Pav didn’t have a clue who Gunner was. The man in the cage waiting for his challenger didn’t look particularly familiar, and he seemed to be the same size and height as Pav. He never found it to be very fair when they put a much smaller man up against a large man. But that was just how these fights worked—nobody gave a shit, honestly. It was all illegal, and far too many people lost their lives on that dirty, bloodstained mat.
Had they cleaned it in the last year?
Probably not.
“I challenge,” Pav said, raising an arm high.
He felt the eyes in the warehouse turn on him as he moved close enough to the cage that he could reach up and curl his fingers along the chain-link. Viktoria was close at his back, her hands resting flat over his shoulders as her warm breath pulsed against his neck.
“What are you doing?”
She sounded horrified.
And hot.
“Relax,” he murmured.
“Zhatka,” the man hanging onto the cage said. “Been a minute since you’ve been around, yeah? Where’s your handlers? They have to keep you in line, don’t they?”
Pav nodded behind him. “She’s looking out for me.”
The man arched a brow as he studied Viktoria’s face. If he recognized her, then he didn’t say. “She’s gonna pull you out of there when you cross the line, huh?”
“No crossing lines tonight—promise.”
He even put his palms up to solidify it.
The guy still looked at the man inside the cage waiting. “Well, Gunner, you wanna fight or not?”
Pav grinned when Gunner’s eyes lock on his. “Yeah, I’ll fight him.”
He was already climbing inside the cage and dropping his jacket and shoes over to Viktoria before the guy could call out the fight. He waited as the man across the cage got his knuckles taped up. Nonsense. The tape wasn’t going to make anything feel better, but it might protect his hands from getting cut up if he landed a punch to Pav’s mouth.
He wouldn’t land one.
Not a single one.
He grew up in these fights, in a way. Twice a week for years, Vadim had Pav dragged to these warehouses. Best way to learn, he was told. He needed to know how to fight, but also how to kill. He figured it was also yet another way for Vadim to scare the hell out of Pav and show him just how far the Boykov name could reach.
One of many lessons.
“Pav!”
Viktoria’s call of his name echoed above the shout of the man for the fight to start. He glanced over his shoulder to meet her gaze as his opponent made his way across the cage to him. She smiled at him, mouthing, “Be safe.”
Right.
Safe.
He winked back at her.
She had nothing to worry about.
The sounds of the people roaring and banging on the cage deafened to a quiet murmur in the back of his mind as he turned his attention back to the man just a couple of feet away. Gunner was already throwing out a punch, and Pav had been expecting that. He ducked it, but barely, causing the man’s fist to land right against the flexible chain of the cage. Just as fast, Pav hooked the man in his right kidney with a hit that he was sure would have taken his breath away. It definitely made the man take a couple of steps back.
It was enough.
Enough for Pav to move away and take a second to reevaluate what was going to happen in this cage. He played with the guy for a while, bouncing from one end of the cage to the other. He had fast feet and faster hands. That was before he counted in his keen eye, and ability to pick out anybody’s weakness in less than thirty seconds. He let Gunner land a couple of easy hits—nothing to his face and nothing that even hurt.
And then, Pav got bored.
He tasted the blood in his mouth from that first fight—felt those bruises and broken bones again. He remembered the way the crowd had laughed when he’d lost, and how someone had shouted for his first opponent to kill him while he was almost passed out on the mat.
He thought about the damp, hard cement floor where he’d healed for days after, and the way he’d barely been better before they’d dragged him back for another round.
Those memories were scars now.
Like so many others.
Scars on his mind that he liked to pick at and irritate when he needed a reminder of just how far he could push his body before it would break. He never broke—not really.
Death was already dead.
One couldn’t kill it.
Maybe his nickname was appropriate.
Gunner came for him when Pav put himself in the corner; the man should have recognized that was a bad idea. Nobody willingly put themselves into a corner if they didn’t have a sure way out of it in a cage.
Well, Pav didn’t, anyway.
Gunner reared back with a punch, while Pav kept his face covered and weaved back and forth just enough to make it seem like he cared if the man landed the hit. The punch came hard to his shoulder, sending Pav jerking back into the cage. But that was okay, too. It was where he’d already found the man’s weakness.
It seemed whenever Gunner landed a good hit, he took a second to enjoy the sight of it before he went back in for a round of fast punches, one after another. The man moved back an inch, but Pav was already there grabbing his wrist before he could even pull his arm back from the punch he landed.
Pav punched down hard, right into Gunner’s inner elbow—the popping crunch that answered the punch as he broke
