Free Ringside by Elodie Chase Page A

I told his manager. “Now!”
    “No way,” he told
me, shaking his head.
    “But he’s in
trouble!” I turned to look at Angel just I time to see his stubborn
unwillingness to get out of the way earn him a heavy punch from Nitro that made
the crowd suck in its collective breath.
    When I turned back
to Jessie, at least the guy looked worried. “It’s going to be okay,” he said,
more to himself than to me as he cast a nervous glance back at the guys he’d
been talking to when I dragged him off.
    Both of them were
watching the match with great interest now, and from the looks of it they
weren’t very happy about the way things were going.
    “Who are those
guys, anyway?” I asked Jessie, hoping to distract him.
    “Leo and Vick
Carello,” he said absently.
    The names didn’t
mean anything to me, but I hadn’t been asking to educate myself. On the other
side of the fat man sat a stack of towels, and I figured if there was anything that even this sort of fight
would understand, it was someone throwing in the towel.
    I dodged past him
and snatched one up.
    Jessie may have
been fat.
    He may have been a
slime ball.
    But one thing he
wasn’t was stupid. He knew instantly what I was planning, and the look of sheer
panic on his eyes gave me pause.
    I don’t think I’d
ever seen anyone so afraid before in my life. He was jumping up and down in
front of me, waving his hands like I was a runaway train he was trying to stop
from hopping off the tracks.
    Screw that.
    I spun past him
without a problem. He didn’t stand a chance against all those years of ballet
training.
    I watched Angel
lunge forward with a vicious jab. All of his strength was behind it, but
unfortunately for him it was too little too late. If it had been on target,
perhaps it would have made the difference, but he’d been beaten too badly to
aim it.
    I watched as it
glanced off Nitro’s face, barely missing the chance to become a knockout blow.
    Only…
    Only the big
Russian went down like he’d been shot by an elephant gun. It happened so fast
that I doubted what I’d seen an instant before, especially when the crowd went
wild.
    I looked at Jessie
and saw him flash me a big grin and a wink. Most of the crowd was at a
different angle to the action then us, and I realized to them Angel’s punch
would have looked perfect; a one in a million shot that felled the monster.
    But I knew better.
    The fight was
rigged. I shoved past Jessie and got to the edge of the crowd, trying
desperately to reach Angel. He was barely able to stand. Blood poured from
another cut, this one on his cheek, and the injured eye had swollen completely
shut.
    “Sloane?” he
mouthed.
    He looked
defeated, despite the fact that he’d just won what the crowd was treating like
the match of his life.
    I went to him, the
blood and sweat forgotten.
    Now that I was
closer, I could hear his voice in my ear over the din.
    “I told Jessie to
get you out of here. I didn’t want you to see me get beat.”
    “You won,” I told
him.
    “How?”
    I didn’t know how
to answer that, so I didn’t even try…

Angel

 
 
 
    The bathroom
they’d let me use to clean up wasn’t much different to the locker rooms I was
used to, after a fight.
    It had running
water and washcloths though, and that was really all that mattered to me right
then.
    I shoved my hands
under the water and splashed as much of it could on my face and upper body. It
wasn’t time to look in the mirror yet. Not yet, but soon.
    I probably looked
like hell. Judging by the way Sloane had been babying me, I must have scared
her. The cut man had said the gashes on my face wouldn’t need to be stitched,
so I just cleaned them out as best I could and plastered a couple of thick band
aids across the worst of it.
    There. Job done, I
let myself look in the mirror. Just like always, it wasn’t as bad as it felt.
I’d hurt tomorrow, but in a couple days the bruises would reach their peak and
in a week or two I’d be as good as