Low Blow: A Kira Brightwell Novel

Chapter 2

2

Kira slammed her fist against the ponderous weight of the heavy bag with a jab, following up with an uppercut. She grunted as she threw a hard knee for good measure. The bag shuddered in its hangings. The chain anchoring it rattled. The sound was familiar background noise to Kira, even though she was training in unfamiliar territory. She had accepted Nick’s invitation to work out at the gym frequented by members of the La Valentia PD. He was off somewhere doing cardio.

The gym was not an MMA gym as Kira would have preferred, but it was within biking distance of her apartment, which meant she didn’t have to drive there. And of course, the other major selling point was there was no chance of running into Jeff Saunders there either.

She had scrupulously avoided her regular MMA gym since she had broken things off with Jeff. At first, it had been to spare herself the awkwardness after he had admitted there was someone else. But then that someone else had turned out to be her best friend and roommate, Rob. That particular discovery made ‘awkwardness’ seem like an understatement. Kira hadn’t spoken to Jeff since walking in on him with Rob. In Rob’s defense, he had been under the impression that Jeff had already told Kira about the kindling relationship between them before moving forward with things. As far as she knew, Rob hadn’t spoken to Jeff either after discovering otherwise. Both she and Rob had been very careful not to talk about ‘The Incident,’ as Kira now thought of it, in an attempt to block out what had happened.

She threw another punch. It was good to have somewhere to work out again and blow off some steam. She had focused on running and biking to keep up her cardio, but the late-summer heat in California could make it a challenge. She knew Rob was happy she had finally found somewhere else to train. He kept complaining that her shadowboxing was distracting him. Still, she found herself missing the cage from her regular gym, along with a trained partner she could spar with. Nick’s gym was mostly filled with weight and cardio machines. There was a matted sparring area, but the training and techniques used by the off-duty officers weren’t the same as what Kira was used to. The last thing she wanted to do was offend or hurt someone by doing something unexpected. So she stuck to the heavy bag. She spun, slamming it with a hard kick.

If only Jeff were the worst of my problems...

Her body had recovered from the torture she had endured only a few weeks ago at the hands of Carlo Traversa. The man who had been born as Karl von Stein before changing his name had died less than an hour afterward. Kira couldn’t say she was sorry. He had been the ‘client’ behind her abduction over three years ago under the alias ‘Doloroso’. If not for him... Well. Who knew what her life would be like now?

Carlo had been killed by the man known only as the Procurer. The only evidence left behind was a slashed throat, but Kira had no doubt. Traversa had gotten too curious about the elusive man he had hired to acquire both Kira and her replacement once Kira had escaped her initial abduction three years ago. He had mentioned that he had found something when he had been torturing Kira. Somehow, the Procurer had found out. He had killed both Traversa and his accomplice—the very woman the Procurer had abducted for him after Kira’s escape. Whatever Traversa had found out, it must be important.

Kira brushed a stray lock of long, brown hair that had escaped her usual ponytail away from her face with the back of her padded glove. She had found the evidence Traversa was sitting on. After escaping from the room where Traversa had been holding her, she had stumbled across someone raiding Traversa’s safe. The same person had removed something from the safe to shred and burn it before leaving. Kira had managed to rescue the smoldering fragments before they were completely destroyed. Rob had reassembled them for her, but she still didn’t know what it meant, or why the intruder she suspected was the Procurer had gone to so much trouble to destroy it.

Worse, she hadn’t told Nick about it.

Nick Foster had become her friend over the past several months, but he was also a police detective. She liked and admired him. She even trusted him, up to a point. But if she handed over the evidence she had found, she knew he would be obligated to report it as part of the ongoing Procurer investigation. The last thing she wanted was to be shut out. The Procurer had become big news. In addition to being the suspect behind the mass abduction Kira had escaped three years ago, he was also wanted on suspicion of murder for at least three other victims, in addition to Traversa and his accomplice, as well as other abduction charges. But for Kira, this was a personal matter. She had promised herself three years ago that she would do whatever it took to find the man behind her capture. She had missed him by only a few minutes at Traversa’s mansion. She wasn’t about to let that happen again.

Of course, if you believe the papers, I’m only wasting my time.

After escaping the Procurer and rescuing his other victims three years ago, and then rescuing her friend Stephanie only a few months ago, Kira had become something of a reluctant media sensation. Kira Brightwell: The Girl Who Escaped. She had received several requests for interviews, but she had turned them all down. She was a private person, and had no desire to see her face splashed across the front of the local paper. But since her last case, she seemed to have little choice in the matter.

Her most recent client had been billionaire philanthropist, Raymond Stirling. She had recovered a stolen piece of jewelry for him—a family heirloom. The culprit had been Carlo Traversa and the abducted woman Traversa had broken and molded to be Stirling’s wife. The matter of the stolen item had been overshadowed by the murder of Traversa and the woman masquerading as Laura Stirling, and rumors of the Procurer. Once again, reporters had clamored for Kira’s version of the story, but Kira had refused. Between the tarnished history of the brooch that had been stolen, and the connection to the Procurer, she didn’t want to disclose anything that might either tip off the Procurer or shame her former client, who had been horrified to learn the brooch’s origins. Her reputation as a professional problem solver relied on her discretion.

Without Kira’s version of events to go on, the press had come up with their own wild theories—none of which cast her in a good light. Was Kira in league with the Procurer? Was Laura Stirling Kira’s lost twin, manipulated to Kira’s own advantage? Did the Procurer even exist? After all, no one had known about him until Kira had managed to escape... It was maddening.

The only person who had ever seen the Procurer without dying immediately afterward as far as Kira knew was a girl named Clarissa Hunt. She had been the woman in the room next to Kira’s when she had been abducted. Clarissa was the only one of the eight girls who had been taken without an end buyer in mind. Kira suspected she had been taken for the Procurer’s own use. She had heard him raping Clarissa from the next room. When Kira got out, she had a hard time persuading Clarissa to escape. The poor woman was convinced the Procurer would kill her. She had died only a few days after their escape in her parents’ home, without giving a statement to police. She was found in the bathtub with her wrists slit.

Now the papers were insinuating that the Procurer was perhaps a figment of Kira’s imagination. After all, who had seen him? Clarissa’s death had been ruled as a suicide. Maybe the whole thing was just a series of random events... No matter how the papers decided to spin things, Kira came out looking like an attention-seeking fraud.

She had never been one to care much about what other people thought, but that didn’t mean she enjoyed being maligned in the local paper, or stared at in the street. Nick believed her, which helped, although it also made her feel even more guilty about not sharing her evidence with him. Even though the Procurer never left any evidence behind to trace back to him, there was little to incriminate Kira either. And as much as the paper tried to gloss over the fact, someone had managed to get into the local jail to murder one of the Procurer’s clients in his cell before he could cut a deal. She knew she just had to weather the storm until the press got bored and found another story to amuse them, which was easier said than done.

None of that matters anyway, as long as I can track him down...

A plan had been forming in the back of her mind for some time now, but she had forced herself to remain patient and bide her time a bit longer. The last thing she wanted was to tip her hand by rushing things, but she had grown tired of waiting.

She landed another spinning kick against the bag, imagining it was the Procurer.