“You’re kidding.” Alice stared first at him, then at Dinky. “Is he kidding? Forgive me, but Dinky Clouds sounds like me trying to describe weather to a toddler.”
“It’s what I answer to, but if you want, you can call me Shlomo. I won’t answer to it, but like I said, feel free. Are you sure I can’t get you to dance tonight, Loki?” he went on, turning his attention back to him. “People see you here, and the betting becomes a feeding frenzy.”
“Dance?” Alice glanced his way again, and the weight of it hit him like a full body blow. Wow. “You, uh… you dance?”
“When it comes to footwork, no one’s better than me.” She had the cutest tip to the end of her nose, he realized, letting his eyes play over her. Her thick raven hair had a tendency to curl at the ends and was a stark contrast to her porcelain paleness—pure Black Irish if there ever was one. “Do you like to dance?”
“I have no clue.”
His brows shot up. “You’ve never danced?”
“There were only two dances I ever went to as a kid—one in the ninth grade, where my date’s face slobbered into my flat-as-a-board chest the entire night, and my senior prom. The slobber was so much worse.”
“So you weren’t kidding. You really don’t know if you like to dance.”
“I know that I don’t like to be slobbered on. Is that why we’re here? To dance? Is this a rave?”
“Holy shit,” Dinky said, staring at her. “You don’t know? She doesn’t know?”
“Dinky is the ringmaster of this little get-together,” Loki said without answering, then watched her with narrowing eyes. “If you ever want the lowdown on underground fights going on in this city, Dinky’s your man.”
Alice’s midnight eyes widened. “Underground… fights?”
“We only have two rules here,” Dinky said, as if he thought Alice might want to sign up. “No weapons, and no killing, at least in The Pit. Not that we have an actual pit. The Pit is just a ring of spectators that have a profound love for bare-knuckled blood sports. But we call it The Pit.”
“Oh.” Her brows drew together as she took a moment to chew on that. “So, that other rule—that famous rule about no one talking about a fight club—is just Hollywood bullshit?”
“If people don’t talk about it, how the hell am I gonna make money? Tell your family, tell your friends and coworkers and even your priest or rabbi. Hell, if you’ve got an Amazon twin, bring her along and we’ll put the two of you in The Pit, maybe covered in oil. Think of the revenue you’d bring in.”
“Yeah, uh, think I’ll pass on that spank-the-monkey fantasy you’ve got going on there, Dink, but thanks anyway for the offer.”
Loki chuckled at Alice’s vaguely horrified expression before tightening his arm around her shoulders. “I’m taking her up to the opera box to avoid dealing with the fans, Dinky. Any objections?”
Dinky held up his hands. “Even if I did, you'd soon show me the error of my ways. Enjoy the show. Oh, and bet a lot of fuckin’ money, yeah? After all the cash you’ve made betting on yourself, I know you can afford it.”
“Betting. Fight club. Gravedigger.” Alice’s gaze was glued to the wall of people that ringed the well-lit fighting area as he steered her toward the southwest corner of the lot. “Opera box?”
“It’s what we call a shallow ramp that leads up to Lower Wacker. But it’s a great place to get a complete view of things, as long as you don’t mind sitting on a slant.”
“Okay.” That frown stayed in place as she turned her attention to the concrete ramp. “What about Gravedigger?”
“Everybody has to have a fight name.”
“It’s more than that. The kutte you were wearing earlier had patches on it—Gravediggers MC.”
“You don’t miss much, do you?” He paused briefly to clasp hands with a Chicago Bears football player who’d been in his tattoo booth a few days ago before they moved on, all the while turning a deaf ear to the people who called out his name. “My full name’s Loki Colgrave. Surname like that sounds a lot like cold grave, or so my grandpa thought when he was a young idiot looking for trouble. That was his nickname—Cold Grave—until he actually beat someone to death. Did ten years at the gray-bar hotel for that. When he finally got out, he was meaner and harder than ever. That was when he took the connections he’d made while he was inside and founded the Gravediggers MC. Back in the day, the name was accurate.”
“Damn.” She said it so faintly it was almost lost in the sound of the crowd. “And I thought my lineage was fucked up.”
“Is it?” He stopped them halfway up the ramp, then invited her to sit on the edge of it so they could watch The Pit from there. Obviously the evening’s action was in between bouts, with a seasoned crew tossing out sawdust to soak up whatever bodily fluid that had been spilled, then sweeping everything away for the next round. “What’s so screwed up about Alice Kathleen Halliday’s family?”
“Nothing that lots of therapy and the self-discipline of martial arts can’t fix. So you’re a part of the Gravediggers, then?” she went on, sitting down on the ramp’s edge without fuss and dangling those gorgeous long legs over the side. “Being a legacy and all that, I’m assuming you’ve got a high position, or whatever.”
He shook his head as he joined her, his thigh just brushing hers as she sat. “I quit the Gravediggers for good when the long arm of the law reached out and nabbed my old man.”
“For what?”
“The same damn thing his old man went in for.”
She gasped. “Wait. You’re saying your father also beat a man to death?”
He nodded and held up his own fists. “That’s the one thing my old man passed down to me that I can’t ignore. I’ve got a talent for violence.”
“I don’t know if that can actually be considered a talent.”
“It can in the Gravediggers world. It’s one of the reasons the brothers in the MC looked to me as well as my older brother to assume control once our old man went away. I even thought about doing it, for about a minute, anyway. But then I figured I’d wind up just like every other Colgrave Gravedigger—locked up in a cage because I’d become so rabid I no longer understood I couldn’t do whatever the fuck I wanted. So I walked away from the world I grew up in and looked for another world that was strong enough to fit me.”
“And you found this.” She turned and looked down at The Pit. Two men had entered the area ringed with people, and the screams for blood rose to a deafening pitch. “Wow. That’s some world.”
“You don’t like it?”
“It’s monstrous.”
“That makes sense. I’m a monstrous man. Anyone who finds their way here for the sole purpose of beating another human being into bloody pulp is monstrous. Try to keep that in mind as you watch,” he added, raising his voice over Dinky as the other man introduced the fighters to his avid audience. “See what people are truly like when they step into The Pit, Alice. In a very real and brutal way, it’s the most honest place on this earth.”