“You may begin.”
Jameson didn’t circle his opponent. He mirrored the man’s moves, anticipating each one with eerie accuracy, right down to the angle at which the guy held his head. Was mocking his opponent the smartest way to start a match?
Maybe not. But Jameson excelled at pissing people off, and he’d always been taught to play to his strengths.
He stopped mimicking the moment the house fighter threw his first punch and switched to dodging instead. The more times the guy tasted air, the angrier he got. Jameson slid into the white space on the man’s weak side. Another punch came, thrown harder than the rest.
Hard enough to leave his opponent off balance.
When you see your moment, the old man’s voice whispered all around him, you take it.
Jameson did. He spun, then went airborne, driving the lower part of his shin into the side of his opponent’s head.
The house fighter went down and stayed down. Jameson straightened. He turned back to the crowd and hopped up to balance on one of the posts that held the ropes. “Looks like we have a winner,” he said, preempting Rohan’s line. “Do we have a challenger?”
Looking out at the crowd, his gaze found Avery’s immediately. Behind her and to the left, making a concerted effort to blend into the crowd, was a man with slicked-back white hair. Gone was the salt-and-pepper beard, but he still held the cane.
The moment Jameson’s eyes met his, the Proprietor stopped trying to blend. He hit his cane against the ground three times, hard.
I’ve got your attention now, Jameson thought. He stayed on the post, perfectly balanced, not even winded, as the crowd went silent. The Proprietor offered pointed applause. One thundering clap. Two. Three. And then he lifted his cane and angled the platinum handle toward the ring.
“Rohan,” the Proprietor said pleasantly. “If you please?”
Jameson looked to the Devil’s Mercy’s number two. The expression on Rohan’s face was impossible to read as he slipped off his black tuxedo jacket and began unbuttoning the rest of his shirt.
Jameson jumped back down into the ring, and as he did, he caught the look in the Proprietor’s eyes and thought suddenly of his grandfather, of all the times he’d thought he’d earned the old man’s approval and realized, almost too late, that what he’d earned was another lesson.
CHAPTER 41
JAMESON
Rohan didn’t have a single scar that Jameson could see. Shirtless, there was no minimizing the breadth of his shoulders, the hyper-definition of muscles, sharpest where they met bone. There was no visible tension in the way the Factotum stood, and Jameson was hit with a sudden premonition that there would be no blank space with this opponent.
No weaknesses.
No openings.
No time between moves.
This should be fun. Jameson felt the adrenaline building inside him—the anticipation, the awareness that he wasn’t going to get out of this fight unscathed.
This was going to hurt.
Blood dripped down his temple. The metallic taste of it was thick in his mouth. His body was mottled with bruises. But on the plus side, only three of his many bruised ribs felt cracked.
Rohan threw him face-first onto the rock-hard mat, and for the first time over the past nineteen rounds, the Factotum spoke. “Stay down.”
Jameson laughed. It came out ugly and garbled, so Rohan could be excused for not recognizing the genuine humor in it.
Hawthornes didn’t stay down.
Besides, it wasn’t like Jameson hadn’t gotten in some good hits of his own. Rohan’s lip was split, his ribs as busted as Jameson’s. The only advantage the Factotum had, really, was that neither of his eyes was swollen shut.
Jameson forced his knees to bend and got them underneath him. The heels of his hands dug into the mat. He breathed through the pain, focusing on it, drawing strength from it, then brought his head up, well aware that the expression on his face probably looked, to the crowd, a little manic.
One foot underneath him, then the other.
Rohan returned to his corner, an expression like regret in his deep brown eyes.
He’s stronger, Jameson thought. I was faster. At this point, Jameson’s speed was past tense. Where his own fighting style was a mix of those he’d mastered across his childhood, Rohan’s defied description.
The Factotum fought every single round like he was fighting to survive.
There was only one way to counter instincts like that, especially with injuries slowing him down. Stop trying to. Jameson couldn’t anticipate Rohan’s next move. He couldn’t match his strength—or his reach. If I fight to survive, I’ll lose. The only thing that could beat survival was a death wish.
No fear. No pain. Less strategy—and more risk.
He ran straight at Rohan, his head down. Get inside his reach. Just before they collided, Jameson threw his right elbow up, catching the Factotum under his chin. Rohan weathered the blow and countered, but Jameson barely felt it, because the elbow to the chin had never been the point.
The point was his other arm, snaking around Rohan’s neck from behind.
Rohan was down. To the crowd it might have looked like he was out, but Jameson knew better. He saw the tension in the back of the Factotum’s hands, the ripple moving up his arms. Any second, Rohan was going to push back up.
But he didn’t.
It wasn’t until Jameson looked out at the crowd and saw the Proprietor holding his employee’s gaze that Jameson realized. He’s giving an order.
Rohan stayed down.
Jameson dragged himself from the ring, barely standing. Avery was there in an instant, propping him up on one side, and another figure slid in on the other.
Zella. “If you bleed on this gown,” the duchess warned, “I’m dropping you.”
“Bloodstains,” Jameson slurred with a grin that set his face on fire. “The point at which outsiders no longer stick together.”
On his other side, Avery’s body pushed in closer to his. “I told your brothers you were fine,” she muttered. “I promised Grayson you weren’t spiraling. And Nash? He’s going to kill you—and me.”
“Libby won’t let him. Killing bad. Cupcakes good.” Jameson ignored the pain and turned, looking for the Proprietor through the crowd—but the man was gone. And when Jameson swung his screaming head back toward the ring, so was Rohan.
CHAPTER 42
JAMESON
It’s an unwritten rule. If anyone goes twenty rounds with a house fighter, the house yields.”
For someone who couldn’t have been a member of the Devil’s Mercy for long, Zella knew an awful lot about its unwritten rules. She’d escorted him and Avery into the atrium, then past a set of velour curtains—Lust—and up a winding, golden staircase. Now the three of them were in a room like Jameson had never seen. The bed was larger than king-sized. The ceiling was a deep midnight blue, just reflective enough that Jameson, lying prone on the bed, could catch the occasional glimpse of a ghost of their images. The floor on which Zella and Avery stood was made of round, smooth stones that had been warm under his still-bare feet.
The wall that Jameson could see when he propped himself up was seemingly made of water, falling into a basin below like a waterfall tamed.
The sheets beneath his body—the sheets he was bleeding on—were made of the softest silk.
“What are you doing?” Avery demanded, putting a hand on his shoulder and pushing him gently back down onto the bed. “You need to lay still.”
“I need to do more.” That word. It always came back to that word—needing more, wanting more, wanting to be more. “The Proprietor will choose the players in the Game tonight. I can’t spend the rest of it up here.”