“I was surprised to hear you had a kid.”
“Why? It happens to the best of us.”
“Not to me,” he said.
“You don’t have any children at all?”
“None. I bag my shit up.”
She flinched. “He did, but it tore.” Belle shrugged. “There’s never any real protection other than to not have sex.”
“I want to know more about this guy.”
“Drago, he was a no one. We had a bit of fun, and he liked the idea of screwing a female fighter. From what I heard he even bragged about being my first. How disgusting is that?”
He wanted to tell her that he should have been her first, and Drago didn’t know where the fuck that thought came from.
“I think there’s more to this,” he said.
She tilted her head and he saw she was hurt by his prying questions, but he didn’t care. Let her be hurt. Right now, something wasn’t adding up, not to him.
“Why do you have to think this is a big deal? I stayed in a place I knew was dangerous.”
“But you haven’t fought in years, Belle. You’re telling me that right now something doesn’t stink? To me, it fucking stinks.”
She chuckled, but it sounded forced, no real humor there at all. “I don’t know what you want me to say. I … I’ve wanted to get out for as long as I could remember. This guy, he was different. He wasn’t a fighter, but he knew a bit. He had a life far away from it.”
Leaning forward, Drago finished off his bourbon, and poured himself another glass. “What proof do you have?”
Drago knew this was killing her. Nothing could be done tonight. He wanted to get her daughter back more than anything. First, he needed to know what the hell he was dealing with.
Something was going on with Belle, and he didn’t know what.
“What are you talking about? Why are you asking all these questions?”
“A guy out of the blue suddenly starts sniffing around you. He’s asking you questions, telling you everything you need to hear, and you don’t once think that it’s odd?”
“I don’t understand. What the hell are you getting at?”
Scrubbing a hand over his face, he hated to be the one to break her heart. This was not how he imagined their reunion would go. He’d always known that their paths would collide again. He didn’t know how it would happen, only that it would, and he wasn’t wrong.
“You know what I’m getting at, but you don’t like the answer.”
Belle wasn’t a fucking idiot. He watched her, seeing the answers staring right back at him.
“What you’re saying is … my daughter’s father was sent to woo me? To get me pregnant, so that I would be drawn back into the life? That’s crazy and stupid.”
“Is it, or are you just too embarrassed to the see the truth?” He waited a few seconds, seeing her eyes fill with tears. “That you were so desperate for attention that the first guy who showed it to you, you gave it up for.”
The tears fell, and he expected her to throw something at him, to lose her shit. Instead, the tears kept coming, and he watched as she got to her feet. “I need to sleep.”
He didn’t stop her as she entered one of the spare bedrooms. Finishing off his bourbon, he sat back in his chair, and rubbed at his temples.
This was too much of a headache. Why the fuck did he do this? Why didn’t he just walk away when he had the chance?
His cell phone rang, and he saw it was Carlos on the line. “I thought I told you to leave?”
“I did leave. I left to gather information. You didn’t come back with the baby, so I figured I could help you by finding out everything you need so you don’t go into your meeting blind.”
Drago couldn’t help but smile. There was just no stopping the man. Carlos seemed to know what he wanted even before he did.
“What do you know?”
“The odds of the fight were leaked out to a few known players,” Carlos said. “Even before the fight took place. In fact, Belle’s fights have been fixed from the beginning.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“They believed she’d win the first five fights. They were guaranteed wins.”
“Okay.”
“After that, the odds started to drop, but on the seventh fight there was a complication. Rumor has it that she was due to take on another female fighter, Kendra. Girl is eighteen years old, undefeated. The odds were for Belle to fall within the first two rounds.”
“But she didn’t.”
“No. The next two fights, again, the odds were not in her favor, and a lot of money got lost. It changed hands.”
“You think this was a deal gone bad?” Drago knew about fixing fights where the people in the ring didn’t have a clue about the outcome. They would pitch small time fighters with big time players that would guarantee defeat. If this was the case, then Belle’s father had to have known.