Prologue
LYING ON MY BACK, my eyes scan the flawless, bright white ceiling. Not a single mark or an uneven paint stroke is visible.
Impossible.
Perfection is a fabricated expectation in life. All our souls are tainted and eventually our sins slip through the cracks, exposing the truth.
We’re all flawed, but some of us can hide it better than the rest… just like the ceiling above me.
A warmth circles around me and sticks to my skin. My body’s numb to every sensation, but the feeling of my own blood saturating my clothes. My long, thick black hair is fanned out around my head, absorbing the liquid.
My body is rendered immobile and my vocal cords are paralyzed. I’ve been silenced and made a prisoner within my own skin.
The sound of my heart pumping leaves a whooshing tune ringing in my ears. With every passing moment, it’s becoming weaker and I’m slowly sinking deeper into myself and farther away from here.
I’m bleeding out.
I’ve witnessed death before, but I never imagined my own. I knew one day it would come to this and it’s a miracle that it took this long.
This isn’t the first time that Jasper laid his hands on me, but it is certainly going to be the last. We’re edging past the point of no return and he’s got his foot pressing the pedal to the metal.
Smiling to myself, I chuckle inwardly, feeling it in my chest. It’s all quite ironic. I’m lying here on the floor, bleeding out at the hands of a cardiothoracic surgeon. He saves lives, but not mine.
Mine, he decided he would take.
It was never a decision for him to make.
♦♦♦
There’s movement throughout the room, but it’s too fast for my sluggish eyes to follow. There’s a shift in the air and I don’t need to see him to know he’s here.
Axel.
He saved me and he brought me back to life. He showed me how it feels to truly be loved.
He did everything he could for me and now he’s going to have to let me go.
He was the love of my life and now the love of my death.
Wherever I go from here, I’ll carry a piece of him with me.
Axel is everywhere, filling the room and my senses. His smell and the sound of his voice, it’s as if I can feel him without touching him. His presence alone consumes me.
He keeps my head above the water, just as I begin to go under.
The weight and the pressure vanish into thin air and suddenly, I’m no longer sinking. I’m caught in a dreamlike state, where none of this feels real.
I’m weightless and it’s relieving, it’s comforting. I’m floating, suspended in the air, and there’s no coming down from here.
The warmth surrounding me on the floor, seeps inside and warms my soul. My sins are free, and it soothes over the cracks in my façade.
Only in the moments of our death are we flawless.
♦♦♦
A loud bang rings through the air and penetrates my eardrums. The lights grow dim and I’m no longer floating.
I’m not sinking.
I’m plummeting downward, spiraling out of control with no end in sight.
Like the flip of a light switch, everything goes black and everything becomes nothing.
Chapter One
Axel
DROPLETS OF BLOOD spray across my face as my fist connects with the side of his jaw. His mouth falls open as his head jerks away from me and toward the crowd surrounding us. He stumbles backward, barely catching himself and I’m barely a step behind him, cocking my arm back. Watching me from the corner of his eye, he sees me coming for him.
And I anticipate his actions.
He throws an uncoordinated punch and I stand firm. I don’t duck, I take it. I let him get that one hit, but for my own selfish reasons. He gets a cheap shot in, splitting my bottom lip open on my teeth. Running my tongue over my lip, I taste the blood and a grin slowly creeps onto my face as I step back into his space. With one final blow to the side of his head, my opponent falls to the ground with a loud thud.
Dressed in their designer suits and elegant dresses, the crowd outside of the ring cheer. They’re all colorblind, to every color except green. It’s easy to forget how illegal this is until you see tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars being handed back and forth between the onlookers.
Illegal street fighting was all that I had in life. I learned how to fight at a young age, and it became a vital part of survival.
I was a fire station drop off baby. Whoever my mother was decided she didn’t want me and dropped me off, still covered in her blood. I never knew her or any blood relatives. And if they were out there somewhere, they never came looking for me.
As an infant, I was thrown straight into the system. Most couples that are trying to adopt want a baby. Babies come with nothing but biological flaws. They’re still innocent and pure, untouched by the toxic world they were born into. New parents can form and shape them however they want.
Biologically, I was flawed, and I never fit into the mold of the perfect son that every parent wanted. The family that took me in never adopted me. They gave up on me the moment that their older son had to get stitches because of me. They saw me bash him in the head with a glass vase, but what they didn’t see was the torture he’d been putting me through since I was an infant.
He constantly tormented me, and I finally stood up for myself. At the ripe age of four years old, I landed on my ass, back in the system.
After them, I bounced to and from houses, families and school districts all with the reputation of being a shithead kid. One with an attitude and an anger problem.
They weren’t entirely wrong, so I went with it. If they were going to give me that label, then I was going to live up to their expectations. And when I was thrown into the shittiest group homes in Miami, I used that to my advantage.
The group home taught me everything I needed to know. I grew up in the gutter of Miami and I learned quickly that the street mentality isn’t like the rest of the world. That’s where I learned what I needed to survive, to make it to the top.
And I did.
Staying on top is harder than getting there. I took one misstep in that ring and it was game over… I lost everything.
I was one of the top illegal fighters in the country and I ended up in a coma because of a brain injury.
Flexing my hand, I make a fist and feel the nerves light up through my fingers.
A wonderful side effect of surviving a deadly blow to the head.
As soon as I was cleared by the doctor, I got back in the ring and I’ve been steadily making my way back up the food chain. Society doesn’t accept the moral code and ethics that I live by, so I stay in the shadows until it’s time to fight.
Now, I’m back in the gutter, but maybe it’s where I belong. This city made me who I am today.
Miami is a breeding ground for the vicious monsters that prowl the streets late at night. It’s the city where criminals are born, but they hide in the shadows when the sun rises across the horizon.
They aren’t the ones to be feared though, not when the daylight hides the vilest creatures of them all. They are the criminals that don’t get caught and they’re a whole different animal.
♦♦♦