Player (A Secret Baby Sports Romance)(161)

5





Logan




Great, more secrets; just what I need. Pretty soon they’re going to bury me under all the secrets.

The fighting; fuck, I mean, I know why I do it. I also know why I don’t tell anyone about it; not even Hudson and Bryce, the two men who are my brothers in every sense of the word but who we were born to. That might actually be the worst part of all of it; that with everything I’ve seen and been through with these brothers of mine, I still can’t tell them. I mean part of it is to protect them, but I know the other part of it is because of who I am. I’m a fighter, and when you’re on the ropes, you don’t cower and call your friends.

You fucking hit back.



“You’re not my father.”

His eyes narrow into slits, and he gets that wicked looking smile on his face. I’ve seen that smile before, and it’s usually the prelude to a storm.

“Dammit, boy!” My mother’s words are slurred as she staggers out from the kitchen, holding the coffee mug that hasn’t held anything but vodka and orange juice in it for as long as I can remember; “You treat your daddy with respect, you hear?”

I whirl towards her, my face contorted in as much rage as an eleven year old can possibly muster; “He’s NOT my dadd-”

It only takes half a second for me to realize what a fucking terrible mistake it was to turn my back on Rich like that; a mistake he only too readily hammers home with a sharp cuff to the back of my head that sends me sprawling across the floor.

And she laughs.

My goddamn mother is laughing, like seeing her son get slapped across the room by her drunk piece of shit boyfriend of the month is the funniest fucking thing she’s ever seen. Rich wheezes out a chuckle too, his gravel-tinged nicotine laugh ragged and joyless. Tears sting my eyes as I grab at the threadbare carpet, but I’m grinding my teeth together, just sitting there on my hands and knees listening to them just laugh their drunk ass off at me, and something inside me just snaps.

I’m yelling as I surge up from the floor and throw myself bodily, head-first into Rich. I’m windmilling my fists as hard as I can at his stomach and his balls, just trying to HURT him in any way someone my size can to someone that size. I’d like to think I get a good few licks in, but then he’s got me by the shirt collar and hauling me back at arm’s length.

“By God, you’re gonna learn to respect me, boy!” He roars at me, the scent of beer wafting over my face.

“No!” I yell, willing myself not to cry; don’t cry.

My mother is shrieking in the background; “Boy, you respect your daddy now, ya hea-”

“He’s NOT my daddy!” I scream, and then I do the only other thing I know how to do in that moment.

I haul back and spit right in Rich’s face.

And it’s the last thing I recall before he hauls back with his fist and sends it crashing into my face, and then it all goes black.

It was later that we went through hell, spit in the devil’s eye, and somehow came back from that. None of it makes sense, because in a just and fair world, we’d have been dead a long time ago. But somehow, we’ve gone from the dark hole on the outskirts of basic humanity to the men we are today; and I don’t know if I believe in any sort of higher power, but that shit just doesn’t make sense.

When we came back from all that - when the Old Man rescued us that is - we were all broken; broken in every sense of the word. Three years of running will do that; three years after running off from the duties and orders none of us could bring ourselves to execute ever again. I can look back on that and wonder about what-ifs all I want, but I know in my heart that none of us could have kept going; not after the shit we saw back in Afghanistan. There were three years of forcibly losing every sense of who we were as men, working as mercenaries to the highest bidder in the combat zones of Africa, and losing ourselves in drink, drugs, and women, probably in that order. Hudson always liked to say that Bryce was the worst of us back then, but his demons were just the most visible; needles will do that. Me, I like to drink as much as the next guy, but it’s in Ghana that I learned to fight. Sure, I’d hit people before, but in that mercenary camp, I learned how to fucking fight; and that became my drug.

And that’s how he found us; washed out, beaten up, drunk, and clawing at the last shreds of what made us men, and somehow, he saw promise in us. Don’t ask me how.

So now that we’re whole new men, worth more than we’d ever even dreamed we’d be and running William’s company after his death, why the underground fights? Goddamn secrets, that’s why. Because something followed us back from that hell. Someone, I should say, with a knowledge of a truth that I thought we’d buried back in the jungle; someone with a knowledge about who we really are.