The Fighter and the Baroness: A Modern-Day Fairy Tale Read online

  SYNOPSIS

  CHAPTER ONE: MEMORIES

  CHAPTER TWO: EXODUS

  CHAPTER THREE: SAINTS

  CHAPTER FOUR: TRAVELS

  CHAPTER FIVE: THOUGHTS

  CHAPTER SIX: BREAK

  CHAPTER SEVEN: ALIEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT: WORK

  CHAPTER NINE: WRONG PLACE

  CHAPTER TEN: CONNECTIONS

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: WELL TREATED

  CHAPTER TWELVE: FOCUS

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: SKYPE

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: MIAMI

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: SURAT HIN DREAM

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: UNWANTED SURPRISES

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: WORRY

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: NEWS

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: CONCENTRATION

  CHAPTER TWENTY: LAST MOMENTS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: MORNING MOOD

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: KYRIA CASTLE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: LEAD-UP

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: SLAYED

  CHAPTER TWENY-FIVE: ELFRIEDE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: SUNDAY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: DIVERSIONS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: TRUTH BE TOLD

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: INNER CIRCLE

  CHAPTER THIRTY: PALACE FIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: EXPERTISE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: REARRANGEMENTS

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: A BEAUTIFUL DAY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: JANUARY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: MAY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: GOD, IT’S TINY

  DODGING TRAINS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT SUNNIVA DEE

  FUTURE PROJECTS

  CONTACT INFO

  OTHER NEW ADULT TITLES

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  COPYRIGHT

  Victor Arquette knows the meaning of sacrifice. Destined to legendary status in mixed martial arts, his life is founded on it. Dedication equals sacrifice, and sacrifice means around-the-clock training, no partying, no junk food, no alcohol—and no women.

  Helena von Isenlohe is the heiress to Kyria Castle. Due to her father’s lack of financial prowess, the restoration of the ancient German estate rests on Helena’s shoulders. A failed attempt leaves a wealthy man alone at the altar—and the fleeing bride on a plane to the United States.

  A chance meeting, and Victor and Helena’s chemistry is undeniable. Except, her presence clutters his focus. Victor shouldn’t crave their nights, shouldn’t be concerned where she is or with whom. And meanwhile in Germany, Kyria Castle deteriorates at a suspicious speed, indebting Helena further to the man she left behind.

  VICTOR

  My stomach is so full. But then it’s not full at all. I’m three, and I’ve known the difference between good-full and bad-full for a long time.

  Sometimes when I whimper, someone comes along and changes it. I whimper now, at the foot of a Muay Thai ring. I’m curled up next to a friendly dog, a stray that’s had puppies. I don’t know where they are now. She licks me.

  “What’s up, kid?” someone shouts from above me. He’s got yellow eyes gleaming with fight. Blood streams from his nose, but his sweat smells like victory. “You hungry?”

  I bob my head. It’s why I cry. The fullness in my stomach is air, not food. I’ve seen this boy before, not quite a man. I’ve seen him fight in the ring. Maybe he was the one making people scream out glory a while ago. I like to watch, but not when my stomach cramps around air.

  “I want to celebrate my win,” he huffs as he hunches to my level. He grabs underneath my arms, which flail, limp until he’s got me standing. “We’re getting Som Tam,” he tells me, and my mouth waters even though my stomach still cramps.

  We don’t walk far. This strong boy who’s almost a man has my wrist in a grip while he walks us to the corner. I’ve smelled the food all day, but I know better than to get close to the street seller on my own; there are too many hungry kids here for him to be friendly.

  I hide behind the fighter. Around his arm, there’s a monster that’s biting its tail. It is scary and beautiful.

  My nostrils flare with the scent of chili and cooked shrimp, ground peanut and rice. Oh I am so close to a real meal.

  I don’t trust that it will be mine until the fighter leans down and settles a small paper cone in my hands. He gives me a plastic fork to eat with. I took a kick from the seller the last time I hovered too close, so I shrink out of view, back toward the Muay Thai rings with my prize. The fighter nods to me, a grin on his face. “Eat it slowly, okay, or it will hurt. It’s a lot of food for such a little guy.”

  I nod back to him, a thank you and an acknowledgment; yes, I know this. I’ve learned that eating too fast makes it all come up again, and then I’m as hungry as I was before I ate.

  I sit down in the shade behind the ring. I keep my back to the dogs, and they let me be. Maybe it is my dog friend, the mother dog whose puppies I once saw. Maybe she watches over me.

  It’s hard to eat slowly. My mouth was dry before the fighter gave me dinner. Now, it produces all this saliva, and it wants to open so wide it could empty the whole cone’s worth of warm food in seconds.

  It hurts. I need water, something to soothe the heat in my mouth. I feel my lip tremble, because I used to have someone with me. They’re not here as much anymore. They were little like me, but older by years. They’d curse at me for being a baby, but they’d find water when I needed it even if they didn’t have food. I spend time alone now.

  I have my momma dog though. She licks my back, a comfort, but my stomach feels worse than it did before.

  “Here, boy,” the fighter says, suddenly there. He holds out white liquid—it’s milk. I haven’t had milk in a while. “Small sips,” he continues when I grab the bottle with both hands, too eager. “Slowly. You have to listen.”

  Later, I’m relaxed in the shade by the ring. My body isn’t fighting me anymore. It has calmed around the food and the milk. I feel no hunger. I feel no pain. The fighter has left, but not until he gave me a T-shirt with black writing on it. He told me it’s mine now, that I should use it as a bed for my nap. My body likes his idea, so I lie down on it.

  Everyone has left the ring, probably to get their own lunch. But I’m here, and I have my momma dog. She lies down next to me too, liking the T-shirt as much as I do. And when I doze off, I’m smiling and fur tickles my half-dressed stomach. I know already that Muay Thai fighters are my heroes.

  HELENA

  I barge through the forest, away from the castle. Panic sits in my bones in a way I’ve never felt before. I’ve had inklings of it since I became old enough to understand, but today it’s so strong my feet leap off with me and my breath whooshes in and out of my lungs.

  Think.

  Can’t think.

  The sun beams down on me. What would my life be if I stayed? Beneath my crystal-studded shoes, loose pavestones give, another money-sucking project procrastinated by my father. They thump and rattle as I run, past Madonna altar number one, then past Madonna with child, but once I’ve traversed the seating area for Madonna number five, I see the end of the forest and the iridescent green of the hillside below. It slopes into soft fields and ends with our village at the river’s edge.

  Papa warned me. “I know what I’m doing,” I told him, and Mama supported me, thinking I did.

  I didn’t.

  I couldn’t go through with it after all.

  A heel cracks. The gown is too long, too fairytale for such a rushed departure. I tiptoe on, limping and raising damask and silk and golden brocade as high off the dirt as I can. The trail of my dress dances along in a stream behind me. It chases m
e at every curve in the path, and I feel it each time it gets stuck.

  The parking lot. I should be used to this by now, but there’s bus parking at the base of my home. My car’s here. The Lexus is open. My keys gleam from the mid console, and my wallet and passport await in the glove compartment. Who am I kidding; my subconscious has planned this.

  There’s a big, vast, enormous, gigantic world out there free of my reality. It will welcome me—I can change things up. All I have to do is find that world and embrace it.

  I’ve been to airports before, but never like this. Two hours after I raced off, I still hyperventilate when I realize my subconscious didn’t think of preparing a suitcase.

  I park in the airport garage, my chest pressing against the bodice and needing it to reconsider its restraints. I gasp. Lean over. Stare at the asphalt while I breathe faster than I should. If you hyperventilate for too long, you pass out.

  Papa would tell me I’m overreacting. But this is big; I’m fleeing from a ceremony I created, and the lord knows when I’ll return. I’m letting down a lot of people. My parents, Gunther Wilhelm Affenheimer the Fourth and his family. Even many of the townspeople wanted this to occur.

  I don’t have a ticket.

  I might not be able to leave.

  What if someone comes after me?

  Panic puffs out through my teeth at all these thoughts, and I cover my mouth, holding back. They’d never guess I’m at the airport though. They’d never know I drove two hours straight without even stopping to get new clothes. I must look crazy.

  VICTOR

  I’m the luckiest man alive.

  For the last seventeen years, I’ve lived in a small, Florida-lush bungalow on an overgrown patch of grass a few blocks from the ocean. But the location isn’t what makes me lucky. My mother, Maiko, is.

  Maiko is a saint. One of the main characteristics of saints is that they never believe they’re extraordinary. “Don’t for a second believe I did it to save you,” Maiko says whenever I look too grateful. “It was your effervescence. Of all the boys loitering around the Muay Thai rings, no one had obsession in their eyes the way you did.”

  “I was five, Maiko,” I say now while I prop my feet up on the low coffee table in the sunroom. I crack my knuckles with fake nonchalance. “How could you sign off on a lifetime deal with a brat like me based on a facial expression?” She’s told me my nostrils flare with anticipation when I ask this. My mother always replies though, humoring me like she’s repeating a folktale to the kids of an eager village.

  Today, she halts in the doorway, tea tray in her hands and gaze sinking to my feet. In lieu of a frown, she squints and doesn’t continue speaking until I drop my feet to the floor. My small act is like hitting her “play” button; I suppress a smile at how she instantly moves into the room.

  “Your father and I just knew. Our lives had revolved around martial arts for a long time when we found you. At first, we’d been instructors in others’ dojos. Later, we started our own, and soon, we earned a reputation for discovering natural talents.” She places her tray on the table. Cherry blossoms adorn the surface of our two cups. She lifts one of them and tips tea into it from a decades-old teapot. It was already here when I came to Tampa.

  “Yeah? Then what?” I prompt, the way I used to when I was little. It makes her eyes slit again, this time with pleasure.

  “A few years later, we began to actively search for our fighters. We combed amateur matches across the U.S. and found amazing talent that way: we welcomed new warriors into our stable and helped them set up for college here in Tampa. It was a good system.”

  I perform a slight eye-roll and cut in with a “yeah-yeah.” Her lips thin with amusement, because we both know how much I cherish what comes next.

  “But see,” she starts, crossing her arms and trying to look surprised. She isn’t a good actress, which makes this part funny. “Getting ahold of them at eighteen when you could have trained them through their formative years is an anticlimax. They’ll use techniques that need to be erased and re-learned, and in most cases these fighters will need a full restructuring of their mental approach to combat.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say casually, because it’s crazy for someone with my intended lot in life to become the star in a story like Maiko’s. Faking deep interest in my tea, I hold it to my mouth, blow on it, and shut my eyes against the steam.

  “Mixed martial arts was in the starting blocks, ready to take over the world. We saw it, your daddy and I. We saw it coming.” She nods in that slow, heavy way that doesn’t match her quick muscle response. My mother was the female judo champion in her weight class in Japan when she was young. Now she’s seventy, but she doesn’t look a day over fifty.

  This waif of a woman will hold me by the bridle until the day she dies. I suppress a smirk at that, because I’m twenty-two and could have moved out years ago. When my father passed away though, I saw no reason to make her suffer more.

  Maiko and I have been alone for three years. Since my father’s death, I’ve been her only pupil. She and I, we’re a team.

  “With the new mixed martial arts trend, the fighters entered the cage, collided with their different styles, and hoped for the best. Those trained in throws, whether their branch was wrestling or judo, usually won in the beginning. But then Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu appeared and changed the picture. It became massively popular. Even so, your father and I followed our instinct and studied Muay Thai, a completely different approach to battle.”

  A glint appears in Maiko’s measured gaze. “Very few gyms offered Muay Thai in the U.S. back then. Your father always backed my ideas with solutions, and suddenly, there we were in Surat Hin, Thailand. We brought Daniel-kun. He paid his own fare because it was expensive, but due to his wins in America he trained for free at the camp.

  “Ah.” A small smile grows on her mouth again, and not once have I remained serious at this juncture. “There you were, this scrawny thing. You couldn’t enter the premises, because you were just a little street kid and a nuisance.

  “If you returned now, things would be quite different. They’d fight to hire you,” she says before adding, “Don’t think about that though. They would pay next to nothing, and your future is in America.”

  I’m ramming into a heavy-bag in our backyard ring. Heavy metal blares in my ears as I give it my all. In earlier days, our cage was used for real fights, but I grew up out here, so for me our backyard means training and sparring.

  Heavy-bags are underestimated, I think as I pound at the skin. I’ve heard fighters argue that most of one’s time should be spent sparring, but there’s so much more to be done.

  “Victor-san,” my mother calls from the entrance to the sunroom. I cast a look up and find the moon round and pale. “Come have a snack,” she says. “I’ve got a fruit-and-fish platter ready for you. It is your bedtime.”

  “Give me a half hour for cardio and footwork,” I puff.

  She stands there, an unassuming silhouette against the candles in the sunroom. “Will you be getting up at five?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you will want to get ready for bed. You do like five hours of sleep.”

  She knows me well.

  I do what I do for me. I do it for her. I do it for my father, the big American who believed in me from the moment my mother found me. Yes, I do what I do for us all.

  It’s hard to break free of the ring when my brain and muscles twitch for more. Still, I obey, because Maiko is my conscience and she always knows best. I pull my gaze from glistening leather and machines built to make me a winner. My father raised this ring a long time ago. Air rushes out of my lungs as I take the two steps down to the lawn. There isn’t much grass here. Two pavers and I’m face to face with Maiko.

  “Fish and fruit?” she asks, making sure I’m still on my diet.

  “Fish and fruit.”

  Maiko loves her little patio. Rust-colored mosaics cover the surface of our table-for-two, and miniature rice lamps glow a
bove my head. I rarely sit here alone—I’m too busy for random breaks—but tonight I’m procrastinating. I hear her move around in her bedroom. She’s got a sixth sense when it comes to me though, so she’ll discover me soon and come out. Once she does, I can’t procrastinate any longer.

  I study at Tampa University. It was my parents, not me, who wanted me to get a degree. Because of extended training camps in Brazil and Tibet, I started late, but here I am now, in my senior year in Marketing. My major is a backup I don’t plan to resort to. I’ll finish it on willpower, not on heart and blood like with my fighting.

  Tonight is going to be tough. Despite her appearance, my mother isn’t young. She knows how dedicated I am to my goal, to become a legend with the EFC in Las Vegas, but she can’t follow every move I make. It’s why my news will be a shock to her.

  With the death of my father, many of his duties fell by the wayside. Some I could take on myself, but others, those only entrusted to trainers, I couldn’t cover.

  It’s Sunday night. Finals commence tomorrow. It’s not a good time to broach the subject, but my first fight for Alliance Cage Warriors, my new MMA gym, will happen in ten days. Maiko doesn’t know yet that I’m slipping outside our duo. She’s my rock. I want her with me the way she always is on fights.

  “Maiko,” I say once she joins me. My voice is gritty. I don’t want her to take this the wrong way. If there’s anyone in the world I need approval from, it’s her. “I bought you plum wine.”

  She blinks. I don’t frequent liquor stores, and Maiko deserves the real kind, not some cheap knockoff that’s been on a shelf for ages. To buy that I had to cross town. She doesn’t put me on the spot though, asking for details about my strange behavior. That’s not my mother.