Sick Heart: A Dark MMA Fighter Romance

I nod. “Mmm. Probably true. On both counts. But I’m not telling you this as a threat. I just wanted to let you know that I’ve figured it out.”

“Have you?” He tips his juice glass to me. “Tell me then. What have you figured out?”

“You… men.” I use the word hesitantly. Because they are not men, they are all demons. “You have to control everything, don’t you? Up to, and including, each other. And you use blackmail to do that.”

Udulf’s breath escapes as an involuntary huff.

“You do things. You film them. And then you hand that over to someone to hold over your head. It is a pact. A declaration of loyalty. And in this case, Lazar gave his over to you. That film you showed me that night. That was what you were holding over Lazar. It took me a long time to piece that together because you both look pretty guilty if you ask me. But even in your world, raping a child and skinning a child alive are two totally different things, aren’t they?”

Udulf is silent for yet another moment. Then he laughs. “What do you want? A pat on the back? None of this matters, girl. It’s all water under the bridge.”

It’s not. But I let that go and just move this conversation forward. “And Lazar had something on you too. Didn’t he? What was it?”

“Again,” Udulf says. This time with honest disinterest. “None of this matters. The secret Lazar was holding is gone. It has been… cancelled.”

Cancelled. That word makes me sick and I have to swallow hard to keep the bile from rising up inside me. “Not yet,” I say. “Because whatever else you may have done in your life, your secret was Lazar’s secret too.”

He shakes his head. But he knows I’m right.

“It’s not even the rape. It’s who you raped and who you didn’t want to know about that. Because if Cort knew, then, at the very least, he would stop fighting for you. He’d probably find a way to kill you as well, but that’s not even the point. The point is… you would have no fighters in the Ring. Would you? All your best fighters came from Cort’s camp. And he is their leader. One word from him and you lose them all.”

Udulf actually guffaws. “They all want to live, Anya.” I smile at him for using my name instead of the derogatory nyuszi. “They don’t really care about him. Just look at Maart. He will kill Cort tomorrow. And he thinks he will set the camp free. Fine. Let him think that. Let them all think that they have a choice. But then, you only have to look at Rainer to see how it will end up.” He shrugs with his hands. “My boys, my camp. They are all mine. And that will never change because they are slaves, Anya. They are nothing but slaves.”

I nod to move past this, but continue. Because I’m not quite done yet and he’s getting impatient. “But that night of the fight on the ship. That night I was supposed to be cancelled too, wasn’t I? Lazar wanted me dead because I knew his secret. You told him that I knew his secret. And even if I did know seventeen languages, and even if I was still able to spy for him, I was no longer worth the risk, was I?”

“Anya.” He says my name sharply now. “I’m a busy man. What do you want? You’re wasting my time and I’m tired of this conversation.”

He already knows what I will say. But I say it anyway. “I want to live, Udulf.”

His breath escapes slowly. Like he might’ve been holding it. And then he smiles.

“You want to live with me, you mean?”

I nod. “With you.”

“I bet you would.” He grins. Udulf van Hauten might be a sick, diabolical citizen of the uber-elite class who live in a world where there are no limits and his disgusting appetite for children is always satiated, but he is still just a man.

I am not his preferred flavor, but I am still a beautiful eighteen-year-old girl. And he is still a man with an ego.

I smile demurely as he gets up from the breakfast table, walks over to me, kisses my hand, and says, “I’ll see what I can do.”

CHAPTER THIRTY - TWO - CORT

My humble training village has been nearly empty for three days since Maart claimed all my fighters in his little coup and only left me Zoya, Rasha, and Irina.

This is all I think about in the time between his betrayal and the fight.

And I’m still thinking about it as my private, never-before-seen-or-photographed base camp is infiltrated by the other nine men in the world who own fighters in the Ring of Fire, and, of course, that pushy bitch of a reporter who tried to corner me for an interview back on the Bull of Light four months ago.