Brawler's Baby: An MMA Mob Romance (Mob City Book 1) (2 page)

The referee blew his whistle, retroactively declaring that the fight was on. "Hey," I protested, ducking a wayward fist the Brazilian had sent my way. "Did yer mam tell you it was okay to act like that?"

"You. Shut. Your. Fucking. Mouth." The big, brutish fighter grunted, punctuating every word with a thunderous fist aimed my way. "You're cocky now," he panted, "but just you wait till you're lying on the mat with a broken jaw…"

I stepped back, to the side, and back again, my feet moving in perfect harmony at my brain’s command. My eyes flickered, watching every breath my opponent took, every inch he moved forward, every punch he threw and every kick he attempted.

I took it all in – watching, cataloging and, most importantly, learning how my opponent fought. My buddies used to parrot an old army phrase before going out for the night hoping to pick up chicks – no plan survives first contact with the enemy.

I could say something similar about my demeanor – it's okay to be arrogant as long as you don't get hit. And with Pereira, it'd only take one hit before I was out for the count. The man was a tank – he easily had ten pounds of muscle on me, and it was all located in his midsection – a thick, muscular torso and powerful thighs. The moment I slipped, or he knocked me to the ground – that would be it. The Brazilian was born to grapple, he'd won international medals and nationwide tournaments.

I…hadn’t.

"What's wrong, pussy?" The Brazilian snarled. "Not so cocky now, are you? Where's that big mouth gone?"

I was busy staring at his feet. Not in a weird way – but as normally as a man
can
stare another man's feet. There was a pattern to his movement – he invariably drove forward two steps, then took a step either right or left. If I moved so much as an inch, he inevitably took a pace backward and readjusted. It looked like it had been drilled into him in training, probably as a child, and it told me a lot about him.

Some fighters are like forces of nature – unpredictable, elemental whirlwinds of barely concealed aggression, and others are like chess players. For all his big, dumb aggression, the Brazilian fighter currently driving me backward toward the wire frame of the cage was definitely the latter. You learn patterns in chess. There's always a
move
that counters another and a strategy to beat another player's tactics. So you learn to fight by learning patterns – patterns that tell you how to move, and patterns that tell you when to punch, and when to pivot, and when to duck
.

And that works inside the octagon more often than not.

Until it doesn't.

Because sometimes,
I thought,
you come up against someone like me

"I'm Irish by the way," I offered helpfully as I ducked under another one of the Brazilian's hopeful long-ranged swinging efforts. The tanned brute looked at me stupidly, his mouth hanging open as he pulled back his shoulder for another thunderous attempted punch. My eyes flickered upward – the fight clock read thirty seconds left in the bout.

I had a choice to make, and two options. I could either play it safe and keep moving, keep ducking and keep tiring out the heavy South-American fighter, biding my time.

Or…

I could take the fight to him.

And I was Conor Regan. I didn't know
the meaning
of playing it safe. It wasn't in my make up, my DNA. The Irish don't do planning – if we did, we'd have knocked that heavy British boot off our throat centuries ago. And I'm as Irish as they come.

"Why the hell do I care." My opponent grunted heavily, taking a step backward, as I'd known he would, before finally responding to me. "Where you're from?"

I took a pace sideways. Pereira readjusted. I took a step forward, he took a step back.

I shrugged. "You asked."

The brute snarled, bared his teeth and took a step forward with his shoulder packed and ready to punch. This time, I didn't step back.

The crowd gasped in anticipation as they saw what was about to happen.

I saw a hint of understanding flare in the Brazilian's eyes as I took a pace forward, packed my own shoulder and drove a thunderous uppercut into his chin. It was too late for him to do anything about it. I stepped backward, my guard still up, but I needn't have bothered.

The Brazilian's legs wobbled, and his right thigh moved as though he were about to take a step forward, but by the time his right foot touched the ground, his consciousness had seeped away.

The three-time titleholder crashed to the ground with a volcanic thud, without so much as landing a punch on me.

I'd knocked him out.

The referee rushed to Pereira's fallen body and knelt beside him, putting his ear to the fighter's lips to check if he was breathing. The crowd was silent, shocked that their hero had fallen, but I didn't take any of it in.

I ran to the walls of the cage, searching desperately for the girl wearing the perfume and the expensive black clothes. The VIP's were surging forward toward the octagon to get a close look at the fallen champion, so I leapt onto the biting metal frame and climbed until I sat atop of it, droplets of sweat dripping off my ridged, heaving muscles and sparkling under the floodlights as it fell to the mat below.

The crowd finally woke up, roaring shocked appreciation, their jeers turned to fawning adoration. They thought I was up there to receive their admiration, and to bask in their acclaim.

But they were wrong.

I was looking for a girl.

My
girl.

But if it
was
her, she was already gone.

M
aya

The cold, anodyne gray concrete corridors of the old Alexandria Baseball Arena stretched to my right and left as I burst out of the pit and through the heavy stainless steel doors, heart hammering like crazy and lungs working overtime with panic. Dust trickled off the ceiling in tiny but predictable spurts. I took a peek back over my shoulder, checking that no one had watched me tear out of the crowd as I made my hurried, panicked exit.

I pressed my head against the cool concrete, taking reassurance in its solidity. "Jesus Christ, Maya, what the hell are you going to do?"

It was
him
. He'd packed on another twenty pounds of solid, unyielding muscle as the years had passed, and his torso was inked with another few rounds of impenetrably layered tattoos, but it was undeniably him. The moment I saw the stab wound on his side as he walked past, now covered with an illustration of a single red rose growing out of a bed of thistles, I knew the game was up.

It was Conor. And I was fucked.

A deep, intimidating Slavic accent broke the calm solitude of the concrete corridor. "Maya, where the fuck do you think you're going?"

I spun around, only to be confronted by the ugly, scarred face of the last man I'd hoped to see – The Bull. For a man who was built as thick as an ox, as his nickname suggested, Mikael Antonov could move with surprising stealth when he wanted to. In the midst of my anguish, I hadn't noticed him creep up on me until it was too late. It was no great shock, I guessed, given he'd grown up as a thief in Moscow back in the days when the Politburo still ran the show, and when the punishment for picking pockets was still hard labor in a Siberian prison camp.

Was that what made him this way?

I barely had a chance to begin replying before he cut me off. "I –."

He reached out his short but powerful arms and grabbed me by my left shoulder, squeezing hard and paying no attention to the anguished look of pain that crossed my face. I should have been used to it, but I wasn't, not nearly. "How do you think it makes me look,
zaychik,
when you storm out like that?
Do you think about how it makes me look in front of my
clients
?"

I bit my lip – biting down on my fear, but also my desire to fight back, to say something I'd only regret. Organized crime was so often a maze of metaphors and doublespeak. How could he call me
zaychik
– bunny – and also cause me such pain? And why bother calling them clients when we all knew what he really meant?

Criminals. Criminals and gangsters.

Both.

"I'm sorry…" I whimpered through the waves of pain as the Bull dug his powerful, fat thumb into the soft tissue on the front of my arm. "I didn't mean to make you look bad, I promise…"

"But you didn't think, did you, bunny." He said in a sick parody of what should have been a tender, affectionate tone of voice. "You never do. You didn't answer me," he continued, his voice hardening. "Where the hell do you think you're going?"

I looked at him fearfully. The Bull was unpredictable at the best of times, and lately he'd been almost unmanageable.

"It's…" I panted, gasping at the pain still flooding through my arm. The agony seemed to sharpen my wits as I cast around for a lie to get me out of the situation, and my brain finally landed on the one thing I knew would work. "…A woman thing."

The Bull's lopsided, fat nose wrinkled with disgust and he let me go, recoiling as though I was somehow unclean. I sagged forwards with relief, holding my screaming shoulder with my right hand.

"Can't it wait?" He growled. "I've got important guests with me tonight, and I need you to be there to help…
host
."

My skin crawled. I knew exactly what he meant when he said
host
, and I wanted no part of it. The Bull hadn't forced me to bed any of the men he made me flatter and fawn over –
not yet, anyway
, but I knew it would only be a matter of time.

He treated me like I was a commodity – just another of the hookers he used to smooth his path in the world. I was trapped in a world of his making: a world of corruption, filth and decay, and I couldn't escape, because he controlled the one thing that I could never leave.

I bit down on the rising fear in my throat, embracing a deep well of resolve from somewhere in the unplumbed depths of my soul. "I'm cramping. You know what that means?"

He had the look on his face of a man who wasn’t just entirely ambivalent to women's suffering, but was in fact entirely disgusted by the whole concept.

I plowed forward. "You want me to start showing all over these expensive clothes? How's that going to make
you
look in front of your clients?" I was careful to say
you
, not
me
– because I knew he didn't care what anyone thought of me. Unless, that was, it somehow reflected badly on him. Of course – I wasn't
actually
on my period, but Mikhail didn't need to know that…

"Don't be disgusting," he spat. "Get yourself cleaned up, then I want you upstairs. There's someone I want you to meet." With that, he turned on his heel and clattered back through the steel doors into the arena, where he was swallowed up by the warm noise of thousands of screaming, punch-drunk MMA fans cheering the name of the victor – a man that, to my knowledge, they'd never even heard of just a few minutes before.

"Co-nor! Co-nor! Co-nor!"

I ran, trembling, to the nearest restroom and slammed the door closed, locking it behind me. I needed to get out – to get away from that noise, the chants of the crowd and what they reminded me of – a few months in Dublin, a long time ago, a man I’d loved, and a man I never thought I'd see again.

I turned on the faucet to drown out the sound of my impending tears and sank back on my haunches with my back against the cool tiles of the restroom wall. There was only one question on my mind.

What the hell am I going to do?

C
onor

The delicate tinkling of music from a century-old black concert piano wafted through the air in the expensive, exclusive cocktail bar hidden in the far reaches of the VIP section in the old arena – a sound that seemed entirely out of place in a room filled with fighters, mobsters, and cheap, classless, arm candy in bulging dresses that barely contained the fat tits and plump asses that were so deliberately on show.

The bartender was mixing a drink with his back to me – all showman and style, and as far as I was concerned, not much substance. I planted my palm down on the bar with a thud and growled. "Gimme a whiskey, Irish."

He laughed, but didn't turn to look at me. "Nah, buddy – you don't want any of that crap. Try something decent instead. I've got a great rye from Arkansas, you've got to try it. It's real peppery –."

"What about my accent." I drawled dangerously. "Makes you think I'm from Arkansas?"

He put down the polished chrome cocktail shaker he'd been manipulating and turned toward me slowly, almost dreading what he'd see. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean anything by it…"

"Look around you, kid," I growled. "You think this is the kind of place anyone wants to hear about your ex-ten-sive knowledge of the craft beer industry?"

He shook his head. He looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

"Damn right it isn't. You see that guy?" I said, pointing toward a fat man in an ill-fitting brown suit. He nodded wordlessly, shaking his head up and down and vibrating like he'd replaced his torso with a jackhammer. "Sure you do," I grinned. "Now look down, at his left shoulder. See that bulge?"

The bartender turned to me, apparently stunned by what I'd pointed out, and I shook my head. I was stunned that anyone working in a place like this could be so naive. "That's right kiddo," I winked. "Not so funny now, is it?"

Shake, shake.

Hell, it wasn't just his head that was shaking, his whole body was trembling now.

"I'm just playing with you, kid," I laughed raucously. "Long day. Please tell me you've at least got Guinness? And don't tell me you've got it in a can – I don't want to hear it."

The bartender looked at me tremulously. "So it's not a gun?"

I laughed again. I couldn't help it "Jesus kid!" It came out more like jay-sus, because I never sound more like a kid who half grew up on the streets back home than when I'm pissing myself with laughter. He stared at me uncertainly, and I could tell that he was trying to figure out whether I was messing with him…or just batshit crazy. "Of course it's a fucking gun! What, you wanna touch it? Gotta be sure, so you do?"

Shake, shake. "Are you crazy?"

I leaned over the table menacingly – or at least menacingly enough to send this kid from a white picket-fenced house in the suburbs into a tailspin. "You better watch who you're calling crazy, boy…"

Nod, nod.

"So where's me Guinness?"

"Coming right up, boss." The terrified bartender yelped. The kid was in a tricky situation, and the truth was I almost felt bad for messing with him. But the truth was, working in a place like this, if he didn’t get some street smarts pretty damn quick, he was going to find himself in a whole world of trouble.

A muscle-bound mobster further down the bar, with cauliflower ears and a rasping Russian accent that told me everything I needed to know about his intellect, growled out in protest. "Hey! You gonna get around to giving me this drink, kid?"

He looked at me with pleading eyes. I shrugged. "It's up to you, buddy. Who do you want to piss off more?"

The bartender's eyes flickered back and forth nervously, and beads of sweat glistened on his forehead as he attempted to decide which of the two men in front of him was more likely to take offense. I could see the gears turning in his mind.

Option one: pick the Russian
.
Pros: he's in the Mafia, and he's probably armed
.
Cons: the Irish guy beats the crap out of me
.

Option two: pick the Irishman
.
Pros: I don't get beaten up
.
Cons: I might end up dead in a ditch
.

Okay, so I wasn't leaving him with any good options. Then again, I wasn't planning on letting it get that far. I just liked to test men, to find out where they would draw the line, and to see how far I could push them. It was the same with Shannon.

Men like me don't like boundaries – we like to be in charge. Men like this bartender, on the other hand – well, let's just say they're the reason I get to be at the top of the food chain…

"Holy shit," the mobster exclaimed. "You're that guy, the guy from the cage!"

Where do these guys learn their English

I looked down the bar, scoping the Russian thug out properly for the first time. I've got a routine for men like him. A habit, you could call it. I check the ankle, shoulder and waist for weapons. Then I pass my eyes over his fists – do they have that scarred and slightly thickened look of a seasoned fighter?

Finally, his eyes – are they shiny with intelligence, or do they have the lifeless, unimaginative glaze of a dullard.

You can tell everything you need to know about a man by looking him in the eye.

It didn't take me long to realize that the Russian was nothing more than a common street thug. Then again, if the Russian Mafia in Alexandria was anything like the old firm back home, then he might well be the godfather – the man they call the Pakhan. "You talking to me, boyo?"

"There is someone you want to meet," he said in a Russian accent that brooked no argument as he waddled toward me – a once proud street-fighter laid low by the twin evils of age and potato dumplings. My eyes flickered over the bulges at his waist and ankle – a gun and a switchblade if I was a betting man.

Well, I was – am – but what kind of idiot would take that bet?

"To be perfectly honest 'wit you," I said warily, "I'm just here for the free beer, and then I'll be on my way. I'm not wanting to meet anyone."

He stuck out his hand, as if my refusal had bounced off his skull, or passed through without registering. "Sergei."

I shook it. "Conor, Sergei. Like I said, I keep myself to myself."

"The boss will meet you." He replied doggedly.

Again with the commands
.

"Listen boyo, you're not listening to me – if I wanted to meet your boss, I'd introduce myself, so I would. Now why don't you sit yourself back down, drink your girly drink and stop bothering me."

I vaguely registered Sergei's shocked expression, but by this point in my life I'd insulted enough thuggish brutes to know I'd get away with it – and besides, I had more important things on my mind.

I felt the atmosphere in the room shift – as though a bolt of electricity had surged through the bar, heating the air and sizzling everything it came into contact with. Suddenly, Sergei was at the bottom of my list of priorities.

For a second it seemed that even the pianist had noticed, and his dancing fingers faltered for the finest fraction of a second before resuming their frenetic dance. All conversation in the room seemed hush.

I turned away from Sergei, ignoring him as he grunted something about, "the boss…" I didn't care about his boss, and I didn't care to meet him – especially as the only reason some Russian mobster would want to shake hands with a man like me would be to sign me up to fight for him.

The only person I fight for is myself. I've been doing it for years, and I'm pretty damn good at it.

A brown-haired beauty dressed in black had just walked into the bar, her black leather boots helping her tower over half of the short, stocky gangsters and their tall, glitzy hookers alike. It was
her
– the woman I'd been searching for all these years. And as she stood there, her eyes nervously searching the room for someone or something, she looked every inch as stunning as the day she'd disappeared from my life.

No, more so.

Every man in the place was staring at her, and she didn't even know it. Every woman, paid to be there or not, had a look of irritated jealousy on their face – but I knew they needn't bother. A girl like
her
wouldn't go out with the types of human scum they'd draped themselves over. I still had no idea, all these years on, why she'd ever so much as looked at me.

Let alone nearly married me…

A cowering voice sidled its way into my entranced daydream. "Your beer, sir?"

I grabbed it dismissively, deciding that the sniveling bartender wasn't worth another moment of my time. I only had attention for one person in this room, and if it wasn't Sergei, it sure as hell wasn't him.

I glided through the crowd on autopilot as my brain directed me toward the lover I thought I'd lost forever, drunk with the delight of rediscovering every light freckle and strand of hair on her golden-hued face that I barely registered the expressions on the faces of the men around me – or the size of their shoulders.

Big mistake
.

I wasn't five feet from my estranged lover when a rotten smell invaded my nostrils, so at odds with the beautiful floral scent of her perfume that it seemed aggressive, almost alien.

"Mr. Regan," a Russian voice scoffed from behind me. "You've got big balls coming here, you know that?"

I batted an encroaching arm away dismissively. "Sergei, I told you –."

"Not Sergei," the man grunted, forcefully and deliberately placing a fat, powerful hand on my shoulder and spinning me around to face him. "My men call me The Bull," he said, pausing to appraise me. I must have passed his silent test, because his tone of voice softened and he continued. "But a man like you? No – you can call me Mikhail."

The Bull pushed his face up against mine, grinning at his own joke, with his jaw locked open in an awful rictus grin. My nose wrinkled – he didn't need the gun he had so prominently ‘concealed’ between his shiny black shirt and the tailored suit jacket that was struggling vainly to contain his enormous bulk – his breath was bad enough.

I didn't have time to deal with this two bit mobster – not when my girl was so close. But as I glanced around, it was clear that I didn't have a choice. Mikhail was flanked on either side by men every bit as thick, pig ugly and of course, heavily armed as Sergei.

I sighed and shook his proffered hand. "Nice to meet you, Mikhail. If you don't mind –."

He cut me off.

What is it with these Russians cutting off my sentences?

"Big balls," he repeated, nodding his head sagely. "To come here."

I looked around. The Bull's men were looking at me warily – all grim faced with hands resting in waistbands or tucked inside jackets, inches from their weapons. I was no fool – I knew they outnumbered me five to one, and more worryingly, that there wasn't a man or woman in this bar who'd remember noticing me if the police found my body dumped next to the highway out of town.

Not even that sniveling bartender.

I need to move this along
, I thought.
I’ve got more important things to do.

"Glad you noticed," I grinned mirthlessly, scanning my potential assailants for any glaring weaknesses. I wasn't looking forward to fighting my way out of this one – but if it came to it, I needed to have an edge. I always have an edge. "Why'd you say that?"

"You know how much money I lost on you, Irishman?"

"Call me Conor."

The Bull grinned, like I was granting him a personal favor. They were all the same these Russians, painfully simple once you realized how their minds worked, but no less dangerous for it. The Bratva – the Russian mob – aren't like other criminal organizations, not in my experience, anyway.

No, these Russians were what the Italians used to be – vicious, single-minded in the pursuit of their criminal activities, and unyieldingly hierarchical. But there was another side to them too – a side that wasn’t talked about nearly so much. Like the New Jersey Italians, before they started selling each other out for shorter prison sentences, anyway, their word was the bond – and giving them your first name is a sign of respect.

"Oh, I'll call you Conor alright," Mikhail laughed. "I reckon fifty grand buys me at least that much. You owe me, Regan."

I curled my lip derisively. There was an energy running through me now – the relentless drumming in my brain that had carried me through the last four years was now eating away at me, pushing me to do something stupid, to pick a fight I couldn't win in a place I couldn't possibly hope to survive.

"That's all you bet? Didn't back your boy, did you?"

The Bull's men bristled, reacting to my mockery before their boss did. I watched them with interest, noting every move they made – the non-too-subtle drawing back of jackets to reveal weapons holstered at their hips, the animalistic teeth-baring, the puffing out of chests.

The big dumb brutes were spoiling for a fight – but like turkeys voting for Christmas, they were too stupid to realize that this was a fight they couldn't possibly win. Well – unless they managed to pull their guns out, that was. Looking at the way they sat back on their heels I was confident that I could take all four of them with consummate ease.

Their boss though – he was another matter entirely. Mean-looking and built like a brick outhouse, even with twenty years on me and a gut that must have weighed more than most of the women in this joint, I had no doubt that he would put up a mean fight.

Maybe that's what I wanted. I'd spent the last three years traveling from city to city – across America and back again, trying to find someone bigger, stronger and meaner than me, just to get in a cage and
feel
something again. Even if that feeling was just pain. But what had I got?

Nothing. The same relentless rage that carried me from cage to cage night after night in city after city, also carried me through every fight unscathed. It was rare enough that another fighter managed to lay a hand on me.

Rarer still that it hurt.

And no one had ever beaten me.

Maybe that's why I was here, picking a fight with a man and his gang. Maybe now, so close to the girl I'd been chasing – the goal I'd been chasing – I wanted to wallow in that pain one last time.