Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 79870 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 399(@200wpm)___ 319(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79870 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 399(@200wpm)___ 319(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
I’d taken him from behind because I couldn’t stand looking into those eyes. And because I wanted to punish him. I’d wanted to destroy him. To fucking obliterate him for making me love him, and for being able to live without me. For being able to turn that necklace around with no more thought than changing his socks.
So, yeah. I did it. I fucked. him. up.
What I hadn’t counted on was destroying myself in the process. I hadn’t known I’d leave my beating heart back there on the ground beside him, quivering in the dirt.
Didn’t matter, anyway. I wouldn’t be needing a heart where I was going. I was pretty sure there was no room for emotions at a hardcore pre-fight MMA camp. They’d push me to my limits every day, challenge me to perform at my absolute peak, work off the excess weight that could disqualify me before I even got into the octagon. Marco had arranged it all— ten days in some desert hell hole with some of the best coaches and training partners my uncle’s dirty money could buy. If they were truly worth their price tag, maybe they could work this emotional train wreckage out of me, too. Make me forget I’d ever met Jamie Fucking Atwood.
Because that’s really what I needed right now. I was confident that I’d beat the living hell out of that second-rate fighter they had me going up against. He was nobody. What I really needed was for someone to get me so exhausted every day that I didn’t have the energy to think about the little brown-eyed demon whose memory would be shadowing my every step. Surely the best trainers in the business could manage to do that for me— because that’s what Marco had called them, and he knew what he was talking about. I wouldn’t have known the best if they’d hit me over the head, because I’d never followed the professional MMA scene very closely. I was too immersed in it on a personal level to have ever become a spectator or fan. Truth be known, I hated the sport just as much as I depended on it. It ruled me, owned me, made me whole and hollowed me out. I just tried to keep focused on training, stick to my schedule, and fight when they told me to fight.
And I won. I always won.
It was almost too easy to win. I had a compulsion to do it, that’s for sure. I could no more let someone beat me than I could put Aldo’s Glock to my head and pull the trigger. But I also resented it, because winning was following my uncle’s plan. Just once I’d like to put the plan on its ass, you know? Just flip it right the fuck over and smile defiantly at the master manipulator who’d raised me. The guy just did not lose. Everything was either his way, or something bad happened to you. I’d never pushed hard enough to find out what that something might be, but I was tempted every single day of my life. I did not want to be a part of his plan, to play into his hands with every move I made, and yet that is exactly what I did.
When I was a teenager and had really begun to come into my own as a fighter, that’s when he started bringing guys into the gym to fight me. He’d started me on a steady diet of opponents who were just below my skill level. Systematically, calculatingly, he’d fed them to me. One by one I beat them, using each soundly battered body as a stepping stone to the next tier, until eventually pretty much everyone was below my skill level. Then he’d started offering the prize money, like I was some sort of circus act. Step right up, folks! Beat the freak and win a prize!
Yeah, but you always performed for him, didn’t you?
I swallowed back the taste of bile, pushed away the unsettling image of my uncle as ringmaster, and then it was on me: the anxiety, the palpitations, the unbearable sensation that a two-hundred-forty-pound heavyweight was sitting on my chest.
A panic attack.
I fought it off as best I could. If I wasn’t diligent, if I didn’t try to head it off, it would ambush me and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. That much I’d learned over the years. It would creep over me slowly, as if conscious of not wanting to startle me, and then all of a sudden it would be too late. The point of no return, when I realized I just might as well hang on, grit my teeth and ride it out.
But this stuff with Jamie had me messed up. I wasn’t used to feeling. I’d already had one panic attack since I met him, and I believed it was because deep down I knew it was wrong to try to have a relationship with someone— to bring another person into my fucked up world. If I’d had an ounce of conscience in me, I would have turned and walked away from him that very first night at the MMA event when he’d so clumsily tried to interview me. When he’d pissed off the other reporters, effectively nudging them out of the way and demanding every bit of my attention. Maybe if I’d walked away then, we would have had a fighting chance. Separately. Instead, I had tracked him down and doomed us both.