Free Hawke: A Bad Boy Fighter Romance (With bonus book Sons of Flame MC) by Ashley Rhodes

don’t have to fight illegally, you know? If you’re that good, then, why not go professional?”
    She meant well. I had to remind myself of that. Naomi was the kind of person that always meant well. She was just ignorant was all. She hadn’t been where I’d been, didn’t know what I knew—hadn’t accrued debts to the people I owed. So when I explained why that wouldn’t work, I did it as calmly as I could. “Look, that’s… I appreciate you goin’ outta your way. Okay? But I’m a city rat. This is where I live, it’s what I do. It’s how I stay alive.”
    “You realize you’re in a hospital?” She asked.
    “I don’t mean keep kicking,” I said. “It’s how I live. How I feel alive. I need it like you need air, or water, or blood. All this, what you’re doin’ for me? I’m… grateful, or whatever. I mean it. I know you want good things for me, for all your patients, and want me to not end up back here, worse than before.
    “But, dar—I mean, Naomi—this right here, how you see me this very moment?” I waved a hand at all of me. “This is me. I’ve spent more time banged up than I have in one piece. You think I’m crazy, I know, but without stakes, without danger, without the fight, I’m lost. I’m just some schmuck without a purpose. I can’t leave the city.” It wasn’t worth mentioning that if I did, there were people that would come and find me. “You don’t have to understand it. I need this. I’d die of boredom without it. Like a tree without roots.”
    She watched me. She had the kind of eyes that always seemed shiny, catching the light just right. You’d think the hospital lights that made everything look clean and clinical would wash her out or something like it did everything else, but not her. Her thick lips turned down a bit, sympathetic or pitying, one or the other.
    Didn’t matter, I reminded myself. Once I was gone, she’d write me off. It’s what everyone else did; it’s what I did. I’d write her off too, right?
    “I do get it,” she said finally. “The need for a rush. For excitement. Danger, whatever. I get it.” She sighed, and looked for a second like she might just say something else. Something I wanted to hear.
    She didn’t, though. Not yet, anyway. Or at least, not what I really wanted her to say. “My life is… not dangerous. Not exciting. I do this, six days a week sometimes, and always for ten to twelve hours and when I’m done I don’t have the energy for anything else. And it’s the same, day in, day out. You say you’d wither and die without the danger? I’m already doing that.
    “But a rush? Danger? Excitement?” She dropped her eyes, pained. She looked back at me, waved her hand at my injuries. “This isn’t the only way, Jack.”
    “Maybe,” I admitted. “It’s just the only way I know.”
    “What would be the harm in finding another way, then?”
    “Why do you care?” I asked. I really wanted to know. Sure, she cared about everyone, that was who she was, it was written in her DNA probably. “I mean why do you care what I do? What’s it to you if I go back to the cage, or throw myself off this building? You don’t know me. You don’t know what I’ve done.”
    “You told me,” she said. “I know who you are, Jack.”
    Yeah, they always thought they did. “No,” I told her. “You don’t. You know about the fighting, you know I like it, but you don’t know everything. You don’t know what I’ve done, how I got to where I am now. You don’t know how many people I’ve sent here, to this place, and not just from the ring, lady. What do you think a cage fight is? It’s an interview. With people like Valentino, and worse. People who want things done to other people but don’t have the guts or the muscle or the know-how to do it themselves.
    “Just stop, Naomi. Stop giving a shit about me. Get your rush somewhere else. I’m an animal. And I got an expiration date, get me?”
    It all just came out at once. I wanted