Page 8 of Twice as Twisted

“Come here,” I say, grabbing her scrawny waist. I lift her over my head, settling her onto my shoulders so she can see over the crowd.

“Hey, man,” the guy behind me protests. “Get that kid out of my way.”

“If you can’t see, move,” I growl at him.

He looks like the kind of little bitch boy who might argue, but after taking a second look at me, and Royal beside me, he turns and skulks off, muttering, “What kind of person brings his kid to a thing like this?”

I turn back around. Harper has her opponent on the ground. I watch her finish the girl off, but my mind is on the guy’s words.

His kid.

He called Olive my kid. It’s weird because I never figured I’d get to have kids. I’d screw them up too bad. But I always wanted them. Now I can’t get the guy’s words to go away. I like the sound of them.

I grip her little ankles tighter as she throws her arms over her head and screams along with everyone else when Harper stands back after the girl on the ground taps out, signaling the fight is over.

I could be Olive’s dad. She doesn’t have one. And she really likes me for some reason, though I’m not sure why.

I finish off my beer, toss the plastic cup on the floor with all the others, and jump up and down, yelling for Harper to kick more ass. Olive shrieks and grabs onto my head. I bend down and spin in a circle, spinning Olive out above me. She screams like a banshee, her legs clamping onto my neck, hanging onto my ears for dear life.

“Stop it,” a voice says, a sharp finger poking into my side. “You’re scaring her.”

I straighten and grin down at Harper, the world tilting around me. “Nice going down there, Jailbird.”

Without waiting for her to answer me, Royal spins her around, picks her up and slams her against him. She wraps her legs and arms around him, and they proceed to eat each other’s faces.

“Am I scaring you, Olive?” I ask, tilting my head up to look at the kid on my shoulders.

“Yes!” she cries, her voice shrill through her panting breaths. “Do it again!”

I laugh and bend down, holding her feet with both hands to keep her on my shoulders. Then I spin, my body buzzing with a hot current, the careening thrill of being alive electrifying my veins. I spin and spin, a merry-go-round, an airplane, weightless. Her giggling, wild shriek feeds the hunger for whatever is missing in me, urges me on. Olive is the first thing that’s felt new since we lost Mabel and I found Colt, and it’s every bit as addictive, if in an entirely different way. I didn’t know how much I needed it until I found it in her.

Dolces need novelty. We’re not craftsmen or builders.

We’re hunters. Seekers. Innovators.

It’s in our makeup, our design. We need to pursue, to move, to track and snare and kill, to outsmart and conquer, to win, to improve, to climb higher and run faster and be better. When there’s nothing new, when we’ve already gotten what everyone else is still fighting for, we find new thrills to chase, new dangers to court, forever searching for that elusive challenge.

Suddenly Olive’s legs are wrenched from my hands, and I feel her body connect at the same moment somehow, the realization of what happened only hitting after I’ve lost her, her scream reaching me too late. The pain in it registers a half second after it hits my ears, as I blink stupidly up at the lights and the crowd, my vision still spinning, my world tilting. I try to stand, but I sway off to one side, too dizzy to regain my feet. Her shrieks echo through the raucous crowd, high-pitched and keening as a dying animal.

The crowd around us huddles, drawn back from the circle I made when I swung her around. They all stepped back so I wouldn’t hit them. So what did I hit?

“You dumbass,” Harper barks, smacking the back of my head with her palm as she rushes past. “I told you to stop!”

Royal’s huge body is hunched over something on the ground, someone so small I can’t even see her past his bulk. A few people push in to help, and I stumble onto my hands and knees and crawl over, swaying drunkenly, though it’s as much from dizziness as beer. My head won’t stop spinning, and then I see her little body quaking on the ground, so tiny, nothing but bony knees and skinny elbows. Her hands are clutching her head, her body curled up in the fetal position, her screams like nails hammering into the coffin of my soul.

There’s blood spreading on the floor around her head, and I finally see. The jagged edge of one of the pieces of concrete we were sitting and standing on, now marked with a chunk of her hair, blood dripping off it.

“Call 911,” Harper yells, patting frantically at herself, since she just left the pit and is only wearing a pair of tiny shorts and one of the tees Olive made. Blood is splattered on the front, though I don’t know if it’s hers or her opponent’s or Olive’s.

“You can’t,” Royal growls. “They’ll bust the fighting ring.”

“Who fucking cares?” Harper screams.

“Give her to me,” I say, stumbling to my feet and reaching for her. “I’ll take her to the hospital.”

Harper steps into my path, her voice going cold. “You’ve done enough.”

“I got her,” Royal says, standing with the body in his arms, so fragile, like a crushed baby bird. “Let’s go.”

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