Page 22 of Ghost’s Awakening

They were tryouts. Recruitment.

The fury climbed up out of my stomach. These people had put my brother in a hospital bed to force me into a ring, and the ring was an audition for a war.

"The two you put down backstage." The man tilted his head, studying me. "They weren't supposed to kill you. Just remind you how things work. A little pain, nothing permanent." He paused. "But you cracked both their skulls." He let that sit.

"One of them's dead. The other's a vegetable in a bed now too, brain damage."

The words hit my legs before they hit my head.

Dead. One of the enforcers from the corridor was dead. The other had brain damage bad enough to end the life he'd had.

I'd kicked one of them. The spinning heel to the chin, the same one I'd thrown at the Jackal in the ring, the same rotation, the same heel, except aimed higher and in that corridor there'd been no ring floor behind him. There'd been a cinder-block wall. His head had snapped back into it and he'd folded down the block, and I hadn't looked, because Ghost had my arm and the corridor was closing behind us.

But Ghost had taken the other one. Both hands hooked around the man's ankles, ripping his feet out so he pitched headfirst into the concrete floor. That was Ghost's work, not mine. And these men had no idea Ghost existed. They thought I'd done both.

One of them is dead.

My kick. Into cinder block. Not a padded ring, not a mat. Block and mortar, and a skull driven into it at the end of a heel kick with everything a spin puts behind it.

I'd killed a man.

The ground tilted. My vision went bright at the edges. Twenty years of training and competition, but I had never, not once, killed anyone. I'd broken bones. Made heads ring. Sent men to hospitals. But the line between damage and death was one I'd never stepped over, and I'd stepped over it in a dark corridor running from men who'd only wanted to teach me a lesson.

"We figured the boss would want your head for it." His voice was coming from somewhere far off now. "But it went the other way. Two enforcers, alone, in a locked corridor. That's exactly what he's after." He stepped back toward his bike. "Two weeks. Thursday. Same place. Come fight, come win, come talk to the man after. Take what he's offering." He swung a leg over the pillion seat. "Or don't. And find out what happens to you and your brother."

The rider handed him back his helmet. He pulled it on and dropped the visor.

I watched them rev their engines, the sound brutal and careless on hospital ground, loud enough to shake the windows of the building my brother slept in. The bikes peeled off, tires shrieking on the concrete, the formation drawing tight as they hit the exit ramp and were gone.

Two weeks.

One man was dead from a kick I threw in the dark. Another man's mind gone from a strike Ghost landed in the same dark. Gravedigger thought I did both, and he wanted even more.

And my brother, still upstairs, still breathing through a tube, fifteen feet up and a building away from where I stood with blood on my feet and a dead body I hadn't known I was carrying.

The scream came up from somewhere under my stomach, a place I hadn't known was there, and it tore out of me in the direction the bikes had gone. Raw. Wordless. Loud enough that a nurse crossing the lot fifty feet away stopped dead and stared.

I didn't care. I screamed until my voice cracked and thinned to something ragged and then to nothing, and I stood there in the parking structure with my chest heaving and my feet bleeding and a two-week clock already running.

Then I wiped my face, turned toward the entrance, and walked.

Liam needed me. The rest could wait.

6

PROTECTION

GHOST

Las Vegas at almost half past eight in the morning was half awake and half still drunk.

I ran the Harley through the outer ring of the Strip at seventy, threading between a delivery truck and a sedan whose driver hit the horn and got nothing back from me but distance. The sun sat flat and bright off the glass towers, throwing glare across the asphalt. I squinted behind the visor and leaned through a gap in traffic that wasn't quite wide enough and made it wider with the throttle.

Three engines held the pace behind me. Reaper tight on my left. Tank's Harley filled the lane on my right, big enough that cars drifted away from him without knowing why. Irish somewhere behind him, probably already building the version of this he'd tell Declan and Nolan tonight.

My head was doing its thing. Timelines, distances, scenarios, all of it running at once. Caleb left the compound who knows when. Sometime before dawn, maybe? Thirteen miles on foot, hurt, barefoot, no phone. Two and a half hours if he jogged, three if the injuries slowed him. He'd have reached UMC around half past seven. Earlier if he ran through the pain.

An hour ago. An hour in which anything could have happened.