The ring at the Devil’s Mercy was smaller than a modern boxing ring and marked off with coarse, fraying ropes that whispered of another time.
“You shouldn’t stay for this,” Jameson told Avery as he clocked the way the first two fighters climbed up onto the platform: bare-chested, no shoes, no gloves.
“On the contrary.” Rohan appeared beside them, dressed in black. The tuxedo should have looked formal, but he wore no tie, and the first four buttons on his shirt were undone. “She should stay.” His dark eyes met Avery’s. “Place a bet or two.”
“Wouldn’t I be wagering against the house?” Avery asked. Tonight was the third night, and she still had nearly two hundred thousand pounds to lose on the tables, per their deal.
“Consider your fee paid in full.” Rohan smiled, his expression far too relaxed for Jameson’s liking. “The third night was really more of an insurance policy on my part.”
In other words: Whatever fish the Factotum had been after had already taken the bait. Paid the levy, Jameson thought, the words snaking their way through his brain. Joined the club.
And now, Rohan’s concentration was elsewhere. On the Game.
The Devil’s Mercy was even more crowded tonight than it had been the night before, as if the entire membership had turned out—men as old as their nineties and as young as their twenties, a few women but not many.
“Who should she bet on?” Jameson threw out the question to draw Rohan’s attention away from Avery.
The Factotum turned toward the ring and the men inside it. “Can’t you tell?” The two were evenly matched in size but moved differently. “I’ll give you a hint: The one with the lighter step is one of our house fighters.”
With those words, Rohan strode toward the ring, the crowd parting for him like magic. Rohan hopped up onto the platform but stayed outside the ropes. “You have two minutes to finish placing your bets,” he announced. A trick of the space—or his voice—made the words seem like they were coming at Jameson from all sides.
He tracked Rohan’s progression as the Factotum walked the outside edge of the ropes. You never lose your balance, do you? That was the impression that Jameson got, that Rohan would have moved with the same liquid grace across the edge of a skyscraper.
“For those who are joining us tonight for the first time or after a long absence,” Rohan said with a flourish, “a reminder of the rules. Matches consist of an indeterminate number of rounds. A round ends when one of our fighters hits the floor.” A cheer went up. “The match ends,” Rohan continued, “when the person who hits the floor doesn’t get up.”
In other words, Jameson thought, his focus intense, his heart rate accelerating, the only ways for a match to end are for a fighter to yield or be knocked unconscious.
“No gloves.” Rohan smiled again. A warning smile. “No rings. No weapons of any kind. No mercy.”
The crowd echoed the words back at the Factotum. “No mercy!”
Rohan turned to the fighters in the ring. “As ever, if your face shows evidence of the fight, you’ll be expected to find a way to recover discreetly. If you are unable to do so, the Mercy will be happy to provide assistance.”
That sounded less like an offer than a threat.
Rohan jumped backward, landing on the floor below. “You may begin.” The first fight went three rounds, the second only one. The third match
—between two house fighters—lasted the longest. Jameson ignored the bloodshed, the roar of the crowd, the raw brutality of the fighters and the mercenary glints in their eyes. He focused instead on the blank spaces.
The moves the fighters didn’t make. The openings they left.
The areas in the ring and around their bodies untouched by the blur of motion, by elbows and fists, feet and knees and heads.
The fractions of time that passed between moves.
Weaknesses—and the ways they compensated for them.
“You don’t have to do this,” Avery said beside him, her words lost to the noise of the crowd for everyone but him.
“On the contrary…” Jameson stole Rohan’s turn of phrase. “I do. But you don’t have to watch, Heiress.”
She looked at him with one of those uniquely Avery expressions that made it hard for Jameson to remember life before her. “I’m not just watching, Hawthorne. I’ll be placing a wager.”
On him. She was betting on him.
In the ring, one of the two house fighters went down and didn’t get up.
The fresher of the two raised a fist in the air. Victory.
Rohan jumped back up to the edge of the ring. “We have a winner.” The crowd roared its approval. “Do we have a challenger?”
Jameson raised his own fist into the air. Silence fell as the rich and the powerful turned to stare at him.
Jameson smirked a very Hawthorne smirk. “I’ll give it a whirl.”
