Page 97 of Ruthless Rustanovs

HER RUSSIAN CHRISTMAS

“Hey! Hey! Hey, Beast, look at me! Look at me!”

His vision cleared, and the world came swimming back to him on a drunken wave of adrenaline and anger. He emerged from the Darkness to find himself in a hot concrete basement. The place reeked of blood and sweat, and a circle of yelling men surrounded him.

But in front of him stood a girl. A vision of loveliness with dark tumbling curls, golden brown skin, and eyes the color of champagne.

“Hey, Beast, welcome back,” she said with a teasing smile.

Behind her, the crowd booed, same as they most often did every place he fought.

He wasn’t the pretty guy in the underground fighting movie who fought Goliath and won.

He was Goliath, the villain everybody wants to see brought down.

He was used to hearing his fight name get cursed in every language, but this crowd’s booing seemed especially loud.

Now that the Darkness had receded, he could see four bodies on the floor.

One a bloody pulp. The other three knocked out cold.

That explained the booing. The three must have tried to pull him off the bloody pulp and gotten K.O.ed for their efforts.

Which meant the men who’d bet against him hadn’t just lost money on this fight, but on the next three fights, too.

He knew this not because he was particularly adept at reading underground fight scenes, but because it had happened before. Enough times that he now knew exactly how things had transpired, even though he’d gone Dark.

But there were still other fighters left. He could sense them even if he couldn’t see them in the messy circle of disappointed cowards who’d hoped to win big tonight with their pretty underdogs. Yes, he was back, and he was ready to fight again.

He raised a gloved fist and started to call out for another fighter to approach him.

“Wait, wait! Hold up!”

The girl got in front of him again, and to his shock, she laid her small hands on his arms. As if it was just the two of them in this dark basement and she was pulling him in for an intimate conversation.

“Stay with me here for a little bit, okay?” Her voice compelled him. Made him want to do as she asked. For a second or two.

But then he remembered… she wasn’t a fight. And he needed another fight.

Nose flaring, he swung his gaze away from her, scanning the crowd for someone else to hit.

And he spotted him. Tall and wide with a Greek nose and jawline, his next challenger was dressed in fight shorts and sparring gloves, which meant he probably knew a few different fight styles.

A worthy opponent, even if he was currently shaking his head at Cyrus, the Greek who ran this basement fight gig, in a way that insinuated he had no wish to be The Russian Beast’s next victim.

As he watched the fighter try to talk his way out of the match, the Darkness compelled him forward, blanking his mind of everything but the need to put his gloves on something.

To hear the music of cracking bones beneath his fists.

He pulled away from the girl and started toward Cyrus and the reluctant fighter…

Only to find the girl in front of him again.

“Hey, hold up! Hold up!” she said, putting her hands on his chest this time. “What you trying to do? Get me fired?”

Her words confused him, brought his eyes back down to her.

She was small, but not small he saw now.

Dressed in tiny shorts and a tank top so skimpy, he could see the outline of her push-up bra.

She was short and her breasts were most likely small without the extra padding, but everything else on her was big and lush.

Lush dark curls tumbling all the way down to her shoulders.

Lush curves, barely constrained by her ring girl ensemble.

Lush lips, smiling up at him as if they knew each other.

And more than that, were already old friends.

Not many women smiled at him like that. Especially the ones who didn’t know his last name, the only real acknowledgment his father had ever given him.

Even the women his half brother had sent to “help” with his recovery after Turkey had only barely managed to cover up their terror with simpering smiles.

Which was why he’d used them then tossed them out of his hotel room immediately after.

Without his last name, he was too frightening.

Mountainous body, hawk nose, knived cheek bones that put girls in mind of long ago Mongolians who would not only burn your poor European village to the ground, but also claim every woman in it as his own.

Even the gentle tilt of his mother’s Buryat eyes didn’t help, because his pupils burning black as coal let them too easily see the Siberian beast buried just beneath his surface.

But this woman smiled up at him, her champagne eyes crinkling as she nodded at his forehead.

“That cut above your eyebrow. I need to patch it up before you can fight again. I’m not just the ring girl, I’m the nurse, too—and the cleanup crew, but that’s a whole ‘nother job,” she said with a roll of her eyes.

He stared at her. This woman sounded American. But not like the rich ones his brother kept company with. More like the ones on television. But not exactly. Her voice had a husky quality to it that made him think of the girls who sang in the basement bar where his grandmother used to work.

“It is scratch,” he heard himself saying to her, his eyes going back to the next man he would fight, even if that man didn’t want to.

“Cool, then I’ll have you back out here in no time. Just come with me.”

“It is scratch,” he said again. And this time he didn’t wait for her answer, just started toward the Greek fighter again. The Darkness guiding his every step.

But against all odds, she got in front of him a third time.

“I said no!” she yelled, shoving him backwards. “You don’t fight until I look at that cut.”

The boos cut off with an abrupt gasp, and both he and the rest of the men in the room looked at her like she was crazy. Which she would have to be to shove a six-foot-six fighter known in underground fighting circles throughout Europe and Asia as The Russian Beast.

There were grown men who wouldn’t dare do what she’d just done. But her beautiful champagne eyes held his in a defiant stare down as she declared, “Listen, I ain’t afraid of you! I ain’t afraid of nothing. So you can either come with me now or fight me next. It’s up to you.”

His eyes slitted. She could not be serious.

With an annoyed glare, he simply picked her up and set her aside in one easy motion, then started forward again.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake…!”

The next thing he knew, her body collided into his. Two arms wrapped around the back of his neck and pulled him down with what must have been all of her strength. At first he thought she was trying to bite him—the classic defense of the weak—but then…

Then she kissed him.

The entire world stopped when her lush mouth found his, lips giving him determined claim as her soft curves pressed into his hard body. She kissed him. Long and tough. She kissed him like she already knew him and was merely waiting for him to know her back.

The beast inside him faltered…

And the formerly pissed off crowd erupted into cheers, egging them on in a confusion of surprise and visceral lust. Somewhere in the distance, he heard the heavily accented voice of Cyrus the Greek saying, “Take him somewhere else, Sirena.”

And then the kiss was over. She slid down his body, the back of her feet landing on the floor.

“C’mon,” she said softly, beckoning him forward with eyes that almost seemed to glow in the barely lit space. “Come with me.”

Sirena. That is good name for her, he thought. Because like a sailor enchanted, he let her take him by the hand and lead him out of the fight circle.

“Just take a seat right over there,” she said once they got to her room. She let go of his hand and indicated the little wooden chair she used as an informal nursing station.

He gave her a long, dark look before apparently deciding to indulge her and sit down.

She couldn’t keep herself from staring as he did.

He had a huge tattoo that took up nearly his entire back.

What looked like a Siberian tiger, rendered so realistically, it seemed to animate with the bunching of his muscles as he lowered himself into the chair.

“So, I’m guessing you ain’t exactly a fan of ‘your mama’ jokes,” she said, coming to stand a few feet in front of where he was sitting.

The fighter’s black eyes cut up to hers in a glare of confusion.

“The dude you was fighting tried to talk some trash about your mama before the fight.” She decided against repeating, word for word, what the large Albanian fighter had actually said.

The promise he’d made in English, the agreed upon common language of the fights.

That he would beat the Russian dog and then go find his mother to give her the fucking she deserved for bringing such an ugly beast into the world.

The crowd of betting men had eaten it up with a loud cheer.

But a switch had clicked off behind the eyes of the dude everybody was calling The Russian Beast. A deadening like nothing she’d ever seen before.

Now the Albanian was laid out on the concrete floor outside her tiny room, battered and broken, with no guarantee he would survive the night. And it was on her to keep the Beast distracted until Cyrus’s two goons could remove the body.

“Extra hour pay for tonight if you get him to stop,” Cyrus had said, right before he shoved her into the fight circle with the huge muscle-bound fighter. You know, the one who’d just knocked out the last three guys who tried to stop him.