Untamed (A Bad Boy Secret Baby Romance)(17)

That’s the one thing keeping me from just wailing on him. I don’t know if he’s got his weapons today. If he does, it might be a short fight for me.

“You owe me,” he says. “Pay up, bitch.” He pulls out his gun from the front of his jeans. I tense up, but he puts it on the lid of the dumpster beside us.

“Don’t worry,” he tells me. “I ain’t a fucking coward. I’ll beat you with my fists. Like a man.”

Like a man. What the fuck does he know about being a man?

What the fuck do any of us know?

“I don’t owe you jack shit,” I tell him. “You want my money, you come and take it.”

It’s not much. It’s twenty-five bucks crumpled up in my back pocket. He’s not doing it for the money – he carries around thousands, an inch-thick wad of cash that he keeps in a gold money clip. The bills are dirty, though, crumpled, once clenched in the shaking fists of addicts on their way down before they make it to him.

He likes to take it out, wave it about. Some of the boys grovel at his feet for a handout.

I don’t blame them. We have nothing.

But I’ll never do it. I don’t fucking beg.

So it’s not money he wants from me. He wants me to bend. He wants me to break. He wants to stand over me and thump his chest and shout that he was the one to beat me when nobody else before him ever could.

He’s a bully. I’ve never backed down from bullies, and I’m not going to start now. As far as I’m concerned, the world could use less bullies.

“You better give me that fucking money,” he says. “You want to disrespect me? Like Lucas did?”

He’s talking about another boy from the home. Lucas disappeared after saying he was going to get Danny, going to fight back. Nobody ever found out what happened to him. That was two months ago.

Danny comes closer, and his two friends do as well. They’re surrounding me. It’s crazy, but I feel this thrill. It’s… fun. It’s like energy is being pumped into my body and I’m about to burst.

Down at the street, a limousine sidles past. It takes forever to cross the gap between the two walls of the dirty alley we stand in. Once it’s past, we hear it slow, then whine backward in reverse before stopping at the mouth to the alley.

The limo has tinted windows. We all stare at it for a moment. It’s an odd sight in this part of town, but some rich fuck in a suit isn’t going to bother with us nobodies.

I return my attention back to Danny, and he to me.

There’s a pause of time, the space of a blink, and then he moves. Time remains slow for me. I see his hand reaching behind his back.

I grab his arm, run forward so I’ve got it behind his body, and then wrap it around his back. I yank upward, slap his elbow, hear something pop, and he grabs his shoulder, grunting, and drops to the ground.

I spin with my arm outstretched, anticipating someone getting close to me from behind. My fist hits a nose, blood spurts, the boy cries and runs away.

Just one left. I drop into a natural stance, leading with my left. He tries to punch me, a wild, aimless haymaker, I slap the outside of his forearm with my palm, redirect the punch away from me across his own body.

He’s jailed by his own arm now, and his side is exposed. I thump him twice in the rib cage, hard hits, too. I feel the bone against my knuckles.

The boy coughs, tries to throw another crazy swing at me.

I duck it, kick his knee out, and then when he’s on the ground I pull his head up by his hair and hit him on the nose.

There are two places to hit somebody on the face if you want to stop them. One is the nose, the other the jaw. With the nose, you don’t even need to hit hard to send those nerve endings exploding, to send a man reeling. With the jaw it’s a little tougher, but if you hit hard enough, the brain shuts off. It’s lights-out to protect you from the pain.

I know what it feels like. It sucks. My jaw didn’t break or unhinge that time, but it throbbed for weeks. I came to with my shoes missing.

The boy on the ground grabs at his nose, scrambles to his feet, limps off, doesn’t look back at me once.

I approach Danny, reach into his back pocket and take out his knife. It’s thinner and lighter than I expected, more rectangular than I expected.

I open it up, unfold it carefully, expose a glistening and sharp blade. He obviously cleans it regularly.

“What were you going to do to me with your fists?” I growl, bending down onto one knee, holding the blade in front of his face.

“No!” Danny cries, trying to scramble away.

I put my heel on the small of his back, and press down until he goes still.

“Don’t move anymore,” I warn.

“No, please!”