Page 3 of Saving Blood

“Just the way I like it.” Bolt enters the passcode numbers, the lock clicks and he pushes the thick door open.

Let the fun begin. Just another day in Tijuana.

2

MAXINE

I enter the cage and immediately size up my opponent, knowing I could easily take her down. It’s not false bravado—it’s practical knowledge of past experience and knowing my advantages. Sure, she outweighs me and is maybe two inches taller, but I’m fast and agile, where she’s bulky and probably clumsy and slow. Granted, if I let her connect a few blows, I’ll be in trouble, but that will never happen ‘cause I’m just that good.

Over the last five years, I’ve learned all the tricks the hard way, but the bottom line remains—I became proficient, and what didn’t kill me not only made me stronger—it made me impossible to defeat.

As we circle each other, I catch sight of Blood out of the corner of my eye leaving the bleachers. I’ve seen him in the gym plenty, and people in the know say he organizes the fights and handles the betting for the Royal Bastards MC. Gossip also said the Bastards run most of Tijuana, a fact Hector Rodriquez hates.

Diesel, a member of the Royal Bastards, doubles as a fighter and trainer. He and another guy, Ricky, also a member of the RBMC, watched some of my other bouts, then took me on when I applied to fight under the club’s colors. A great gig, since the popularity of women cage fighters is growing fast and quickly becoming more lucrative than the male fighters. The only thing men like more than watching two women sweating in the cage together is two women sweating in the bedroom together.

Doesn’t take a genius to figure out the profit—the exact reason Hector Rodriquez sent me to infiltrate and find out some key information. Of course, I agreed. You don’t say no to a psycho like Rodriquez, but my reason for stepping into the cage has nothing to do with Rodriquez or the Royal Bastards. It has to do with freedom—my freedom.

I’ve been fighting for it one way or another for most of my life: a need and a want that bloomed in a shy Midwestern girl named Chastity.

CHASTITY/Five Years Ago

By the time Chastity was ten years old, she knew her parents were different from other kids’ parents. Even brought up in a tiny bumfuck town in Oklahoma with a population of two hundred and four, she knew. They had strict ideas about right and wrong, with no room for apology or other opinions.

Television and radio were not allowed in their tiny ranch house because, according to her parents, they were the devil’s instruments. Her father believed God wanted them to suffer because they were unworthy sinners. God must’ve also wanted them to experience hell firsthand, because summer without air-conditioning in the plains of Oklahoma reached way over one hundred degrees.

Their devotion to their religious beliefs went way over the line of normalcy, using every situation, every act, as a way to instill fear. Their God held vengeance and retribution, but Chastity saw their behavior for what it was—outrageous and dangerously abusive.

Her parents’ skewed reality came from their version of the Bible, or God’s Word, as they readily spouted the scriptures, but little Chastity didn’t buy it. No higher power would approve of locking a child in a closet for hours because she walked on a newly mopped floor or came in five minutes late for dinner. No divine being would condone beating a nine-year-old so severely, she couldn’t sleep on her back for a week.

Since her parents didn’t encourage friendships, Chastity spent most of her time alone. Her life centered on going to school and doing homework, which put her at the top of her class, making her an honor student by the time she reached high school. On Sundays, she attended church all day, where the minister preached about punishment and damnation in the fiery depths of hell.

In her free time, she counted the days until she was old enough to leave what she calledherliving hell. She knew there had to be another way to live, far, far away from her parents’ insane rules.

Planning her escape became the center of Chastity’s existence at age thirteen. By fourteen, she had an outline. By sixteen, she had a solid plan, and a year later, she put her plan in motion—on her seventeenth birthday.

The day marked the beginning of her new life, her freedom.

Chastity planned to run off with an older girl she befriended in high school. Tiffany was everything Chastity wasn’t: brave, outgoing, beautiful, and rebellious. It was the brave, rebellious part that made Chastity share her plan to run away.

Perfect timing since Tiffany’s last offense centered around smoking weed in the boys’ locker room and blowing said smoke in the gym teacher’s face. Facing suspension for her fifth offense in as many months, Tiffany jumped at the chance to get away from her parents’ wrath.

Chastity crammed her two favorite pairs of jeans, a few t-shirts and random travel-size toiletries she’d swiped from Walgreens into a plastic shopping bag. Her fanatically religious parents would’ve told her she’d burn in hell for such a sin, but she wasn’t afraid. After being locked in a closet for hours and beaten with a belt, nothing scared her.

They left immediately after attendance was taken in homeroom. Tiffany reasoned it would give them a day’s head start before anyone began to look for them, but Chastity wasn’t concerned. Her parents frequently threatened disowning her for minor infractions, so breaking the rules so drastically would make Chastity damaged in her parents’ eyes and, therefore, unwanted.

Chastity happily spent her seventeenth birthday speeding down Route 80 on their way to California in Tiffany’s Mercedes coupe, a gift from her parents when she promised to stay out of trouble the last time. Apparently, gifting a crazy teen a luxury vehicle wasn’t good parenting skills either.

Tiffany taught Chastity how to drive along the way, and they shared the long ride, making it to Los Angeles in just under twenty-four hours. They hit the Golden State with a thousand dollars between them. All of it was Tiffany’s, but she wasn’t stingy. They rented a tiny one-room apartment right off Sunset Boulevard, with the intention of getting jobs, then breaking into Hollywood and becoming famous actresses. Again, they were teenagers with big, unrealistic dreams.

A year later, they still weren’t actresses, but Chastity wrangled a job at Taco Bell. Most employers weren’t interested in her honors classes since she was only seventeen with no work experience. Tiffany was a hostess at a local restaurant, when she actually showed up. They should’ve had enough to get by if Tiffany wasn’t obsessed with clubbing every night, spending hundreds on clothes and picking up deadbeat boyfriends who claimed to be big-time talent agents.

Chastity never joined Tiffany on her all-night adventures. Some of her parents’ rules still lingered, along with a sense of responsibility. Plus, at least one of them had to hold down a steady job, especially since, after only two months, she was promoted to manager of the Taco Bell on Hollywood Boulevard. Her bosses finally noticed her organizational skills and the fact her cash drawer was always correct to the penny. Mr. Nash, her Advanced Placement Math teacher, would be proud.

Tiffany, on the other hand, must’ve had and lost ten jobs in the last twelve months, but she never lost her spirit or her single-minded desire to hit it big and become an actress.

“I can’t believe you’re actually coming with me tonight,” Tiffany squealed.

After much prodding, teasing and cajoling, Chastity agreed to go along on one of Tiffany’s wild nights. After all, it was her eighteenth birthday.

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