They Left Me to Die, So I Came Home Undefeated novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Lupa Takes the Cage
Mirella drops the biggest man in the cage, unmasks in front of her brother Teo, and learns in the locker room that her family wants her home.
The bell rang, and I put my left fist into his liver.
The man in front of me weighed twice what I did.
Two hundred people were packed into the basement under the old cold-storage warehouse, and none of them knew my face.
They knew my record.
Twenty-three fights, twenty-three wins.
My mask covered everything above my mouth, and the crowd called me Lupa.
He folded around the hit and gasped.
I brought my elbow into his temple.
He dropped, and the cage wire shook when his back hit the mat.
The basement went wild.
Money changed hands up and down the benches.
I knelt beside him with my mouth close to his ear, so only he could hear.
"Stay down," I told him. "You did fine."
He stayed down.
Before the bell I had counted the men who didn't belong in that room.
Two of them stood at the back by the stairs, in good wool coats, with their hands in their pockets.
Nobody in that basement wore a coat like that.
The taller one hadn't clapped once.
The younger one had stood very still since I came down the steps.
I knew the way he stood.
Five years ago my family put me out in the snow.
A burner phone turned up in my school bag, and they said I sold our shipment to the police at thirteen.
They believed her in one afternoon.
I stood up, put both hands behind my head, and pulled off the mask.
I raised my face into the lights.
The crowd saw a skinny girl with a split eyebrow and sweat in her hair, and they went quiet.
At the back by the stairs, the younger man took a step forward and stopped.
Teo.
My brother Teo used to smuggle me snacks in the middle of the night and call me Pip.
He stared at me with his mouth open.
"Welcome home, Teo," I said across the cage.
His mouth opened, and nothing came out of it.
The taller man put a hand on his shoulder and kept it there.
That was Corrado.
I walked out through the gate with my head high and didn't look back.
In the locker room I sat down on the bench and unwrapped my hands.
The clock over the door said 12:02.
My phone lay face up on top of my bag, and the screen was dark.
My father used to call me at midnight on every birthday.
He never missed, not once, until I was thirteen.
I was eighteen now, and the screen stayed dark.
I had stopped expecting it years ago, and I looked at it anyway.
I turned the phone over.
I unzipped the inside pocket of the bag and took out the thing I kept there.
It was a small plastic hospital tag, the kind they snap around a newborn's wrist.
It was yellowed, and the letters on it had faded to gray.
Baby A, 6:41 a.m.
My mother tied it on me before she died, and I never found out what the A meant.
I held it in my fist for a moment, then put it back and zipped the pocket.
The door opened without a knock.
Corrado stood in the frame, so tall he had to duck his head.
He had a crooked nose now and a gray hair at his temple that hadn't been there before.
He was twenty-seven and he looked forty.
"Happy birthday, Mirella," he said.
I stood up and put the bench between us.
"That's not my name anymore. Papà made sure of that."
"He sent us to bring you home."
"Home," I said.
"Cosima cried for a week when we found out where you were."
Nobody in that house had sent me one word in five years.
I didn't say that.
"You put me out of a car at a bus yard in January," I said. "I had a coat and no money."
His jaw moved once.
"Papà said an aunt would collect you within the hour."
"Which aunt?"
He didn't answer, and he didn't look away.
I had given him a minute to say sorry, and he had used it to stand still.
"Nonno is dying," he said at last. "Saturday is Cosima's presentation dinner. The old man says he won't bless her unless you stand next to her."
"Why does Nonno care about me?"
"I don't know."
I could see he didn't, and it made him angry.
"Papà will not ask you twice," he said. "If you say no, we carry you out of this room."
I looked at the tall man who used to carry me on his shoulders at the fair.
I looked at the door behind him.
Four of Papà's men stood in the hall.
I could break two of them before they got to me.
I could not break four, and I was not going to be carried out of the one place I had won everything.
So I said yes.
"I'll come home," I said. "Everyone in that house is going to wish I hadn't."
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