Page 4 of The Air You Breathe

Why the fuck do I still have this?

I internally cursed myself. It seems like the world was intent on making me suffer with memories of Evan.

2

EVAN

Iwalked to Misfits already dreading the night. The bouncer opened the door for me as I nodded. I strolled into the club, feeling the bass of the music immediately, and looked around to make sure everything was running as smoothly as possible.

I checked each bar, talking to the bartenders making sure we had enough inventory and to see if they were getting requests for certain things. Debating if I should go check on the DJ, but I knew that at this point I was just biding my time before I had to go into the office to deal with Lucio.

I walked to the door and entered a hallway that led to several different rooms and also, a way to leave without being noticed. Lucio was a paranoid bastard who always insisted on an escape route.

When we were having this place renovated, he demanded a secret route that no one knew about except a select few. He constantly talked about having a way to escape the feds. In the three years I had worked for him he had gotten worse and worse. It was exhausting.

He was a man who had started out as a loan shark, building this little empire with underground fighting, drugs and women. It was only a matter of time until he was noticed which made me paranoid too.

Delaying the inevitable even more, I went to go look at the fights we had scheduled for the night. There was a decent opener, but our main event was a guy who had gotten kicked off the UFC scene for being a dirty fighter.

Brent was this massive guy who looked like all he did was shoot up steroids and workout. He was a mouthy, shit talking asshole when we had our meeting with him. I was curious to see if he would deliver on his promise of putting on a good show and not just knocking out his opponent.

The guy he was up against was a local fighter who had made a name for himself. He looked like Kimbo Slice and I had seen him knock out guys in less than a minute. It had been a while since he had a fight with us, making me wonder if he was ready for the mouthy fucker.

I made it just in time to see both of them get into the cage together with the ref. They looked to be even in size but there was something menacing about the mouthy asshole. He seemed ready to kill, not just knock out his opponent, making me nervous about what we would have to deal with if that actually happened.

“Boss is looking for you.”

I glanced over to see Lucio’s son Giovanni standing next to me with his arms crossed over his chest. He looked exactly like his father, dark hair, dark eyes, same nose and skin tone. His mannerisms were the same, but on the inside, they couldn’t be more different.

“I know, I’m delaying the inevitable.” I shrugged.

He chuckled. “I know. I almost called in sick.”

I laughed. “I think he would have dragged you out of your bed.”

“Cazzo, I think he’d find a gun to his head if he saw Vittoria naked,” he growled. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Vittoria didn’t threaten him first.”

I chuckled. His wife was a feisty Italian woman who didn’t give a shit who you were. She would protect her family at all costs. I envied their relationship and every time I saw them together, it was like putting salt into my wound, reminding me that I had given up something that felt like forever.

Darcy. She was beautiful, kind, funny and completely not made for this world. It’s the reason I broke it off three years ago. I also didn’t want this world to taint her and change her in any way. This was my burden to carry, she deserved a real life.

The crowd started to get wild, dragging me from my thoughts. The mouthy guy was on top of the other fighter pummeling him.

“Merda, he’s going to kill him,” Giovanni snarled as he took off for the cage and I followed him.

The ref was just watching the fight when he should have called it thirty seconds ago. Giovanni banged on the cage to get his attention, making the gesture to stop it. The ref quickly blew the whistle two times before Giovanni opened the cage and pushed Brent off the fighter.

He quickly turned his murderous glare to Giovanni but I knew Giovanni was packing and he wouldn’t hesitate to pull his gun to show this asshole who was boss.

“He blew the whistle, fucking idiot,” Giovanni snarled at him, while he checked on the Kimbo Slice lookalike dude. Looking for his team, I nodded my head so they could come in.

At the same time, I made sure Brent didn’t come after Giovanni, since he had his back turned to him. I was nowhere near as big as the dude, but I might be able to hold my own, those Krav Maga classes might finally come in handy.

Lucio came into the cage clapping like the mad man he was. “Brent, that was some display of power,” he said, slapping his shoulder and the dude looked like he wanted to break his arm off.

God, I wish. I wanted to beat him with it too.

Lucio grabbed his arm and raised it up to signal Brent was the winner. Everyone cheered and I had to control the need to throw up at the amount of people that were ok with this maniac.

---