Total pages in book: 154
Estimated words: 148220 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 741(@200wpm)___ 593(@250wpm)___ 494(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 148220 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 741(@200wpm)___ 593(@250wpm)___ 494(@300wpm)
I should have been there. I should have fucking been there. Instead of jerking my cock in a cell, pretending everything would be hunky-dory swell. Anna needed me to do what I do best. To get shit done.
But I didn’t do a goddamn thing.
I still can’t do a goddamn thing—except exactly what these bastards tell me to do. Roll over, play fetch. Turn into a mad dog when they eventually put me in that ring.
After about three hours, the van stops. There’s nothing to see yet. They’ve got the vehicle set up like a prisoner transport, with no windows in the cargo hold and no access to the cab, no view out the front. Six of us are shackled to the benches. At the barns, four other vans were loaded up at the same time, along with most of Victor’s guards—and I’m guessing that’s the real reason every fighter gets a free show. Not so we can get a look at the competition, but because they need the guards here, not at the compound.
They don’t take any chances moving us all as a group. Instead we’re escorted out one at a time.
I don’t give them any hassle when my turn comes. Despite all the money these bastards rake in by streaming these fights over backass channels on the dark web, the facility they’ve got us in is a rundown piece of shit. It’s an old abandoned warehouse, with what I’m pretty fucking sure are bats flying around in the rafters. The Cage itself is just a big box of chain link fencing that might take a couple of workers a half hour to erect.
They probably put it up today. An operation like this will stay mobile, harder for the authorities to track down. Most likely, they haven’t used this location before and won’t use it again. So even if the cops get their hands on one of the broadcasts, even if someone recognizes this warehouse, they’ll be chasing after ghosts.
And those broadcasts are where the bastards are putting their money. The cameras they’ve set up sure as hell didn’t come from Walmart. Thick cables run along the floor toward a van mounted with a satellite dish—a van that likely serves as the mobile heart nestled deep within onion-like layers of code hiding the broadcast’s source.
At the other end of that signal are all the rich fuckers around the world who get their jollies watching men kill each other—with a buy-in of a million bucks just to see the fights. There isn’t an audience on location. Just the guards, the fighters. Probably a few video technicians in the van.
After they chain me to another bench, I scan the faces of the fighters around the Cage who were brought in from different stables. A few of them I recognize from rally fights up and down the west coast. All of us lured in by some sweet ass bait.
All of us stupid assholes with our brains in our dicks.
Cherry’s here, too. But I can’t even look at her without seeing my sister strapped to that chair, bleeding and crying. Without feeling like I’m rotting from the inside, because I fell for a sad smile and sent those bastards straight to Anna’s door.
And how the fuck did they get to her?
But that’s the wrong question to ask now. It’s a question with an answer, but not an answer I can get while I’m here.
That’s the real issue—I’m still here. Which means the Riders haven’t found a link between Cherry and the Iron Blood that’ll lead them to the Cage. Yet the Iron Blood found a link from me to my family.
But how the everloving fuck did the Iron Blood figure out who I was?
Supposedly the reason they picked me is because I won a fight. But they found Anna, so that doesn’t track. I didn’t give them anything to go on. No real identification. Just my kutte. But nothing on my vest would lead them to my family.
I didn’t give Cherry anything to tell them, either. She knows I’m a lumberjack, but I work for Widowmaker, another Hellfire Rider. He wouldn’t offer that information to anyone. I told her that I had a dog, but they didn’t track down my family using a dog’s name. Especially a name as common as Daisy.
But winning a rally fight isn’t the only reason men end up in the Cage. Some are targeted. Either to punish them or to send a message. I can imagine what the message was—to stop looking for the missing fighters, which was why Gunner and I were at the rally in the first place, trying to dig up info that would lead us to the Cage.
Yet that doesn’t tell me who aimed the Iron Blood in my direction. Who knew my real name and told them I was at that rally?