Page 69 of If You Fight

Chapter Twenty-One

Ryder

After everyone left and the warehouse wasn’t The Pit anymore but just a vacant building again, I sat in the room that at one time was my home and waited for the pain to subside. If it was just the normal aches and pains from a fight, I could have handled them, but as I sat there on that old metal folding chair wishing I was home submerged to my neck in a hot bath, I knew nothing about how I felt was normal.

I’d had two matches this week, and they’d followed two fights the week before. I’d won all of them, but those wins hadn’t come without a price. The guy in the second match last week had been a fucking monster with fists the size of my head. Even though I was faster and ended up running circles around him just to stay on my feet, when he caught me on the right shoulder with his last few jabs, he got me good. Barely able to lift my arm a few inches, I’d been in searing pain nearly every minute since then.

If I didn’t have a damn good reason to be fighting, I would have hung it up after that match. But I did, and every night when I returned to the apartment and saw Serena sleeping peacefully in our bed, I didn’t have to remind myself of why I said yes to every fight Floyd could get me.

Closing my eyes, I tried to push away the pain in my ribs from that night’s fight. The guy I’d defeated had used my sides like a punching bag for the first half of the match, and even though he’d definitely gotten the worse of it after I got back up on my feet, those blows hurt just as bad.

Between my shoulder injury from last week’s fight and my ribs from tonight, merely moving hurt enough that all I wanted to do was curl up into a ball and sleep for three days. Hell, I’d take a straight eight hours.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re exactly what those people say you are. A beast. I can’t figure out how you’re doing it, but whatever it is, don’t stop,” Floyd said as he pulled up a chair next to me.

I opened my eyes and turned to look at him, groaning with each inch I had to move my head. “Right now, I feel like what the beast shit out.”

He studied me for a moment and shook his head. “I’m wondering how long you can keep this pace up, Ryder. Four fights in two weeks looks like it took a toll on you.”

Moving my head slowly, I looked up toward the ceiling, unsure how long I could keep fighting like this too. I didn’t have a choice, though.

I’d barely made enough to get us away from the estate, but with a baby, we wouldn’t be able to just stay anywhere. Over the years, I’d saved nearly thirty grand, but by my last estimate, I had to make at least five grand more to be sure we could afford a decent place safe enough for a newborn and everything a baby needed, and that was just for the first few months. I’d get a job doing whatever I had to in order for us to live, but I didn’t want Serena or the baby to go without because I hadn’t done enough now.

“I just have to make it a little while longer, Floyd. I can do this.”

“Well, how much are we talking about here?”

I knew when I told him his eyes would probably bug out of his head. Five grand in our business was like a million dollars.

Without looking at him, I answered, “About five thousand dollars.”

The sound of surprise I expected from him didn’t come, so I slowly turned my head and looked over at him. “I figured I’d get some reaction from you on that.”

He nodded and said, “Normally, I’d say that’s a number you’re not going to see for a while, but I heard from a friend of mine who got into the fight game a while ago and is doing pretty well for himself. He’s a big deal in this town called Keyser in West Virginia. Not anywhere I’d want to spend my time, but different strokes for different folks, you know?”

As Floyd rambled on, my spirits soared at the mere thought that this guy he knew in this place I’d never heard of could get me closer to what I needed to get Serena and me away at last. When he stopped badmouthing this Keyser place, I jumped at the chance to get him to the point of his rambling.

“That’s nice, but can your friend help me out?”

Floyd’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Didn’t I just say that?”

“No. You said anything but that. So what’s the story with this friend of yours? What’s he up to and how much is the take?”

“Nate’s arranging a pretty big event in that town of his. Seems the cops are as crooked as a witch’s nose, so he doesn’t have any worries in that department. The place is pretty much a dead end in every way, so he’s got no shortage of guys willing to risk themselves for even a small payday. It’s a typical Appalachian town, you know?”

I thought about what I knew about typical Appalachian towns. The answer was not much. I’d seen something on TV one night when I couldn’t sleep about how those places were fucked up from meth and things didn’t look like they were going to get better any time soon. Other than that, I never cared to know anything about them until that moment.

But how much money could I possibly make in a place even Floyd had called a dead end? It didn’t sound so great now.

“I’m not fighting some meth head, man. I’m desperate for money, but I’m not that desperate. You ever see those fuckers? They look like their faces are peeling off from that shit. And I know from experience guys high on something have the strength of like five guys.”

Waving my concern away, he tried to reassure me. “No, no. It’s nothing like that. The place is poor as fuck, but it’s out of the way enough that big spenders like to bet on his fights. He’s good at flying under the radar, if you know what I mean.”

Well, that sounded a little better. Still interested, I pressed him to talk money. “Okay, what kind of prize are we talking about, Floyd?”

He grinned and leveled his gaze on me. “You’d end up with just over three grand after I got my cut.”

Three grand! That was equal to a couple weeks’ worth of fights. I wanted to jump at the chance to make that kind of money, but nothing this good came without having to give something.

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