SICK HEART by Huss, JA (non fiction books to read .TXT) 📕

been fair, if you take out the fact that he’s been trying to get me killed in fights since I was five.

Wow. That’s a really fucked-up thought that requires some serious self-reflection, but not now. Some day—some far, far day in the future—I will sort out all these feelings. But not now. I’ve been surviving on instinct my whole life, and even though we’re close, we’re not out yet. All the ways in which this life of mine is pathological can be thought about later.

I would not say I trust Udulf, but the few times he’s given me his word on something, he’s always followed through.

And anyway, letting us go isn’t some favor. It was a transaction. I paid nearly twenty million dollars in collective purse money to buy our freedom.

This cost us dearly over the years. We might be the number one camp in all of Ring of Fire, but we’re also the poorest. Because eighty percent of the winnings I was allowed to keep went to buying our freedom.

We scrape by. Barely. And there is a part of me that suspects that Udulf respects us for this.

We earned our freedom and he knows it.

Rainer bumps my shoulder. “Come have a drink with me.” Then he pushes off the wall and heads downstairs.

I take one last look at Anya, then follow him.

We throw our dishes into the sink and Rainer grabs the bottle of Lectra we’ve been nursing since they arrived a month ago. It’s the same bottle I opened for Anya.

Back out on the training platform Rainer points. “Up or down?”

I point down, not wanting to think about the damn kids anymore tonight. Or Anya either.

Rainer nods. “Sounds good to me.”

I follow him down the stairs and we settle on the steps near the lowest platform. The ocean is a little testy tonight, the waves splashing against the rusted steel grate that separates us from the dark depths below. The air is thick with salt that settles on our skin and marks us as wild.

This is a wild place and I’m going to miss it.

Rainer and I pass the bottle back and forth, taking small sips. Not just because there’s only a little bit left and we can’t crack open the new bottle until after the first test if we want it to last, but because we can’t afford to get drunk. Not on this shit. Not tonight.

But small sips are usually enough for me.

We don’t typically have Lectra with us on the Rock, but this is not just any other training retreat. It’s our last training retreat. We have been saving these bottles for years. Ever since I started paying for our freedom. And each bottle will be consumed before we leave here and then, we wil never drink this shit again. You can’t even get it out in the normal world. And even though we’re happy about leaving, and the Lectra is a way to celebrate our achievements—and the mere fact that we’re alive—I’m torn about the whole thing.

Once we leave here, we’ll never come back. What about my birds? Will they look for me? I have this horrible recurring nightmare that they will look for me the way they look for their missing mates if they don’t show up at the predesignated breeding spots every two years.

I don’t want them to look for me. I just want them to move on.

“God, Cort. What are you doing? You’re being weird today.”

It’s funny that he can hear my thoughts. Even when I’m silent, around Rainer and Maart, I am never silent.

I sign, Will you miss it?

“This place?” He blows out a breath. “I dunno. Maybe some of it. But you can come back here if you want. We have the ship. I’m sure we’ll be cruising by here all the time.”

The supply ship, he means. That’s where a lot of our purse money went. We’re gonna run the platform ship and do supply runs for some of Udulf’s other rigs. None of them are camps, like this one. They are huge drilling operations. And we had to do some serious upgrades to the one ship I could afford to buy to get those contracts.

I’m not gonna lie. This part bothers me a little. Because are we really free if Udulf is still giving us a paycheck? Are we just trading in the devil we don’t know for the one we do?

But I can’t picture it. I don’t understand what a life out from under Udulf looks like. And I’m not trying to fool myself into thinking I love the man, because I don’t. I’ve had a lot of feelings about him over the decades, but none of them were love.

Mostly, I hate him. This hate is coupled with self-loathing when I take the time to explore it. Because according to the most ruthless underground fighting ring on the planet, I’m the world champion. I’m someone to be feared. And yet I have lived under Udulf’s thumb like a possession for twenty-two years.

I have never attacked him. And I guess that’s part of the brainwashing, right? He gives me more than anyone else around me, but it’s only ever just enough.

I get those pretty girls at the end of the fight. Like Anya. But then he takes them away. Like he will Anya.

I get the purse money too. But then again, he takes it away.

Weeks later, he’ll give some back. And I can spend that any way I want. But it’s only ever just enough. Just enough to make that payment on our future freedom, or the supply ship upgrades, or enough food and supplies to keep the training center going until the next fight.

I have never had extra.

And I get it. I’m fucking lucky. Because at the same time, it has been so long since I felt the hunger pangs of needing something that wasn’t within reach that I’ve almost forgotten what it was like to be five years old in the world of men like Udulf.

It’s