Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 126003 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126003 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
“I do.”
“You don’t. It’s not even why you told me to meet you here.”
She’s right. But I don’t look at her now. I just let my gaze wander across the ocean. It’s calm today, and it calms me. I like the flatness of it. Always better than the storm, in my opinion. Even though the storm comes with dramatic thunderheads in every shade of purple and gray you can think of, and even though it’s beautiful in a terrible and exciting way, the smooth glassiness of a calm ocean is like letting out a breath of relief. It’s like relaxing back on a hot stretch of sand and closing your eyes for a moment of peace.
Something I never had much of before recently, because my life, up until Sick Fights became a gym and I became a world-class MMA trainer, was mostly jungles and blood.
That’s why the bikinis, and the traffic, and the laughter throws me. How is it possible that this world I live in now exists side by side with the one I came from just a few years back?
Have they all been blinded by the sun?
Or is it a choice?
I guess I understand. If I had the choice to know, or not know, I would rather not know.
But I wasn’t given that choice. I was born into this darkness. That’s why I had to make up a last name. That’s why all my papers are fake.
“OK.” Mackenzie stands up this time. “Listen, I’m not here to torture you. I don’t need this story. I’m retired. So if you’re not ready—”
“Ready?” I stand up too. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
She huffs, tilts her head a little, shoots me a look that says, Cut the bullshit. “I know what you’re after. Cort told me, Maart. You’re looking for Irina.”
I turn my back on Mackenzie and run my fingers through my hair.
The next thing I know she’s got her hand on my shoulder and she’s leaning in to my neck. “Come on. Let’s do this somewhere else.”
Then she takes my hand, like I’m a fucking child or something, and leads me across the roof to the elevator.
The most interesting thing about this move is that I allow her to do it.
Maybe ‘allow her’ is a strong way to characterize it. Because I’m not even thinking about Mackenzie anymore. I’m still stuck on the name Irina.
She didn’t even have a name when she got to the camp when she was six. Sergey named her. Something Russian because she spoke Russian and so did he. That’s how Irina came to me.
That’s how almost all of them came to me.
Small things, mostly starving. Some pale, some brown. Some blue-eyed, some green-eyed, some brown-eyed. Blonde-haired, black-haired, even some ginger-haired.
It was just a constant thing, these kids showing up. Like a never-ending fucking river of kids. Every couple months some would die and new ones would take their place.
When Irina landed in camp she had a black eye, a cut lip, and a freshly broken finger. No one explained why she came like that because Irina was dropped off without ceremony.
One day there was no girl named Irina. Then one day there was.
Not even Cort knew she was coming, and that was unusual in its own way. Udulf usually let him have a say in the kids he brought to camp. Not typically in choosing them, but definitely in accepting them.
But with Irina, there was no discussion.
She stood no taller than my waist and weighed thirty-six pounds that first day. I was twenty-two and she was six.
It didn’t take her long to learn English—a few months. By that time she’d had her first fight and she could mostly have a conversation.
I remember looking at her that very first day, all beat up, while I was setting the bone in her finger. And I remember thinking… It’s just not fair.
Of course, none of it was fair. Nothing in my life had ever been fair. At the time I had probably trained several dozen children. Cort had won maybe fifteen or twenty Ring fights by then. And Sergey was one of the first to come train with us and the only one left from those early days.
But something about Irina hit me harder than the others. She had a scowl on her face. She didn’t ever whimper as I set her finger. And when I was done, she looked up at me and just… sighed. Like she was a weary soul who had lived too long and didn’t really care anymore.
That was my first impression of Irina.
And I wanted her to win.
Of course, I wanted them all to win. I did. And I tried really hard to make that happen.
But they can’t all win.
They can’t all be Cort.
Mackenzie and I end up in my gym. It’s noisy, and stuffy, and smells like sweaty men, but it was a good call on her part because this is a place I understand.