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George doesn’t hesitate – she reaches up and kisses him. He holds her roughly, plunging his tongue into her mouth. He’s seven feet of pure muscle and he can break George in half like a twig. When he finally sets her down, George’s eyes are as wide as the moon. She staggers a little in her heels but manages to blow him a kiss as she drags me past.
“I’ll see you around, sugar,” she calls to her new friend. Her nails dig into my arm as she drags us along with the crowd. She wipes the smudged lipstick at the corner of her mouth.
“You told me you’ve never been here before,” I hiss.
“I haven’t.” She grips me harder, and I feel that she’s trembling. “But look around. This place is a den of sin. The whole reason that guy works here is so he can make people bleed and get all the pussy he wants. He doesn’t remember me, he just thinks he’s getting lucky. Now, come on.” She tugs me into the fray. “I want a seat near the front.”
George is a constant surprise.
As she makes her way through the crowd, I can’t help staring around us. When Claudia mentioned Antony’s club, I pictured some shitty old warehouse with bad lighting and even worse people. But this… this is another world.
The roundhouse surrounds us on all sides – a high building of steel with at least forty open bays. Some still contained rusting locomotives, their noses pointed toward the turntable, but most are filled with people. Women swing from the locomotive skeletons and dance on the gangways. As we pass one bay, I see the inspection pits beneath the tracks have been covered with glass, and couples fuck on piles of snow white cushions while people watch from above.
In the center of the circle, open to the elements, is a round pit that once housed the locomotive turntable. It had been made deeper with concrete walls and enclosed by a steel mesh cage. I notice a trapdoor in the floor of the arena, and a gangplank stretched over the center, hung with a professional lighting rig and a series of hooks and ropes and pulleys. Two large water tanks hooked up to a squat building decorated with three distinct insignia – a sword encircled with a laurel wreath, an eagle, and a she-wolf howling at the moon.
The Triumvirate.
My blood chills. This is Claudia’s world – the secret underbelly of Emerald Beach, the dark heart that beats at the center of the city, with a constant flow of blood needed to keep it pumping. I know I don’t belong here and yet, after what George found out about Dad, I realize how my own comfortable life has flowed directly from this source. My hands may be clean, but my bank balance sure isn’t.
Bleachers have been built into the sloping ground, and closer to the stage are collections of tables. On the other side of the arena, a disused train car serves as a bar. A roped-off area on a raised platform fills up with people dressed to kill – literally. I see weapons peeking out from every belt on holsters hidden under expensive furs. This roped-off area has its own bar – a small switcher engine – and appears to be the VIP section. My heart pounds as I recognize Nero and my mother at one of the tables, and I whip my head away, hoping they won’t recognize me in this getup.
George pulls me toward the tables near the arena. There don’t seem to be designated seats, so we slide into one right next to where the action will take place. A waiter appears almost instantly and I empty the cash from my pockets to get us a couple of drinks. I’m jittery enough without adding alcohol to the mix but I’m not about to ask for an orange juice in this place.
At the table next to us, two men in Armani suits snort cocaine off a woman’s exposed breasts. Beyond them, a woman crawls on her knees underneath a table, wearing nothing but a diamond-studded collar around her neck. She kneels in front of one of the men sitting there and unzips his fly. A waiter approaches their table and offers the men a tray containing small rocks of what looks like cement. “Compliments of the boss.” The men use tongs to pick up the tiny rocks and drop them into a glass pipe.
“Holy shit, that’s grey death,” George whispers. “I’ve been reading about it. It’s a synthetic designer drug containing heroin and a cocktail of opioids. It’s so potent you can overdose just from touching it. I read it was only in Georgia and Alabama, but I guess someone has brought it to Emerald Beach.”
“How do you know this stuff?”
“The wonders of the internet.” George nudges me. “There she is.”
I follow her gaze to a table on the opposite side of the arena. Claudia. She’s wearing a black wig and too much makeup, but I’d recognize those icicle eyes anywhere. She’s sitting next to Gabriel, who somehow manages to look both ridiculous and also completely in his element in a pitch-black suit with several gold chains hanging around his neck.
I can’t breathe. I can’t stop staring at her, trying to fit the pieces together. George is talking to me, but I don’t hear a word she says. I don’t notice anything is happening around me until the lights over the arena come on and a voice on the loudspeaker who sounds suspiciously like Claudia’s cousin announces the first fight.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. For our first fight, we’re pleased to welcome back a crowd favorite tonight – the indomitable, the impenetrable, the Barbarian!”
A masked figure walks into the arena – a beast of a man wearing only boxing shorts and leather cuffs around his wrists. His eyes and most of the top of his head are obscured in a monstrous leather mask, with goat horns that curl back to accentuate his height.
He raises his fist to greet the crowd as a great roar descends through the roundhouse. All around me, men and women beat their fists on the tables, stomp their feet, yell and holler and scream. Whoever the Barbarian is, they love him. The figure makes a circle of the ring, soaking in the adoration of his fans. He’s completely ripped, his muscles glinting with oil, and his jaw set in a mean scowl. Surprisingly, his skin is bare of tattoos, except for…
…I squint at his chest…
…except for the tattoo over his heart. A four-leaf clover disintegrating in the wind.
“Noah,” I whisper.
George turns to me in surprise. I nod at the fighter, my heart leaping into my throat. “That’s Noah.”
“That’s impossible. Noah can’t be—”
I have to do something. I start to get up. George reaches across and slams my shoulder down, pushing me back into my seat. “Sit down,” she hisses. “There’s nothing you can do. Besides, according to that announcement, this isn’t his first rodeo. He’s an unbeaten champion. He’ll be fine.”
I wish I had her confidence. How can Noah be a champion? He’s never been to this place before tonight…
Oh, fuck.
Noah’s been here before.
