Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet

The moment he felt me close, his eyes raised from the task at hand—a task that involved blood and sweat and a three-hundred-pound opponent—and locked on to mine. The surprise that flashed across his face was so minute, so fleeting, I doubted anyone saw it but me. He caught himself instantly. His expression hardened, his corded muscles tensed, and the guy he had folded into a full-body lock yelled out in pain a split second before he tapped the floor of the cage, indicating his surrender.

It must’ve been hard for a man like that, clearly a seasoned fighter, to tap out, to admit defeat, but the pain Reyes inflicted had to be excruciating.

And yet Reyes didn’t stop. He didn’t let up. A makeshift referee ran into the cage as the guy tapped again. The pain twisting his features had me cringing inwardly, but Reyes’s eyes wouldn’t leave mine. He stared, his sparkling gaze angry, his jaw set as he tightened his hold even more. The ref was going crazy, trying to drag Reyes off the opponent. Two other men rushed into the cage, but they didn’t have nearly the enthusiasm the ref did. They approached more warily as the crowd roared in excitement. Begged for blood. Or, well, more blood. The man’s pain was too much. It pulsed in sharp, liquid waves through my veins as surely as hemoglobin did.

I lowered my head but not my eyes and whispered, “Please, stop.”

Reyes released the man immediately and fell back on his heels, a salacious warning glimmering across his impossibly handsome face.

He didn’t want me there—that much was obvious—but it was more than that. He was angry. He who’d set me up just to watch me fall. He who could bite my lily-white ass a thousand ways to Sunday was mad at me. Of all the nerve.

The opponent lay on the canvas wheezing and writhing in agony. That last little exertion on Reyes’s part must’ve damaged something. Reyes ignored him. He also ignored the ref, who was pummeling him with verbal warnings, and the guy who started to put a hand on his shoulder for support before thinking better of it. Jumping to his feet, he strode out of the cage like he had somewhere else to be. Cheers and congratulatory whoops abounded as he navigated through the crowd. He ignored those, too. Thankfully, the crowd had enough sense to move out of the way when he got close.

He swam through it with ease, then ducked inside a door that led to a large, boxy construction in the far corner. Offices, maybe. The trainers helped the other guy to his feet and led him away in the opposite direction while a custodian mopped blood off the mat.

My feet followed where every eye led. To the rooms in the corner. I shoved past the feral crowd and lovelorn women. Several of them hovered near the door but didn’t dare go inside. The fact that the door was completely unguarded surprised me. Another guy walked out, shorter and stockier than Reyes, his hands wrapped in tape, his fists at the ready as he shadowboxed his way to the cage.

And the crowd went wild.

I stepped through the door into a type of industrial locker room. Not the kind in gyms, clean and bright, but the kind in old factories, dingy, dark, and dirty. Three rows of the metal units cut the steam-filled room in half. On the left were several walled offices and a desk. On the right—

“And they want you to make it last longer.” A male voice echoed toward me from that very direction. “We talked about this, remember?”

I followed it, walking past the lockers until I came to an open area with benches and a couple of tables. The showers were past that, and someone was apparently taking advantage of them. Steam billowed around Reyes as he sat on one of the tables. A man who must’ve been his trainer stood in front of him, wrapping his hands in white tape, just like in the movies. His jeans hung low on his hips, showing just enough of the dip between hipbone and abdomen to weaken my knees. Bandages and more white tape adorned a shoulder and encircled his ribs, and I fought to tamp down my concern. As for the rest of him, his coppery skin stretched with fluid grace over a solid frame of hard muscles and long sinewy curves. He was simply magnificent.

The first time I saw Reyes, I was in high school and my sister Gemma and I had spotted him through the kitchen window of his apartment late one night. It was a bad part of town, and what I saw proved it. A man—a man who I would later learn was Earl Walker, the monster who raised Reyes and who, years after that event, had tortured and almost killed me in my own apartment—was beating him. Reyes was nineteen at the time. Fierce. Feral. And beautiful. But the man was huge. His fists were slamming into Reyes until he could no longer stand. Could no longer defend himself.

To stop the man from killing him, I’d thrown a brick through the kitchen window. It’d worked. The man stopped. But that brick was like putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound. I found out years later that Reyes had spent over a decade in prison for killing Earl Walker, only to be told that Earl wasn’t really dead. He’d faked his own death, and Reyes had gone to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. The problem lay in the fact that Reyes escaped from prison to prove his innocence and used me as bait to get Earl Walker to come out of hiding. I almost died as a result. Cookie and her daughter, Amber, were put at risk as well.

Those things combined with the fact that Reyes was literally the son of Satan, forged in the fires of sin and degradation, were proving a little hard to get past. But he was also the dark entity that had followed me my whole life. Had saved it more than once. His actions contradicted everything I was raised to believe about such darkness. Such ambiguity.

And now, I stood at the precipice of a great divide. Did I dare trust him again? Did I dare believe anything he had to say? I had spent two months in my apartment pondering that very thing.