Page 7 of Unleash Hades (Ungoverned Spaces #5)

Hugo

Strathlachlan, Scotland

“ Y our left,” Rose warned, before landing her fists of fucking fury on the left side of my rib.

What the fuck were her knuckles made out of? Belt buckles?

“You keep dropping your left guard.” She gritted through her teeth. She was getting agitated with me.

No kidding.

For days, she had trained me not to win a fight, but to defend myself from getting killed. It was a tougher task than anticipated.

I was too old, too sore, and frankly too irritated to ever put in the work of becoming an Underground champion. This was fucking hard!

The things I had going for me were stamina and an already good fitness regimen. But that was nothing when drilled down to the skill of a fighter.

We had decided that it was best to concentrate on surviving, not winning.

“Remember that your opponent is your height,” Rose landed a hit to my sternum, “With your wingspan.”

She kicked my inner thigh, and I grunted, almost falling to a knee.

“She will have an easier time than me,” Rose warned, barely breaking a sweat. “I’m out of shape.”

I groaned. She was pregnant only a few months ago. She was bouncing back just fine!

If she was out of shape, then I was going to fucking die. “You don’t seem to be struggling much.”

Rose smiled, stepping away in that bouncy fighter’s step, her fists up by her face. She was giving me time to catch my breath. I suspected she was being kind.

“Fighting in the octagon is not like fighting in the real world.” And now she’s trying to comfort me. Merde . “You have to learn to fight within the rules, just like it’s chess, or checkers, or cards.”

“I don’t recall getting this winded with cards.”

“Keep your hands up.” In a blink she was on top of me, her red gloves hurling through the air towards my face. I barely dodged in time, before she landed an elbow with her other arm, squarely hitting me in the ribs. “Protect your face. Remember your head is more important than the rest of you.”

I wasn’t sure if that was true.

The bell chimed, and I almost collapsed in relief.

“ Poutain! ” Fuck! I slowly lowered myself to my knees. “Are they sure they don’t want you to fight in my place?”

The sweat poured down my eyes, stinging and blurring my vision.

I heard Rose slump beside me, as she handed me a water bottle. I squirted it into my dry mouth with my fist, and we both lay down on the cool canvas for a beat. Though, I suspected that she could have gone another round just fine.

“They won’t let me do anything anymore.” She lay back on the cold ground, her arms splayed out to her side, her knees tilted in one direction. From above, she must have looked like Jesus on the cross.

If she were anyone else - if she were her husband, for example - I would not try to ask questions. But Rose was a different matter.

She was straightforward and had no pretenses. She would not waste my time, or words, with prevarications. “What do you mean?”

“It means that my father who trained me, and my husband who fought beside me will never let me into the field. I’ll never fight in the octagon again. I’m just…” she let out a sad, long, tortured sigh. “I’m a mommy.”

Children ruin everything. They take, and take, and take, and if you survive long enough for them to give you anything back, then you were lucky.

“Have you told Alastair?” I did not point out her sadness. I did not have to. It was clear as day.

“I’ve tried but he doesn’t understand.”

“Hmm.”

There wasn’t much else to say after that.

She was right. Her father would not let her go on missions, and her husband would not let her fight anymore. Her body was too precious when it held their children inside. Now, it was what fed and nourished them. So, it would be years before she really trained again. Precious years.

And years were an eternity in the sport.

But, then again, there was also another part of the equation – the most important part. Her.

Her desires, her will, her determination.

“They might forbid you from doing things,” I said, slowly. “But they cannot stop you, without your consent.”

I groaned as I lumbered to my feet, feeling the soreness in my thighs, in my guts, in my chest. I felt pain everywhere, and we had only been at this for a few days.

I should also be learning about my mark, but I was too fucking tired. By the end of training, my old body felt like death, and my brain was too broken to read the dossier Philippa provided.

When I said that to Rose, she laughed.

“If you slept, instead of watching your screens all night long, you’d have more bandwidth.”

The irony of her statement wasn’t lost on me. My cameras took a lot of literal bandwidth. I used enough to fuel an entire Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game - the kind with wizards and thousands of basement dwellers finding serotonin in fantastical stories and victories online.

I would need to rely on Rose to know the information, because my brain was too exhausted to learn new things.

“Why do they believe the mark can point a finger at Richard Davenport?” I asked, as my addled mind tried to piece together all the bits of the operation. All the little nuances that would paint the picture of why this was happening.

“They wouldn’t say,” Rose said with a roll of her eyes. “It’s classified.”

She groaned, coming to her feet as well.

As exhausted as I was, so was she. Thank God.

If she was fresh as a daisy, then I’d just be embarrassed.

She was always up late with her babies, and even though the fight energized her, all of it would drain from her just as quickly as soon as we stopped sparring.

“But if I had to guess, the She-Bear makes massive amounts of money for her owners,” Rose lifted her arms over her head and stretched. “That’s a terrible moniker, by the way.”

“Is the She-Bear worse than being called the Vixen?” I asked, teasing her with her old title.

Rose shuddered, but ultimately ignored me so that she could dispense the information I needed.

“They use the Underground Circuit to meet up and do their exchange. So, she must see… something. There’s no way she hasn’t.”

“Who owns her?” I hated that phrasing.

No one owned another person. Not really. Not unless it was consensual. The way Calissandra owned me.

Slavery was a vile abomination that should have been wiped off the planet. But here it was, alive and thriving.

“Probably the Mafia,” Rose said, pulling off her gloves and stretching her fingers out. “There were rumors of things like this back when I was fighting.”

“Why would they need the Underground to meet?”

“It’s an alibi, really. All the criminals and law men are in the same room at the same time, but none of them are ever able to talk about it. If they talk about it too much, the Underground will revoke their invitations.”

“And why does that matter?”

“Well, you saw who was in the audience of those things,” Rose said as she climbed from between the ropes and out of the training ring. “It’s like the Studio 54 of powerful people. Royalty, politicians, cops, criminals are all there. They’re rich, influential, and all in the same secret room.”

“Why hasn’t Callum gotten invited, if it’s about influence and money?” I wondered, pulling off my own gloves as well. The leather and linen slipped off my sweaty hands as if they were covered in soap.

Callum was a Baron, owner of a reputable security company, and rich. He had connections that were far and wide, so why wasn’t he in the audience?

“He probably hasn’t asked to go.” She picked up a bottle of water, and drank from it, squirting the long stream into her mouth without touching her lips to the nozzle. “He has his own contacts from boarding school and doesn’t need to mingle and rub elbows among the nouveau riche.”

“Hmm.” That made sense.

“The Underground is a place for back-room deals, shmoozing, and asserting influence. Also gambling.” Rose continued. “I bet a lot of bloody handshakes happen there. What happens in the Underground stays Underground.”