Breaking Hammer Read online

  His saffron colored robes swirled around him as he moved, his feet bare on the gravel except for the minimal sandals he wore. He was an older man, but like most monks, seemed to possess an ageless quality that I'd always thought was because they spent their lives in pursuit of enlightenment.

  I bowed my head slightly as he approached me.

  "Meia," he said, his voice soft.

  "Tayza Sayadaw," I said, holding my donation and offering of food for the monks. It always seemed like a pittance, compared to what I took from coming here, the soothing this place did for my soul. He took it wordlessly, our routine perfected by a hundred weeks of practice. It was a strange choreography, our dance, the monk and the sex slave.

  “You look worried, Meia,” Tayza noted. He noticed everything. He'd said something, once, about the bruises. I didn't answer, told him I couldn't answer, and he stopped asking. I think he understood that I wouldn't.

  “I am worried, Sayadaw,” I admitted, addressing him by the deferential term for his position as the senior monk. “I cannot calm my mind.”

  “Why are you worried?” he asked. It sounded like a simple question, but everything with Tayza was laden with more meaning than the surface would indicate. He wasn’t asking for information; he was asking why I felt the need to be so attached to my worry. He was asking why I wasn’t letting go.

  “Things are becoming complicated,” I said. “I’m not sure if I am on the right path.”

  We walked in silence for a long time, until I began to feel my heart rate slowing, the same way it always did when I was here. Until all of the thoughts, swirling and racing around in my head, finally calmed down and the storm of emotions began to subside, replaced by the sound of my breathing and the padding of our feet as we walked the grounds. When Tayza did speak, I had become so used to the silence that the sound of his voice startled me.

  He stopped and turned toward me, looking at me from behind his glasses, his eyes bright. “Meia,” he said. “You suffer because you are grasping at things beyond your control.”

  I felt a transient flash of irritation. I already knew this. Suffering was caused by failure to let go. I couldn’t do that. It was one of a million reasons I was a bad Buddhist. I would never be able to let go. “There are so many things from the past, things I don't think I can ever let go. Things that have not been brought to justice. And things now...that cannot be let go."

  "Letting go does not allow others to escape justice, Meia," he said. "It allows you to have peace."

  I looked down at the ground, turned over a small rock with my foot. What did Tayza know about how to help me feel peace? Then I asked the question, the big question. “What if I can’t ever get peace, Sayadaw?”

  He turned to me, his expression unchanged. But his voice was firm, intensity in his words. “Then it will destroy you,” he said.

  It already has, I thought. I'm already dead inside.

  It was two weeks later, and I'd put thoughts of that prick Aston - and of the girl I'd seen - out of my mind. I was going through the motions at work, unable to stop thinking about fighting again. I'd had a taste of it, and I wanted more. The rush was over too quickly, the only thing that added a tiny breath of life to the existence I was otherwise barely eking out.

  And it wasn't just that. I was stopping by the clubhouse now, more regularly after work. Testing the waters, hanging around like I'd done in the beginning. The President there, Geezer Jake, was a solid guy, at least he seemed that way. You never fucking knew, though. I wouldn't have expected Mad Dog to go the way he had.

  Well, that wasn't true. Mad Dog always had it in him, from the very beginning. He had that capacity, and I knew it. He just always kept it in check...until he didn't anymore.

  I wondered if, years from now, someone would say the same thing about me.

  Even so, despite my reservations, the thoughts about coming out of retirement kept creeping into my mind. It was a new chapter. It wasn't Mad Dog's club. I could keep the day job, do the bare minimum at the club. I'd be like a fucking weekend warrior, right? No big deal. It didn't mean I'd have to turn over my soul to the club.

  These were the things that kept going through my head.

  But I knew they weren't true. I knew myself. I knew that if I came out of retirement, I'd take it seriously. And that was something I wasn't sure I was ready to do.

  Even so, I sat out in the garage yesterday with the bike, just thinking. I still hadn't ridden yet, afraid that if I got on the bike, it would flip a switch inside of me that I wouldn't be able to turn off.

  It felt like I'd be closing the chapter on April or something.

  Even if I knew in my head she'd want me to move on - fuck, she'd chew me a new asshole if she knew I was this wrapped up in memories still - I couldn't quite bring myself to actually do it.

  “Watch yourself up there, Mr. Holder,” Mark, the security guard, said.

  “You make it sound like I’m walking into something dangerous, Mark,” I said. “I think I’ll be all right installing this system on some rich guy’s penthouse, thanks.”

  He shrugged. “He’s a special kind of rich guy, that’s all I’m saying.”

  I opened my mouth, about to ask him what exactly made this special snowflake different from all the other fucking rich shits here in Vegas, but Mike’s radio squawked and he picked it up. Without taking the radio away from his mouth, he waved at me as he walked down the hall, his pace brisk.

  I was already irritated with this whole thing. It sure as shit wasn’t my job to install security in a goddamn penthouse. But it was a special task from the casino owner, and what he wanted, he would get. My boss had given me no details, just told me this was a security system issue with the penthouse owner. Some dude with too much money who was used to having people jump through hoops for him. Which was what I was fucking doing now. I didn't even know who the owner was.

  So to say I was irritated as I stood here was an understatement. I wasn’t irritated. I was fucking livid. At this douchebag for insisting on a goddamned specialist to come up and do what a regular garden-variety tech could do. At the casino owner, for readily agreeing to pimp out my services. At my boss for insisting it was me that had to come here on a fucking weekend.

  Mostly at the world, for the way things had turned out in general.

  I rung the penthouse doorbell, half-expecting it to be answered by a butler. But this was no butler.

  She stood there, in this all-white outfit, these flowy pants and top made out of some kind of silky material that almost shimmered, the way the light glinted off it, making her look other-worldly somehow. A look of surprise flitted across her face when she saw me.

  He stood in front of me- the fighter. The man who’d run into me in the casino, held me in his arms. The one who'd delivered the beating in the fight, that took my breath away, kept me on the edge of my seat, my hands clenched tightly as I watched him fight the way a man fought when he didn't care whether or not he lived or died.

  Even when I'd seen him in the casino the first time, in slacks and a collared shirt, he was rough, there was no doubt in my mind about that. His business clothes, the ones that hung on him like the most ill-fitting garments in the world. They didn't suit him. He was cut from a different cloth.

  He was out of place there in the warehouse, too. I recognized the drive, the intensity I saw there, the darkness in him. But whatever was driving him, it was a compulsion, something that didn't quite seem to fit him even though he was obviously skilled at it.

  Now, he stood in front of me, dressed the way he was that first time in the casino, the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up on his forearms, revealing the expanse of tattoos that covered the length of his arms. I briefly wondered what he might look like completely out of the dress clothes, then put the thought immediately out of my mind. This was not the type of man I needed to wonder about naked, this man with the darkness in his eyes.

  "You," he said. If his words had not, his expression would have betraye