He was going to pay.
We didn’t touch gloves—of course we didn’t. My eyes were on his when I heard the
abrupt whistle and the fight started.
We shadowboxed for a few minutes, with me noticing Graham in my peripheral, standing next to the cage, eyeing me like he had a feeling I was going to fuck everything up. He was right to think that.
Stefano tried to throw a few jabs my way, but they were futile. I was too fast for his own good.
I countered his jabs with two smooth uppercuts, one to his chin and the other to his jaw. He stumbled backwards but didn’t fall. I heard him groan and watched him raise his gloved hands to touch where I hit him, but he withdrew his hands quickly from his face, like he had remembered something.
I wondered what that was about.
Graham’s face grew serious as I became more confident in the ring. A roundhouse kick to Stefano’s stomach sent him to splash against the net of the cage. The Irish cheered me on. The Italians booed at Stefano. Stefano tried to grab my foot when I went for another kick, but then I spun him around and dropped him to the floor, locking his head between my thighs in a perfect jiu-jitsu move.
So far, it was an easy fight.
Stefano was big and strong, but like most muscle guys, he didn’t know what to do with his strength. I knew my grip on Stefano was cutting his air supply, and I wondered when and if he would tap out. I hoped he was man enough not to tap out so I could kill him. It’d have made everything that happened worth my while.
Graham was on the verge of yelling at me—I saw it by the way his whole face whitened and he kept trying to lock eyes with me, but I didn’t allow for that. I knew that if I’d look him in the eye, I’d chicken out on my plan.
My plan to kill Stefano.
A few minutes of me thigh-choking Stefano had passed before I realized what was happening. Stefano was fondling his gloved hands along my ankles before dragging them up to my knees, and the pain was sharp, hot, and blinding.
I let go of him immediately when I noticed the rivers of red running from my legs to the canvas below us, the steady drip of my blood.
Fuck.
The fucker put blades in his gloves.
I didn’t have much time to contemplate what to do. I just knew I needed to end this fight soon, but before I had the chance to get up, he struck me again with a punch straight to the face. I felt the razor slicing through my skin, deep, and groaned in pain, squeezing my eyes shut to avoid the sting of my blood against my eyeballs and stumbling to the net. I held it firmly while I wormed into a standing position.
“You couldn’t let it go, could you?” Stefano barked at me, but I was the only one who was able to hear him, seeing as the crowd went ballistic around us. The Irish were beginning to suspect something was wrong with me losing so much blood, and the Italians were simply happy Stefano finally got his shit together.
Even if he was cheating.
“She’s fucking mine! Mine!” Stefano threw another jab my way. More blood. More cuts. Now I really wanted to kill the fucker as soon as possible, but I felt myself going under. I could barely breath. Barely stand up. I knew that I was going to pass the fuck out, soon. Fuck that shit. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I heard Carter shouting in the background and Graham’s voice, low and calm, contemplating what to do. They knew something was wrong, so at least I had that.
Stefano’s glove clutched my neck in a grip, and that was when I really began to worry because I knew the blade was more than likely going to slit my throat. I was going to die there, in the cage, like an animal, like prey, like a dead beast.
Without even knowing where to aim—at this point Stefano was nothing more than a shadow dancing in my milky vision, clouded by my losing blood—I managed to throw a few punches to move him away from me before I collapsed in a heap of muscle and blood.
I heard shouting.
I heard screams.
Then I heard Jade crying and sobbing.
I wanted to open my mouth, to tell her that everything was going to be okay, because I loved her enough to lie to her.
I heard Graham on the phone, and he was pissed off.
I heard Carter cursing with his weird Northern Irish accent and trying to comfort Jade, but she didn’t want to hear a word he said.
Then I heard the most surprising thing I’d heard in a long while, and it came from Graham’s doctor who tended to all of us underground fighters and soldiers of The Savage Army.