Alpha Fighter - Part Two Read online

  Alpha Fighter

  Part Two

  Ava Ashley

  Alpha Fighter - Part Two

  Copyright © 2014 Ava Ashley

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locations is entirely coincidental.

  This book is intended for mature adults only.

  To contact Ava:

  Email: [email protected]

  Website: www.avaashley.com

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/authoravaashley

  Thank you for purchasing Alpha Fighter by Ava Ashley. To be emailed as soon as Ava has a new book out please join her MAILING LIST

  Disclaimer:

  This book is not suitable for younger readers. There is strong language, adult situations, and some violence.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Thank You

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  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Savannah

  “I’ll take pancakes with two eggs, sunny side up, and a cold mocha latte with one pump of chocolate syrup, not two. I will send it back if there are two! And don’t think I can’t tell. I can totally always tell if there are two. But don’t go giving me a wimpy short pump, either. I want one full pump. If it tastes like coffee, not mocha, it’s going back! And I’d love nine ice cubes—no, eight—and a bendy straw.” The potbellied man closes his menu and hands it to me. “That’s all.”

  “Yes, sir. Of course, sir,” I say. “One pump, no more and no less.” I’m turning to go as he raises his pointer finger.

  “Oh, and leave out the onions on the fried eggs, unless they’re green onions, got it?” He looks at me expectantly.

  “Yes, sir,” I say.

  “I hope so,” he grumbles. “Or I’ll send it back!”

  “Waitress!” a woman at the next table over calls out to me. “We need drink refills over here. We’re waaaaiiiiiiiiiiting!”

  I rush to get their refills and put in the picky man’s order, who is, unfortunately a three-meals-a-day regular, before I forget. We’re where he gets his big belly from, but he’s as picky an eater as an anorexic teenager and never orders the same thing twice. The worst part is that he does send things back, just as he threatens, and every single menu item has to be modified to his tastes, because nothing is just right the way it is. One day, he wants a mocha latte with one chocolate pump, one day it’s with three. One day he wants extra crispy bacon, one day it has to be soft. One day onions are the most appalling thing and he starts retching if there is sign of one anywhere near his food, another day he wants onions on everything, including his dessert.

  And he never tips. It’s always the diners who are the biggest pains to serve that either don’t tip or just round up to the dollar and act like they’re being incredibly generous. My shifts here range from eight to thirteen hours, because they’re chronically short-staffed and the little staff they have are constantly calling out ‘sick.’ I never call out and I always take the extra shifts, even when I’ve just gotten off from the parlor hours earlier and know it will mean only having three hours of sleep again.

  I need the money and, just as much as I need the money to stay over water financially, I need the distraction to not fall into the treacherous trap of thinking of Cooper. Every free moment that I have that isn’t spent dealing with troublesome diners and the perverted middle-aged manager, working at the tattoo parlor, or catching some much-needed deep sleep—the kind that’s more like temporary death than sleep, because of the extreme exhaustion—is spent thinking about Cooper. It hurts like a thousand daggers in my heart, so I do all that I can to get those moments to as close to zero as possible.

  But I can’t avoid them entirely. I have to eat, and during those breaks, Cooper’s face is all that I see. I have to bathe, and while I’m standing in the shower, Cooper’s hands on my body are all that I can feel. I physically and emotionally ache for him with a longing unlike anything I have ever experienced before.

  I pick up the pitcher of water in one hand and grab three bottles of soda by their necks in the other. Thinking about impossibilities won’t pay the bills, won’t get me closer to my dreams, and won’t help me move on.

  Oh, God, what I would give to be able to move on. But I can’t. I just can’t. I wish I had Cooper, right here by my side.

  Chapter Two

  Cooper

  After that night, I am looking worse than I have since some of my first bad fights back in middle school, before I learned how to block my opponents properly. My lip is busted, my eye is swollen under a big black bruise, I have random pound marks and scars all over, including a nasty-looking gash right above my ear. But years of getting pounded on, even if it was not nearly as much as the guys going against me got pounded on, have trained my body to be resilient and I bounce back quick. I nurse my injuries like a bad hangover the next morning, but by midday I’m feeling better and even starting to look less banged up.

  I should be at the ring. In the middle of tournament season isn’t exactly the time for a rest day and Vlad is appropriately pissed when I am a no-show at the gym, but I don’t answer my phone when it starts ringing off the hook with annoyed, then concerned, then flat-out livid calls from Vlad. Eventually, my inbox is full, so that quiets things for a while. It’s a good thing, too, because I need to focus. I spend all day on my computer, using all of my ex-SEAL intelligence skills to hunt down clues that will lead me to Savannah.

  But skills alone aren’t enough to get into the real business of finding a smart woman who doesn’t want to be found. No, I need equipment, or rather elite, military-grade software, for that—and I know exactly where to find it.

  Vlad looks ready to spit fire when I show up at the gym. Then he takes in how banged up I look and looks even madder.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you, man?” Vlad yells, “You’ve gone absolutely off your rocker—first throwing a tournament match, then not showing up to training, then daring to show your face here looking like that. What, you blew off your big fight so that you could go get yourself pounded at a bar instead? Man, I would expect that from some of the juice heads the other guys are working from, but not from you. I know you, man, and this just isn’t you! Are you on crack? Be straight with me, are you on crack?�
�

  He stares me down hard.

  “No, man,” I say. “And I know it looks bad, and I know I’m risking my career here, but it’s important. I don’t have time to explain, but if you’re my friend and if you trust me, then I need your help right now.” Vlad has an untraceable computer—my old untraceable computer from my Navy SEAL days, with scores of heavy-duty software downloaded on it. The SEALs don’t know I still have it. It was supposedly lost on mission, but I was bitter and was going to keep something from my days as a SEAL when they said I couldn’t go back. When I got back here, sorted myself out, and came back to myself, I didn’t want it anymore. Vlad likes to do some online gambling, which isn’t exactly above-board in our state, so I let him have the computer as thanks for all he did for me.

  But now I need the computer. I need the incredibly powerful gigabytes downloaded onto its hard drive.

  “Man, I need the computer,” I said.

  “What are you doing?” Now Vlad doesn’t look angry anymore, just troubled. “Dude, I know I’m not Mr. Legal or anything, but what are you getting involved in here? Are you sure it’s worth it? I don’t want to see you locked up. You’re too good for that.”

  “I’m sure,” I say, resolutely. I am. “I don’t have time to explain, but I need it. Now.”

  Vlad and I lock eyes for a moment. Then he sighs.

  “Just be careful, man,” he says. “I don’t want to see you get in over your head. This has to do with Savannah, doesn’t it?” I don’t answer and he just shakes his head and sighs again. “I’ll drive home for it now and bring it by your place immediately.

  “Thanks, man,” I say.

  True to his word, Vlad has the computer to me in less than thirty minutes. As soon as I get my hands on it, I get straight to work. First, I hack into her personal records on a federal site, securing my computer first so that the FBI or CIA doesn’t come knocking down my door. She doesn’t have any active credit cards or debit cards that have been used in the last week, or even the last few months, so that’s little help. So I think.

  What could lead me to the girl? What leaves tracks for a woman who travels so light and inconspicuously that all she has is a backpack and the clothes on her back?

  Money. Or rather, the lack thereof. I remember the necklace Savannah always wore, a beautiful gold locket that she told me, in a moment of unguarded openness on one of our jogs with the dog, was a gift from her mother. She clammed up right after that and wouldn’t say anything more about the necklace or her mother after that, but I could tell that the necklace was important to her.

  I could also tell that the necklace was valuable, however, from the way the gold gleamed. That was real high quality gold that definitely wasn’t pyrite or some metal mix. And knowing Savannah as the practical girl that she was, even something so sentimental would eventually be sacrificed to practicality in her quest for self-sufficiency in the face of extreme adversity.

  It takes thirteen uninterrupted hours of searching the internet using all possible combination of search terms, and sifting through the results the software spits out at me of items that match my description of the locket and the appropriate time window for listing. I feel like my eyes are going to bleed before I hit gold.

  But there it is, on the online listing for a Harlem pawnshop called Uncle Johnny’s Treasures and Trinkets. It’s Savannah’s necklace, sure as can be.

  It’s early in the next morning and I haven’t slept a wink, and only eaten at my computer, but finding the listing makes me feel energized like I slept ten hours on a bed of feathers and fluff. I found my girl.

  Bingo.

  Chapter Three

  Savannah

  I’ve gotten to a place where the days are all starting to run into each other. Sure, I still miss Cooper so badly that it hurts whenever I think of him, which is still every single moment that I’m not actively doing something else, but I’m starting to come to terms with that as a fact of life. I will always pine for what I once had, all too briefly, but at least have the memories.

  Right?

  Luckily, I’m run so ragged between picking up countless extra shifts at the diner, fending off the advances of my handsy boss, and somehow managing to fit in some time at the tattoo parlor between all of that, that I easily fall into a coma-like slumber every night. I frown. Speaking of the tattoo parlor, I’m exasperated with where it’s going. While the hours at the diner are getting piled on me, my hours at the tattoo parlor keep getting cut back even further. It’s not just me, either, but all of us. There’s a ritzier parlor just a block-and-a-half over and we’re losing out sorely on business to them, because we don’t have curb appeal. Honestly, the situation seems pretty desperate. If we don’t get lucky and have things turn around, and soon, we’ll be shut down before we know what hit us.

  Great. So not only did I lose the man of my dreams, I lost my good path towards the career of my dreams.

  Chin up, Savannah! I try giving myself a little pep talk. Try, try, and try again! If this parlor gets shut down, I’ll just have to find a job at another parlor. Someone is bound to have a chair open for me, or I will convince them to open one up. There is no failure until you fail to try, as Papa always said, and if there is one thing that I am definitely not going to do, I am definitely not going to give—

  I’m so lost in my thoughts, trudging up the stairs to my apartment, that I walk straight into something big and hard that’s blocking the opening of the staircase to my floor. If it didn’t reach out to catch me in its—or rather, his—big, strong, muscular arms, I would have tumbled right back down all the stairs.

  “Cooper?” I don’t believe my eyes. This must be a city smog-induced mirage or an exhaustion-inspired hallucination. “How did you find me?”

  And then I take in what he looks like. I take in the busted lip, the bruises, the fresh scar peeking out under the bottom of his hair at the nape of his neck, and the black eye. My chest seizes up and I can’t breathe. On the one hand, I can’t deny that seeing Cooper fills me with the kind of joy I haven’t felt since I got on that bus to NYC. But seeing him like this, all banged up, just realizes my fears. They must have gotten to him—Nate or Daddy. These aren’t injuries from a fight. I’ve seen Cooper fight and he isn’t Cooper “Veni Vidi Vici” Quin for nothing. He dominates in the ring and he comes out looking fine, with his opponents looking like how he does now.

  No, this had to have been a stacked fight. This had to have been multiple guys on Cooper, maybe even taking him unaware. And this time he came out alive and only relatively superficially injured, not seriously harmed, but that’s probably because they didn’t find me with him and didn’t know the full extent of what happened between us. Next time, he might not be so lucky.

  I start bawling. “Why? Why did you come after me?”

  “Because I want you,” Cooper says, holding up my locket. “Because I want you, only you, and you’re mine. I care about you, pretty girl, and you can run to the ends of the world, but there’s nothing you can do that can make me not find you and come to you—because I know you care about me, too. Deny it and I’ll go, but I know you can’t.” He takes me in his arms, stilling my body as it shakes with tears, until I calm down a bit.

  And he’s right. I can’t. Standing here, in his big, strong arms, I realize what I would not allow myself to realize. The feelings I thought I had managed to put a numbing layer of disengagement around are just as real as ever. And that is not going to change.

  “I...” I gaze up at this beautiful man looking adoringly and protectively down at me, “I want you, too. But Cooper, your face—they hurt you!”

  “If I have you, I have no pain,” Cooper says. Then he literally sweeps me off of my feet, lifting me into the air. I can’t help but give in for a moment and do what I’ve been wanting to since I left. I wrap my arms around his neck and kiss him deeply and passionately. When he finally puts me back down, he slips the locket from my mother over my head. With it back, I finally feel whole again. Bu
t I’m standing here in the arms of the man whom I love and I can’t be at peace with that, much less as delighted as I should be, because he got hurt and it is all my fault. And if I stay with him, it is only a matter of time until it happens again. And the next time they come for him, he may not be as lucky.

  The tears start streaming down my face anew. “Cooper, I care about you,” I say. “That is why I left you. I am no good for you. You don’t know everything about me and this, this—” I gesture at his bruises. “This is going to keep happening if you’re with me. I’m not worth it. You don’t know who I am.”

  “You are worth it and I know just who you are, Savannah Santos,” he says. “And anything I don’t know, you can tell me. But it won’t change how I feel about you. Nothing can change the fact that I care about you more than anyone else. So I don’t care if you are in some trouble. I want you and I will help you and protect you. There is nothing, and I mean nothing, that could ever change my mind. I am not going to leave you, Savannah, not now and not ever.”

  I look up at him, disbelievingly. He knows everything? And he’s standing here, saying all this to me, anyway? I am overwhelmed with emotion. I really don’t even know what I’m feeling at this point. Cooper knows who I am, but he wants me anyway. Cooper really, truly cares about me. And I care about him, too, but because I care about him so much, can I really allow him to take the risk of being with me? Is it even my choice to allow him to be with me or not?

  “Which apartment is yours?” Cooper asks, cutting right through my thoughts. “Pack up your things. You’re coming with me. There’s no more running away.”

  Somehow I obey. I can’t really understand it myself, but when I am feeling so confused and conflicted, it just feels natural to do as he says. Especially since what Cooper is saying to me is exactly everything I have ever wanted. I can barely believe that this is really happening, but it is. So I do as I am told. I lead Cooper to my apartment and he sits patiently on my bed, reaching out a hand to touch me whenever I am within his reach, and pack up my sparse belongings quickly. Then I let him wrap an arm protectively around me and lead me out of the apartment a last, final time.