Page 14 of British Bratva: A Russian Mafia Romance

Sometimes I’d use my laptop to find old footage of her from news clips, and watch them over and over again with the sound muted so that Pierce didn’t storm upstairs and take it off me.

I don’t know what she ever saw in him. She was beautiful and intelligent, always asking hard hitting questions when she was interviewing, disarming whoever she had with her behind the camera with an easy smile.

When I got too sad to think about it all, I hung the heavy punch bag up in the corner of my room. Strapped my hands and went at it for hours.

Vasyl Lomachenko was my idol.

From him, I’d learned that anybody could push through anything with enough determination, drive and intelligence.

I had watched every fight that I could find. Up in my bedroom, I went over footage of the Ukranian boxer obsessively, like if I stared long enough at the screen I’d be able to pick up all his secrets. I wanted to understand exactly what it was he did when he was in the ring – how he could take down fighters who had so much more experience under their belts.

I watched for the ways he dodged and danced around them, finding openings, creating them. Watching his fists fly fast and skillfully, playing with his opponent like he was running the choreography and their gloves grazed off him. He could have been a god. He had to be supernatural. Leading them where he wanted them, with a touch of his glove to the back of their necks turning the tables, quite literally.

I watched him jab and probe, finding weakness and filing it away. I saw him open up offers for somewhere to hit him, only to power through double time with a swinging knock out blow they had no time to brace for. He’d invite punches, then head them off with a change of direction and an uppercut that left them disorientated and reeling.

I saw champions refuse to go the full twelve rounds, knowing they didn’t have the endurance to push through and find the cracks in his defence. I wasn’t sure he had any.

And I wanted to learn how to be like that.

He said his secret was being prepared for pain, learning not to panic through it, knowing how to go beyond it. He used breath training, so I’d read – held a lungful of air underwater in the pool. Then let it out, letting his body sit with the panic and the scream in his lungs while his animal brain tried to force him to open his mouth.

I practiced in the bath, dunking my head under, marking the time with the timer on my cell phone on top of my bath towel on the floor. Half drowning myself should have been nothing when I had so little that was good in my life to hold onto anyway, but I always panicked, always had to come up.

And I guess that meant maybe I still cared too much for what happened to me. Maybe that was a good thing after all but it wasn’t going to help me get my revenge any faster.

For the hundredth time since I’d gotten it, I unrolled the ragged gym towelling and set the solid, stubby revolver down on the carpet with a sigh. The Smith and Wesson logo on the side, and a number that was scrubbed off, and I’d picked it up so many times, loaded bullets into the chambers and pictured shooting it.

CHAPTER 5

Elizabeth

It had rained while I was on the bus the next morning, and the pavement was glistening black with it. The traffic kicked up dirty droplets of water everywhere.

This was a thousand miles from Chelsea. A side of London I never knew before I’d had to seek it out. I’d known shiny black cabs and brightly coloured cashmere jumpers, salad lunches on the Kings Road after trailing through the shops, traipsing through Hyde Park’s picnickers on endless summer days that burned the grass brown, or braving the tube to go and look at the hats in Fenwicks.

Cassie’s family was Irish, and her cousin was some big deal in boxing in Dublin. I didn’t know all that much about it back then, but it meant her brother Mitch had enough credentials to make a living bringing fighters through to the circuit. And their successes built his name big enough that he was enough of a draw as a coach to finance the small gym he set up on the dodgier side of Hammersmith, underneath the flyover.

I didn’t know much about being on the shady side of the law, but all I did know was tangled up with them.

It was Cassie who handed me a leaflet advertising one of their amateur bouts and gave me the night off so I could go and see it. That was just after my sixteenth birthday. She must have known what she was doing, because once I was in there, I knew why she’d sent me. In the ring, the fighters didn’t show weakness. They defended themselves and they moved to get out of the way, and when they got angry, they kept it controlled until they had their opponent up against the ropes and they could really dig into them.

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