Fierce (8 page)

“You’ve finally noticed.” He brought up Luca’s number and hit dial.

“Just do me a favor,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Use a treadmill next time.”

Luca Wright’s home had more pictures on the walls than any house she’d ever been in. They were exotic landscape photos mostly, far-flung beaches and valleys and mountains ringed with mist. He seemed to have a thing for mist, and inaccessible places. It wasn’t a posh house, exactly, but it was a czar’s palace compared to her fleapit. Rose had to be content to change into some of his old clothes: boxer shorts, a Dodgers t-shirt, and a green-and-yellow striped tracksuit she wouldn’t have been caught dead in if her reputation hadn’t already been read its last rites.

Plus, as Luca pointed out with a twinkle in his eye, she’d better not have the gall to complain about having to wear a man’s clothes.

Point taken, boss.

He’d taken her “unmasking” surprisingly well. No doubt he’d vented all his frustration on the way to picking them from Hell’s Highway. Avery had told him everything over the phone. When Luca had finally found their ditch, he’d displayed no resentment. Quiet at first, he’d soon seen the funny side of the whole thing, especially his brother’s screw up. He’d joked he should have brought the press along to see for themselves how far the World Champ had flushed his career down the crapper. But the best part: Luca really had taken a snapshot of Avery and Rose with his phone’s camera as they were helping each other out of the muck.

“You’re going to frame that, aren’t you,” she said, glimpsing Avery trying to snatch his brother’s phone off him.

“Speak of the devil.” Avery quirked an eyebrow at her. “Feeling okay?”

“Can’t complain. But I really should.” She motioned at what she was wearing and pulled a face. “Can’t catch a break, can I?”

“That’s what we need to talk about,” replied Luca. He set a cup of something hot for her on the coffee table then offered her a seat. It was sweet, the smell of the drink and his gesture. He’d remembered what she liked to drink at the office—not coffee or tea, but hot chocolate. It boded well.

“Sorry,” she said. They both gazed blankly at her. “For everything. I should never have put you both in this position. It was selfish, I guess, and wrong. I just needed to train at your gym. I’d have done anything to train there. It was my only chance to…” She thought about reciting her mantra—get tough, get rough, and get even—but it sounded dumb in her head, “to be the best I can be. If you don’t want me there any more, I’ll totally understand. I know your guys will hate me even more than they already do. But if there’s some way I could, I dunno, work out there before the gym opens or after it closes, I’d figure out some way to pay you guys. I just really need this. It means more to me than I can tell you.”

“No shit. I’ve never heard anything like it.” Luca’s tone was veering dangerously close to the way it had sounded two days ago, when he’d blasted Sy Vargas. “Why didn’t you just come to us and explain it? We might have helped.”

“I guess the no-girls thing scared me off from that.”

“You? Scared of something? I find that hard to believe.”

Rose’s tired muscles began to tense. “Believe it. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Don’t try to tell me it wasn’t.”

“Take it easy,” replied Luca. “We’re just talking.” And to his brother: “You see what I mean about the fuse? Knows when to snap and when to let it burn. Just like you.”

“Yep. She’s something, alright.”

If there was one thing Rose hated even more than being cornered, it was being talked about like she wasn’t there. She perched on the edge of her armchair. “You got something to say to me, say it.”

Avery took a sip of his coffee, then grinned at his brother. “Exactly what we need to shake things up.”

“Maybe. But the lying will have to stop. And we’ll have to ease the guys into the idea.”

She silenced them with a piercing whistle. “
Excuse me
? See the girl in the dorky tracksuit opposite you? She wants you to know she’s in the room, and that you’re both being ignorant jerkwads.”

They both laughed out loud, which only infuriated her more. Luca’s obnoxiousness was surprising: he’d always treated her well. But Avery’s dickishness really hurt her. They’d bonded back there in the ditch, and he’d turned the mortifying encounter in the gym last night into an opportunity she’d never have expected. And damn it, she liked them both. They were her kind of guys.

“You know what? Fuck you.” She downed the whole cup of hot chocolate in one go. It burned a little but she didn’t care. “I’m out of here.”

“Wow, not so fast.” Avery gripped her arm as she stormed past, and when she resisted, he got up and carried her kicking and biting back to her seat. “Rose? Rose! You’ve got us all wrong. Stop fighting for two seconds and listen to what we have to say. It’s better than the alternative, I promise.”

She stopped, punched him one last time in the gut because she felt like it, then flopped back in her chair. “Next time talk
to
me, not about me.”

“Deal,” said Luca. “Now, Avery tells me you have a stepsister. Is that right?”

“Uh-huh. Her name’s Cate. Why?”

“Any brothers?”

“No.”

“So it’s just you, Cate, and your stepdad?”

Rose started biting her nails but stopped when she saw them both scrutinizing her. “He kicked me out a while back, okay? Where are you going with this?”

“We have an idea,” said Avery. He’d also borrowed some of his brother’s clothes, but he’d got the stylish ones—a purple Italian shirt and smart trousers—while she’d got the Halloween costume. “We want you to carry on working for us.”

Another curve ball she hadn’t expected. “So do I.” But nothing in her life had ever been straightforward, and she didn’t expect that to change now. “I really do. But what’s the catch?”

“The catch is you’ll have to be yourself,” replied Avery.

“I’m confused.”

“You’re not the only one,” said Luca. “But we think it might work. You’ll have to be Rose Jackson—”

“Jacqueline,” Avery reminded him.

“Sorry, Rose Jacqueline. Ross Jackson’s twin sister. It’s a lot better than admitting the truth to our members, and it will give the place a different dynamic, having a woman around. Plus, your employment can be above board from now on. Salary, tax ID—make it official.”

She liked the idea immediately, but there was one problem. “It’s a men-only gym. Everyone knows it. Won’t this be, you know, bad for business? Won’t they all mutiny? They threatened to the other day over Ross. What do you think they’ll do over
Rose
?”

“Ah, but it’s still a men-only gym. You won’t be a member. You’re an employee, an administrator. They’ll just think of you as a receptionist who also helps around the gym a little bit.”

“Okay, cool. But why do all this for me?”

“Good question,” said Luca. “Let’s just say we want to give you a chance. You’re where we were a decade ago, before we started up our first fight club. The only thing we had going for us was that dream of making our mark; we just needed someone to give us a shot. When that happened, we gave it everything we had and, luckily, hit big.” He paused, looking away. They both did. “But we lost somebody because of it. Somebody we owe everything to. And she’d want us to give you this shot. Right, bro?”

Avery didn’t answer right away. He gazed into Rose’s eyes, perhaps trying to see something in her that reminded him of this mystery girl they’d lost along the way. It melted her a little, seeing him this open, this exposed. She could almost picture the teenage boy of a decade ago, all macho and foul-mouthed and secretly in love with a girl he’d never admit it to but would die to protect. It made sense now, why he’d gone out of his way to be so understanding last night, and why he wanted to keep her around.

They were giving her this second chance, but maybe, in some sweet but twisted way, she was
their
second shot.

By helping me, are they atoning for something?
That was what her intuition told her, and it could be dead wrong. But it was something to hold onto. She’d never played a damsel in distress before.

Frankly, she didn’t have the wardrobe for it.

“Bro?” Luca woke Avery from his daydream. “You okay?”

“Mm? Yeah, yeah. I was just thinking…”

“Penny for your thoughts,” said Rose.

“I was thinking…about taking shots.” He turned to his brother. “I reckon maybe it’s time you got me another fight.”

Luca’s face lit up with surprise. “For real?”

“Yeah. That run today nearly killed me, but I kept looking round, and there she was. She didn’t give an inch. She kept coming no matter what it took. That’s what I’ve been missing.” Then, addressing Rose, he said, “Okay, if you still want to learn MMA, and you don’t mind several more months’ worth of today, I’ll train you. I’ll get you in fighting shape. Where you go from there is up to you.”

She fidgeted in her seat and went to bite her nails but checked herself again. With nothing to do and nowhere to go, she just sat there, looking for an angle she’d missed, some ulterior motive for why these two men were being so nice to her for no good reason. In her experience, it didn’t compute. However, she kept going back to the mystery girl who’d helped set them on their path, and maybe there was something real in that…

Maybe they just wanted to help change her life for the better. Like someone had done for them. And maybe that was all there was to it.

The thorn pricks behind her eyes seemed to hold the tears at bay, but she did feel like crying. Not now, but definitely later, in her room, when the lights went out.

“Thanks a lot,” she said.

“Don’t thank me yet. I’ve never fought a girl before,” Avery replied with a wink.

“Don’t worry…”—in Rose’s mind, the image of him pinning her on the mat after a sweaty training session was reason enough to say yes—“…I’ll take it easy on you,” she said.

They all agreed she should have the next day off for a little R&R, but Rose hated her apartment; it was a tiny, decaying hole in a rundown wart of a building on the armpit neighborhood of Mitre. She slept there, ate there, and did as little else there as possible. Too tired to go browsing at the mall or out for a proper walk—her sore feet and stiff legs fought her every step—she decided it was time to see Cate instead.

Mike had thrown Rose out over six months ago and had warned her to never see or speak to her stepsister again. But they were too close for that. Mike had left them no choice but to stay close, those nights he’d crept outside their room, bottle in hand, deciding whether he should come in or not, and if he did, which of them he should try to get it on with.

In the early days, shortly after Rose’s mom had died, his attempts had been half-hearted, almost pathetic. They’d screamed him out of the room, and he’d skulked away to brood all night on his own. Later on, he’d grown bolder, angrier, harder to dissuade. Screams alone hadn’t been enough. They’d had to fight him off between them; sometimes it had worked, sometimes it had only made him angrier. They used to say he was “spitting a meanie”. That was when the beatings had started. Rose and Cate had dug themselves a nook in that dark corner of the world, a nook no one could touch, no matter how often he barged in stinking of bourbon and calling them those dirty words that still gave them the chills almost a decade later.

They didn’t know what rape was until they saw it on an episode of CSI. As far as Rose knew, he’d never gone through with it, though he’d come close in the early days, she reckoned, with both of them. Close enough to scare himself. Close enough to have to mask those dirty urges in lashings of violence. The beatings had continued for years, growing less frequent but more vicious, as though he needed an outlet for something that built up inside him. Something he could only keep in for so long before it took him over. And boy, when it took him over, he was meaner than any UFC fighter she’d ever seen.