Shit. He was right; I was a total dick. Not that it made what he did okay, but I’d been after his girlfriend since day one. I was no kind of friend.
“Why the fuck didn’t you say something?” I asked. “Confront me! Punch me! Why play like you never saw it?”
“Because if I’d confronted you, you would have still won. She still would have gone home with you.”
“But she chose you.”
“You still think that?” Chris laughed as he pulled himself back on his feet. “What a joke. When she came to break up with me that day, I knew what she was up to. I saw the fear in her eyes. I also saw how much she cared about you, how much she wanted you to fight here in Vegas.” He shrugged. “All she needed was a little motivation to stay with me. I gave her that motivation.”
His broad smile was begging me to punch him. What the hell had he done to her?
“I may have suggested that the only way I wouldn’t pull you from the fight was if she and I were still together.”
“No way.” I didn’t believe him. There was no way Kenzie would do that. Stay with someone for me?
He continued. “I suggested you might not recover from your injury soon enough. After that, she couldn’t keep her slutty hands off me.”
My fist flew at him, but he saw it too late. His eyes widened as my knuckles made contact with his jaw. His skull was thick, but I hit him fucking hard. He spun backward, landing on the floor, and his eyes fluttered closed. He was breathing, but he was out.
Good, because I couldn’t listen to one more second of his bullshit lies. There was no way Kenzie would sell herself for anything. She was smarter than that. If he’d been blackmailing her, she would have told me. We would have figured it out.
My knuckles hurt. Fuck. I’d taped up my hands but didn’t have my gloves on yet, and I had hit him really fucking hard.
Jonah glanced over at Chris, then turned to me. “You okay?”
I flexed my hand and moved my fingers. I’d definitely fucked up my right. Fuck. I shook my head.
“Is it broken?” His eyes were wide. Fighters broke bones often enough during a fight, but going into a fight with a fracture was sheer stupidity.
But I needed this fight. And I needed to win this fight. So I was about to do something seriously stupid. “Let’s re-tape it.”
“Shit,” Jonah said, giving me a knowing look.
He grabbed the tape, and we fixed up my hand as best we could. It still hurt like crazy, but I could deal with the pain. I just needed a whole new fight strategy.
“He’ll expect you to come in fighting with your fists,” Jonah said, apparently already on it. “So wear him out with kicks and your left. Make him dance around for a while. That way, when he pulls the fight to the mat, he’ll be tired. Then use all that shit we’ve been working on for the last few weeks. Listen to me, I’ll help you find your openings. He wants the fight to be about submission. Let’s make it all about his submission.”
I nodded and started visualizing the fight and the new strategy. It might work. It had to.
Determined, I pulled myself together. I could still win this thing. I started hopping again, the blood already rushing through my veins.
“Yeah,” I yelled.
There was a knock on the door before it opened. A man with a headset and a clipboard came in. “It’s time.” He glanced down to where Chris lay on the floor. “What’s wrong with him?”
Jonah shook his head. “He tried to force himself on a woman last night.”
The guy smirked and toed Chris, who stirred a little. Then the guy said, “Must have been some woman.”
Jonah laughed, but the guy was right. Kenzie was some woman.
Cade found us in the hallway and joined us as we headed to the arena entrance.
Forty-Six
MacKenzie
The stadium seating was something to behold. Rows and rows of seats stacked up on one another that stretched up and back in all directions from the single cage in the center of the floor.
I followed Alexa down the aisle to our seats. I’d traded my VIP ticket in the second row with Cade so that I could sit with Alexa. It turned out that Cade didn’t even need my ticket. He’d gotten a text from Ian asking him to stand in as a coach, so my ticket would go unused. But it was better this way. I could sit with Lexa, Ian wouldn’t see me, and thus wouldn’t get distracted.
Their tickets, however, were not as far away as she’d promised.
“How is fifteen rows back considered nosebleed?” I asked. We were barely outside the VIP seating.
“He won’t be able to see you from here, you’ll be fine.” She waved me off. “Sit.”
I sighed and obediently took my seat. It was good to have Alexa here. She might be annoyingly bossy, but at least I knew it was coming from a good place.
Although we’d only gotten there a few minutes before the fight was supposed to start, it still felt like hours until the lights finally dimmed and the stage lights came to life, dancing around the empty cage and over the full audience.
Music blared and the announcer began. “Ladies and gentlemen, our first fight of the night, Hayden ‘The Gator’ Jones versus Ian Leclaire.”
Spotlights spun around the arena, and I cast my eyes over the audience. The place was packed.
I tried to imagine what it would be like for Ian when he came out after being introduced. Would he be nervous? Would he be excited to see so many people here? Would he even notice the people, or would he be so fixed on the fight that he had tunnel vision?