Page 26 of Inflict

Straightforward was always the best way to go.

• • •

Connor stepped into the shoddy warehouse just after one in the morning. He recognized one of the guys at the door, and that was probably the only reason he wasn’t patted down before he was allowed entrance.

The very second he was inside, Connor’s nose stung with his first inhale. It was a difficult smell to describe—the dirt floor, rusted walls, leaky pipes, and rundown state of the place. Yet, above those things, he could smell the animals, the people, old blood, and something sour in the air.

He pushed his thoughts aside, following the corridor that would lead to the main floor. Already, he could hear the snarls and vicious barking reverberating down the corridor, raucous laughter and loud cheers following the noise. Another snarl sliced through the damp air a second before a sharp yelp followed right behind.

Connor just stepped into the main floor in time to see a Rottweiler pin a copper-colored Boxer to the dirt floor, his teeth tearing into the hide of the dog that was down. He passed by the dog fights, and then a well-known prostitute who frequented the events, who tried to approach him, bypassing her as well.

He had a goal in mind, and he knew better than to waste time by getting into conversation with one of the prostitutes working the place.

If he looked hard enough into the shadows, he could find more than enough of those girls working their tricks. A man getting his cock sucked under a table, or a girl getting screwed from behind in the corner.

He just wasn’t interested.

And he didn’t pay to play.

The spiral, metal staircase that led to the upper section of the warehouse was the one place Connor avoided in this particular building. For every girl that worked the floor downstairs, there were five girls upstairs, waiting on stained mattresses and separated by sheets, being used in whatever way a person saw fit to do so.

Skin was a lucrative trade.

He’d seen worse than what was upstairs in the warehouse because of his father, but it was easier to focus on what he was there to do, and then he could get the feck out.

“Irish!”

Connor’s gaze found the man shouting for him sitting on a half-wall near the cage, where two men were fighting, both bleeding profusely from their fists and faces. “Danny.”

“You fighting tonight?”

He made his way over to where the man sat, and quickly pulled himself up to sit beside one of the few people he might actually consider a friend. Daniel—or Danny, as he preferred—was one guy that Connor had grew up with. Danny happened to have a father in the O’Neil organization, and Sean had never openly told his son to stay the feck away from the guy.

“Maybe,” Connor said, his attention going back to the cage. “They weren’t taking names at the door.”

“It’s volunteer tonight.”

“Ah, I see.”

Well, then.

Connor liked that even more.

He sat back, watched the cage, and waited to see a face he might like to kick in.

Ivan Petrov happened to be the lucky bastard Connor decided to fight, although not because he had any particular score to settle with the Russian. Connor had simply noticed that every time a Russian put themselves up as a volunteer to fight, no one seemed interested in challenging them.

Maybe it was the venue—a Bratva-owned warehouse. No one liked to cause a possible problem in a place they didn’t have any say over, or where they could be killed without dispute for starting an issue. Another reason Connor suspected no one wanted to challenge any Russian, was because some of them were dirty, especially when backed into a corner and they thought they might lose.

Connor decided whatever risk involved was worth it.

One, because he liked money. Two, because he wanted to fight. And three, because even though he didn’t have a problem with Ivan, he didn’t like the look of the man’s face. Sometimes that was more than enough to get the Irish in Connor ready to go to blows.

Both men had undressed down to their boxer-briefs, chatted between one another from opposite ends of the cage, and waited while the money started to flow in from the bets of watchers. Connor was the underdog where the betting was concerned, but he’d expected that reaction, seeing as how this was Russian turf, and he was so far from Russian, it wasn’t even funny.

Even if his face wasn’t known, the visible marks on his body were more than enough to explain his Irish heritage. From the large, script-styled O’Neil tattooed across the back of his shoulders intertwined with a Celtic cross, to the raised scars of carved shamrocks inside both his palms, there was no hiding what Connor was.

The only likeness he shared with Ivan were the multitude of tattoos covering his body in colorful ink. But where the Russian’s ink told the story of his Bratva lifestyle and how he’d come into it, Connor’s told his history—from his first tattoo at aged thirteen, to his most recent just a week earlier—if someone cared to look close enough.