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Skullface had a tattoo on his visage that matched the name. Though he and Marius started out much as Marius had with Killjoy, it wasn't long before she went past the point of any mixed emotions to one emphatic one.
Stop. Please just stop.
They'd obviously saved their best opponent for last. Skullface bided his time, drawing it out longer and longer, taking advantage of short openings to land blows on wounded areas and important motor points. He made Marius work for every return strike. Though Marius had showed he had the ability to think and strategize when he fought, Skullface was better at it. When Marius's bloodlust was up, tenacity and brute power took over as his strongest fighting assets.
At the beginning, she'd wondered if the organizers fixed some of the fights to ensure the house took home enough of the profits, but not so much that their audience wouldn't leave satisfied enough to come back. It probably did happen, but nothing in this event with Marius suggested the four fighters had anything on their minds but winning. Marius had been aware of her earlier, but now, she expected the two fighters were as isolated as if they were on a mountaintop together, seeing who could throw the other off the edge.
The crowd roared as Skullface spun and hit Marius mid-body with a kick that knocked him back, then rushed him like a roaring bull. In a move worthy of a professional wrestler, he caught Marius about the waist and thighs and heaved him against the cage door so hard it gave way. Marius slammed into the floor on the outside, shoulder and face thudding against the concrete.
Those clustered near the gate had scattered. Good thing, because Skullface pounced, not intending to give Marius any breathing room. But Marius somehow was already up on one knee. He bulled into Skullface with an enraged roar of his own, and reversed their momentum, taking them both back into the ring. They rolled, and Marius ended up on top.
She saw it happen, exactly what the Aussie had described. Marius hit a different gear, raw power called up from a reserve inside him that simply refused to be beaten, no matter the cost.
He was hammering Skullface with his fists, the blows a blur of motion. He grabbed his opponent's slick cranium and slammed the man's head against the floor, hard enough to daze him.
If Skullface wanted to call it, Regina didn't see how he could. Marius was punching him again, turning his face into meat. Surely...good Christ, she wasn't going to stand by and watch him kill someone. Up until now, the fighters themselves had seemed mindful of just how far they should go, even in this environment. Until one of them was past the point of caring.
She was pushing, shoving, moving along the rail. Then she muttered "screw it" and went over it, onto the top of the bleacher seating just below. She ignored the startled glances of those crowded upon it, gripping shoulders as needed to keep herself steady, get to the ground level fast and push closer to the cage. She was a tall, big-boned and powerful woman, and she wasn't shy about using that when needed.
She emerged right where she intended, at the corner only a few feet from where Marius was going after the nearly unconscious man. Thank God, they'd realized the same thing she had, that Skullface couldn't call mercy to save himself. Now the same men who'd retrieved Killjoy were in the ring, pulling Marius off. They'd left the cage door open, and she had an odd sense of deja vu from earlier in the night, when she'd stood in the doorway of Room 7 at The Zone.
The man in the top hat shouted for--had she heard that right--a shot of freaking ketamine? A horse tranquilizer? She was pushing through the doorway, not thinking about it, just acting on instinct. Perhaps she was as insensible to the wisdom of her course as Marius seemed to be toward everything right now. She wouldn't realize until later her skinny runner and Tal helped her get into the cage with him, obviously deciding something else beyond the norm was required to defuse the situation.
She was driven by conscience, an unsettling feeling she'd somehow caused this. First by not defusing him properly after his session with Siren, and then triggering something in her boy with her presence and that Focus command.
Her boy. Christ, yeah, she'd made her decision, hadn't she?
She put her palm flat on Marius's heaving chest, the only clear space between the arms of the three men holding him. Her touch snapped his gaze to her, his silver eyes as brilliant as lightning in a black sky.
"Stop," she ordered. "That's enough."
Chapter Four
She'd had subs who called her a sorceress for her ability to command obedience from them. But those were men who ultimately wanted to obey, no matter what personal shit they had to wade through. She thought Marius had that in him, but in comparison, her other subs had been jumping a babbling brook to get to a compliant state. He was in the center of a vast, churning whirlpool ocean of sewage. She could almost smell it coming off him. It took three times for the sharp command to reach through the violence and hook his attention.
She felt it when it happened, when he wasn't merely looking at her blindly through that haze. His gaze sharpened and locked. A runner arrived with a full syringe of ketamine, she assumed, and she pointed an emphatic finger at him, a don't touch him with that gesture she backed up with a look. Maybe that alone wouldn't have succeeded, but since each time she'd issued her command, Marius's struggling had lessened, Top Hat waved off the tranq.
The crowd loved the drama, since to them that was what it was. She supposed they interpreted it like an action film, the hero caught up in a just rage. They didn't see the reality, a man so lost to his most base instincts he would have killed the man who was there for no different reasons than himself. Skullface had been transported out of the ring on a stretcher, probably to be placed in the back of some van and taken to a hospital.
The dwarf snapped his fingers in front of Marius's face, drawing his eyes. "Good, Rabid? Can we let you go?"
When Marius jerked his head in assent, the man wasn't completely satisfied. He turned to her.
"What do you think, Legs?" Since his head barely reached her waist, she was relieved he came up with a nickname based on the most evident part of her anatomy, rather than what was at eye level.
She was studying Marius's face. Skullface's removal had defused his most obvious trigger. But to be sure, she laid her hand back on Marius's chest. His heartbeat was still fast, his pulse jumping in his throat as she shifted to a light clasp over it. His gray eyes swiveled down to her arm and back up to her face. When she lifted her thumb to his mouth, brushing his split lip, he didn't flinch. His tongue flicked out and took the blood that had been transferred onto her skin. A spark in his gaze told her he'd done it consciously, but maybe not entirely to be a smartass. When he dropped his head back and closed his eyes, she felt him draw a couple deep, leveling breaths.
"He's good," she confirmed. "But can he go somewhere halfway quiet here?"
"For the money he earned us tonight, we'll give him the champion's suite," the emcee said dryly.
His affable sarcasm made sense when she saw it. They had a sectioned-off area next to the locker room for the fighters, made possible by more of the temporary divi
der panels they'd used in the foyer. There was a padded table, a cabinet, jugs of water and a big basin. All the men but Tal left them there. Barely a moment later, she heard the dwarf announcing the final fight of the night over the dull thunder of the crowd. She thought anything else would be anticlimactic after Marius's performance, but there was no telling what spectacle they'd arranged. Probably a fight between a pair of paraplegics in high-powered wheel chairs, one knife thrown down between them.
Tal slapped Marius on the shoulder. This time Marius did flinch, but not from pain. It was as if the friendly contact was startling. Tal overlooked it with an understanding expression.
"Good fight, Duncan. You did good. Top Hat about shot his load when you took down Tank."
