Page 17 of Mean Machine

Yeah, a wife who went for rough sex might explain some of those impulses. But there was something wrong with him too. She’d loved that, but it was always uncanny how much he’d enjoyed holding her down, even bruising her—God, women bruised so easily—fucking her until she cried.

So it wasn’t that he didn’t understand the sick bastards that booked him. He understood them too damn well.

“You’re certainly not a masochist,” Nathaniel said as if he’d reached right into Brooklyn’s brain.

“I’d be a bad boxer if I was.”

“Strange, I’d think you would need to welcome physical discomfort at least to some extent to even consider such an activity, let alone be any good at it.”

“I’m a fighter. And when they hit me….”If it hurts, I find more strength. I get mad. I want to kill.

But yeah, he’d done that. And that had got him into this fucking mess. The best that rage could do was get him through this fucking mess too.

“When they hit you, at least you can hit them back?”

“Yeah. Fucking Curtis belongs to a whole tribe of Neanderthals, but in the ring, it’s one man against another. Doesn’t matter if they are black or white or rich or poor. The only thing that counts is who’s standing at the end of it.”

“I understand.” Nathaniel smiled. “You’d prefer a Brünnhilde thing, right?”

“What?”

“Brünnhilde.Nibelungenlied, inspired by a Nordic saga. A Valkyrie condemned to live as a mortal woman and sleep in a circle of fire unless a man frees and marries her. In another version, she only agrees to marry the man who fights her and wins.”

Brooklyn squinted. “You read a lot?”

“Wagner. Music.”

“I don’t think I’d want a guy who beat me to fuck me.”

“But the other way round?”

Brooklyn hesitated. Why on earth was he telling Nathaniel this? And what exactlywashe telling him? “Maybe. Why not? If he fought well?”

Nathaniel crossed his arms. “I’m just trying to understand.” He lowered his gaze, glancing to the side as if he saw something in his mind’s eye and needed to stare into the distance to see it properly.

“What exactly?”

Nathaniel exhaled audibly. “Brooklyn.” He met his eyes again. “You know what you can expect from me. I’m not going to order you to do anything you wouldn’t otherwise do. In actual fact, this whole exercise is to get to know you. It was a surprise to learn that there’s a level of… compatibility.” He ran his fingers over his suit cuff, as if to test the quality of the fabric. “I’m minded to leave the initiative entirely to you.”

“Minded?”

“Yes, minded. In other words, I plan to get to know you better, but I’m not going to cross any lines.”

“I got it the first time. I’m not dumb.”

Nathaniel flashed a bright smile at him. “That’s part of the attraction, by the way, that smart mouth and your strong opinions. I see a lot of potential.”

“For?”

“Everything. Nothing. We’ll see where this goes, but I think it’s promising.” Nathaniel shrugged in a noncommittal gesture. “Have your breakfast.”

BROOKLYN WASpummelling the bag viciously, barely seeing anything through the sweat running into his eyes. If not for that Corporate Stewardship Act, he might simply have ended up in prison. Unless somebody spilled the beans about his previous job, he might even have been okay. Under other circumstances, he might even have made it out after ten years if he had managed to keep his head down (which was doubtful in Dartmoor, despite the recent clean-up).

Right now, all of that seemed like one gigantic, fucked-up mess with no way out.

“Brook!”

Brooklyn grabbed the bag and turned. It was the only thing he could do to not attack Les. “What?”