The guy in charge, however, was a greedy moron.

And the question was now, did Isaac fight or not? The flyers had just been made, according to the man who’d shown it to him… and as he mentally counted the money he’d salted away, he could sure as hell use the extra thousand or two he’d earn tonight.

He glanced around and knew he had to get in the octagon. Shit… once more to pad his wallet and then he was gone.

Just one last time.

Striding over to the warehouse’s rear entrance, he ignored the Holy-shit’s and the pointing and the That’s-him’s. The crowd had been watching him beat the shit out of random guys for the last month, and evidently this made him a hero in their eyes.

Which was a whacked value system, as far as he was concerned. He was about as far from hero as you could get.

The bouncers at the back door both stepped aside to let him pass and he nodded at them. This was the first fight at this particular “facility,” but really, the locations were all the same. In and around Boston, there were plenty of abandoned walk-ups, warehouses, and whatevers where fifty guys who wished they were Chuck Liddell could watch half a dozen who were definitely not flap around in circles in a makeshift fighting cage. And that uninspiring math added up to why the promoter had repro’d Isaac’s head. Unlike the other bare-knucklers, he knew what he was doing.

Although considering how much money the U.S. government had put into training him, he’d have to be a total tool not to crack skulls like eggs by now.

And weren’t all those skills, as well as so many others, going to help him stay AWOL.

God willing, that was, he thought as he stepped into the building.

Tonight’s poor-man’s MGM Grand was about sixty thousand square feet of cold air anchored by a concrete floor and four walls’ worth of dirty windows. The “octagon” was set up in the far corner, the eight-sided ring bolted in and surprisingly sturdy.