Paradise Found: Cain (Paradise #2)(80)
My mind chose the most inappropriate time to flashback to being a child. A thick fist punching my tender stomach. A fierce shove against a wall, which knocked my head so hard, my teeth literally rattled in my mouth. The taste of blood mixed with saliva. The after-sting of the slap by the flat of a palm. My heart accelerated at the mere memories and I instantly knew I was in danger. Like the lamb being brought forward to slaughter, I was a son about to be sacrificed, irreligiously.
We turned down a dusty road and traveled a short distance along the path. Ahead I saw a small gathering of people. While it might have looked like an innocent group, casually hanging out in a field off some deserted road, the outcrop of people had the small makings of a scene I’d been all too familiar with a long time ago. This was the setting of an impromptu fight. An organized grudge match. My father had orchestrated his own fight, as he held resentment against the new loyalty between Abel and I.
“I’m not doing this,” I cursed before the car even pulled to a complete stop. The dust flew around the vehicle in swirls of murky brown. The setting evening sun another telltale foreshadow of demise.
“Oh, you’ll fight.” My father smiled cautiously, his eyes fixated on something outside the window, fogged over with a layer of dirt. “If she’s so goddamn important, you’ll fight.”
My head swung to look out my own window in search of who he implied. Sofie. I couldn’t find her and my frantic stare gave my father the leverage he wanted. If he had any doubt of her being important, or my devotion to her being a farce, my anxious search dissipated any false concerns. The car was slowing, but I was out the door before it stopped. Racing toward the small circle, I saw enough.
Malik had Sofie by the arms, holding her back from charging toward me. He refused to look at me when I growled his name. Elma was standing next to Ray. She shook her head in disgust, her arms crossed over her mid-section as she glared at me. Ray couldn’t look at me either, and I realized I’d been betrayed by the two young men I was trying to help. My eyes scanned Sofie as I drew closer to her, but Malik tugged her back, bracing himself between her and me.
“You better get the f*ck out of my way before I send you back to the streets where I found you, in a body bag,” I roared.
“Cain,” Sofie snapped behind Malik. Another henchman of my father’s had come to capture her. “Cain, you don’t mean that,” she bit, her voice hysterical as she whimpered against the grasp of the man holding her.
“Let her go,” I hissed. “If you’ve bruised her, it’s the last mark you’ll ever make,” I vowed. Sofie continued to struggle but this understudy of my father held her firm. What I didn’t understand is how Malik could stand between us like a barricade.
“Move!” I roared, raising my arm for the fight I was prepared to start if he didn’t stop blocking me from my wife.
“I can’t let you do this,” Malik muttered under his breath. “He threatened, no promised, to kill her.” Malik stepped to his right as I dodged left. He broke left when I tried to go right. He ducked when I struck. Sofie screamed. Looking around the human shield, I followed the line of her eye to see a bloodied Abel being removed from another vehicle I hadn’t heard approach.
One eye swollen, his lip puffed, and his nose crusted with blood, Abel had already put up a fight to prevent being here. Elma yelled his name, but when she attempted to run to him, he flinched and she was stilled by a firm grasp from Ray. Something wasn’t right in this set-up. Two of my own men had gone behind my back. In a tug of war between betrayal and protection, I couldn’t decipher what was happening.
Abel staggered toward me, his body lowering, preparing his stance without warning, without provocation.
“What’s going on?” I blinked, as I tried to take in the markings on his face before finally focusing on my father. “What the f*ck is your plan here?” I barked at the old man, who stood tall, almost giddy with a gleam in his eye as his attention flicked between my brother and me.
“You refused the fight.” His sinister lips curled, while his focus never left my brother’s. “The lights. The cameras. The money,” his voice rolled seductively over the one thing most important to him, after fame. “So I’ve brought the fight to you. We’re going back to your roots. Where it all began,” Atom Callahan said slowly, as if his words were to impress upon us a lesson of some type.
My mind flashed back again. My first fight. After I fought my father, and he claimed I was a man, he drove me himself to what I thought was an abandoned desert area near Las Vegas. There, in the cold night air, I met my first opponent other than my father. A man hardly older than a kid stood across from me, much the same way Abel stood in anticipation. His face was puffy; the result of previous fights on a different night. His nostrils flared like an aggravated bull.
“What’s this?” I’d asked my father, innocently back then. My misconception wrongly believing it was a rare night out between father and son. I was suspicious, but hope overruled.
“Your first real fight,” he gloated, staring at the young man with a look of nostalgia. He sighed deeply, patted my shoulder roughly, and pushed me forward, announcing my name.
“Cain Callahan, Cobra, here to kick your ass, son,” he threatened gleefully at the college boy. He handed over a hundred-dollar bill to some scruffy looking older gentlemen collecting money.