Paradise Found: Cain (Paradise Stories Book 2) (35 page)

“See. A star. Make a wish, I guess.” I wasn’t certain what the significance of the star in the apple meant.

Later that night, I was studying on his bed.
Our bed
, I had to keep reminding myself. Cain said he had a phone call to make, and the heated discussion coming from his office lead me to believe it would be a while. He entered our room with something tucked behind his back. Kneeling on the bed, he crawled to me. My books began to jumble and one tumbled off the duvet. I ignored them as he slinked toward me, that predatory look on his face, that hypnotizing gleam to his eyes. He presented me an apple.

“I’ve made my wish.”

My squinted eyes questioned him, but the slow curl of his sexy lips let me know that he was flirting with me. The apple was precut in half, sideways as he called it, and I opened it. Inside the apple, a star shone even brighter as surrounding it was my engagement ring.

“I want you to be my wife. In private. In public. No more pretending. No more secrets. No more hiding. This is my wish.”

I didn’t move. I continued to hold each half of the apple in my hands, staring down at that gorgeous solitaire that had been on my finger for only a short time then dangled from my neck for a month. His father had taken it.

“How did you get it back?” I whispered.

“It’s mine. I always find what’s mine.” His eyes gleamed teasing me. “You didn’t answer my question.”

I smiled sheepishly, playfully responding. “I don’t recall hearing one asked.”

“Sofie, I think this is like the fourth time I’ve asked. Be my wife. Stay my wife. Just let the world know you’re mine by wearing that rock. I found you and I don’t intend to lose you again.”

I laughed despite his sincerity.

“I don’t want to fight,” he added.

“We weren’t…” His fingers covered my mouth.

“We weren’t, you’re right, but you said some things that sucker punched. The most important thing from what you said is I love you. That’s all that matters to me. I love you. I want you to love me.”

“I do,” I blurted.

“Well, I wish I remembered you saying those two words the first time, but I intend to hear them again. A real wedding. A real wedding brunch. An actual honeymoon.”

My arms slipped around his neck and my mouth crashed to his. Books scattered off the bed as we shifted to wrap around one another. I fumbled with the apple behind him until I released it in our rolling together. He jerked back from me and I produced my hand to show the diamond was where it belonged: on my ring finger. Both our wishes were coming true.

Although Abel had agreed to fight, Ava still argued that she had a way out for us, but she refused to explain her plan. I didn’t have faith in her.  There was something about her that seemed vaguely familiar in her take-charge attitude and her severe looks, but I couldn’t place the connection. Abel seemed to trust her implicitly, especially since she had taken him on as her protégé. I, on the other hand, didn’t have to believe a word she said, and I didn’t.

Additionally, Sofie was pretty adamant that she did not want me to fight my brother. I thought about what she said. How I had done so much for my siblings, and I tried to justify that Abel could do this one thing for me, but Sofie wasn’t buying into my argument. She was persuasive in her own right against my fighting for her. The simple threat of her holding out on me wasn’t taken seriously by me, as I quietly reminded her what she’d miss if she did keep her body from me. But something told me there was an undertone to her teasing that was rather serious. She wasn’t going to let this fight occur.

I was stalling from the fight in my own right. I refused the mega million-dollar campaign, the overexposed promotion plan, and the extra-large arena proposed for, what I considered, another fiasco fight of the century. I didn’t wish to meet Abel in the cage again. He wouldn’t win against me. My rage wouldn’t be contained a second time, even though he was my brother. Sofie was on the line. The strength it took the first time to control the need to punch and kick was unparalleled to anything I’d done before. No workout, no training session, no fight prepared me for the composure I’d need to
not
beat the ever-loving-fuck out of my own brother. Instead, I was fighting my father every step of the way.

That’s when he showed up at Eden2. There was no greater omen than his sudden presence in my gym.

“So this is what you’ve been working on?” he scoffed, slowly twisting in a circle to assess my warehouse converted to a gym space. His eyes weren’t appraising. His expression smug. His jaw clenched in concentration.

“You’re wasting your money and talent in the middle of nowhere,” he stated, narrowing his eyes at me. Those cold eyes that matched mine, and yet, recently didn’t. I hoped to God above, I didn’t have the evil in me that Atom Callahan had in him.

His facial expression slowly changed. A twitch came to the corner of his mouth, and slowly his lips curved into a crooked smile. He shook his head as if I’d said something and he was agreeing. My blood grew cold within me. He was up to something. If I knew nothing else of my father, it was that he never smiled unless he had a plan, and typically that plan involved something so asinine, so convoluted, you could only predict that it was unpredictable. When he asked the strangest of requests, come to Carrie’s with him, I should have known better, but I didn’t refuse. Foolish hope sprang, that if we could go someplace neutral, we could talk like reasonable adults.

I followed him willingly to his car, where a driver awaited him. Entering the vehicle, it occurred to me that my gym had been unreasonably quiet. Malik and Ray were normally hovering about, but I hadn’t seen either of them for hours. We travelled off the dusty gravel drive onto the main industrial street in this warehouse district, and then turned onto the highway heading east, away from town. Instantly, I recognized we were headed in the opposite direction of Carrie’s. My heart slowed, as I begrudgingly realized I’d made a grave mistake. There was something very wrong about this silent drive.

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 fuck 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 fuck 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.

“You know what to do,” he stated, jostling my shoulder a little, then pushing me further toward the youthful man. “Make me proud.”

His face. It was burned in my memory as one of the happiest expressions I’d ever seen my father wear. I won that night. It was my first taste of the fight.

Shaking my head to rid the flashback, I realized this would be my final supper. No matter who won tonight, we all lost.

Abel staggered forward, his head lolling slightly to the side before he snapped it upward. I approached him with the frazzled concern I felt for everyone at the moment. For him, for Elma, for Sofie.

“What happened?” I bit under my breath, reaching out for Abel, who flinched back at the attempt to touch him.

“He’s going to kill one or the other of them,” Abel warned me, lowering his head and hunching his body again. “Women and children first,” he muttered, and the metaphor was not lost on me. My brother was suddenly a predator, ready to fight at all costs, despite the obvious appearance of his face and the imbalance of his body. I crouched as well, to bring us to an even stance, in hopes we could briefly talk without being overheard.

“What did he do?” I hissed, my eyes shifting sideways to imply my father.

“Not him,” Abel whispered. “He’d never touch me. He paid that traitor, Thor, to jump me at school.”

Theodore Thurston nicknamed himself Thor when he entered the underground near Preston University. The only details I ever bothered to know about him were that he came from money, a spoiled rich kid who cared for nothing. He was ready to sell out to Elma for a fight against me a few months ago. He wanted to raise his status outside the hidden depths of college cages, and his hope was a challenge with me would bring him fame.
Silly little boy
, I’d thought. He had no idea who he was pitting himself against. He was obviously strong, and Abel held his own, but the fight must have been something if Abel looked this bad.