𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐇𝐢𝐬 𝐌𝐚𝐝𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬

8 | You're Covered In Flour

I picked at the blood under my fingernails during every red light on the way home, annoyed at myself for not wearing gloves like usual. It's innocent fun entering fight clubs but tonight's event was with boxing wraps and not proper gloves; it was brutal.

It helps take the edge off without drowning my stress in alcohol or taking every drug known to man. Fighting gives me a good hit of adrenaline, it makes me feel alive. I don't do it very often, but whenever I do I make sure that I'm in it to win it.

Harry placed a $1300 bet that I was going to lose tonight against Haz who placed the same amount that I was going to win - that gave me even more of a reason to win. Fuck you Harry, brothers don't doubt brothers man.

Underground fight rings are actually pretty thrilling to watch as well. A lot of the time punters will go and place exorbitant bets to Mafia bookies to try and get some cash on their favourite fighters. Like I said before, I don't enter as often as some of the other guys, I usually just do lightweight fights here and there to relieve some stress against some steroid junkies.

The fucker split my cheekbone tonight, nothing major but it bled like crazy. I won't need stitches but it's definitely noticeable and I'll wake up with a nasty bruise tomorrow. Uncle Jack watched the fight tonight too, we barely spoke afterwards but it was nice seeing him for the first time since being in Witness Protection.

He got one of the guys to place a few of those dumb white butterfly strips on my face to help close the wound and told me to take care. Jack is man of few words. That was a normal 'social' interaction from him.

I have to admit, the shower in the locker rooms after the fight was fucking brutal, my face stung like all hell and my chest felt like it had an elephant treading on it every time I took a deep breath.

I still won though.

Getting out of the car I rested my gym towel over my shoulder and looked at the burner phone I kept on me. A burner phone was a cheap disposable phone criminals used to communicate and then destroy before feds could track them. I used them to conduct business. Fuck messaging anyone about crime on my actual phone.

I flipped open the cheap Nokia and saw a text from Sam:

SAM
Found him.

TOM
Send one of the smaller guys
to take care of it alright?

After hitting reply I snapped the phone in half and cracked the sim card. Throwing the two pieces of phone in the trash outside I turned around to see which car was driving up our quiet street, paranoid ever since that personal investigator followed me home the other week. It was Y/N though, who pulled up in front of her house in her little white Volkswagen Golf.

"How was work?" I called out, closing the trash can lid and smiling at her.

"Same old same old, where've you come from huh?" She said squinting to try and figure out what I was wearing; gym clothes of course.

"Just hit the gym, nothing special," I called back, heading into my front yard and giving her a wave as I entered the house. She is pretty cute. I won't lie.

In my kitchen theres a drawer filled with burner phones in their boxes. I take out one of the packages and rip open the plastic, inserting a new sim and using my actual phone to alert my contacts on what the new number was. What I did with my burner phones was pretty calculated.

First I would buy about a hundred sim cards at a time, all with consequential phone numbers. So they all started with the same numbers except for the last three. Every time I destroyed a phone, I texted the last three digits of the new number to my contacts so they knew which one to message. Easy.