize me about boys and dating as I was growing up was wrong, I couldn’t shake my past. No matter how good I tried to be, nothing was ever good enough for him.

If he was to be believed, I was going to bring about the apocalypse with my whorish ways, even though I’d been too scared to even let a boy kiss me. I wore a purity ring in an effort to appease him. I even
meant
it when I promised to abstain until marriage, but the second I wore a skirt shorter than halfway down my calves or went outside without a sweater in the middle of summer, well, the whiskey came out, and sooner or later so did the belt. And the maniacal screaming.

One time a boy had practically signed my death warrant by coming to our door and having the gall to ask for permission to take me out on a date. Even now, miles away, I still felt that self-loathing that had been beaten into me every time somebody showed an interest in me, or every time I even fleetingly entertained the thought of any kind of intimacy.

“You look whacked. Go ahead and take fifteen,” said Gordon, nodding at the door.

I blinked and shook my head, tearing my eyes away from Austin and bringing myself back to reality. This wasn’t something I wanted Gordon to notice.

“No! I’m fine, there’s so much to do, I…”

Gordon pulled the needle through the fighter’s scalp, then held up his hand and shook his head to cut me off. “Go ahead, there’ll still be plenty to do in fifteen minutes, you’ve been great tonight.”

I could almost taste the ice-cold water from the watercooler and the fruit I’d packed for myself.

“Well…”

“Go.”

“OK, I guess. I’ll be back to help soon, though.”