Page 24 of Ghost’s Awakening

The nurse's eyes were now down, back at the paperwork in front of her. "Second floor. Follow the signs."

I turned. Irish's grin had spread through the whole exchange, and even six feet back I could feel it on the nape of my neck like a heat lamp.

"Not a word," I muttered as I passed them.

"I didn't say anything." Irish's grin didn't move an inch.

"Your face is saying plenty."

The elevator opened onto a corridor that smelled of antiseptic and carried that heavy padded hospital hush. My shoes squeaked on the linoleum. Numbered doors ran down both sides, some open, some shut, the muffled beep of monitors and the sigh of ventilators leaking through the gaps.

Room 217 sat at the end of the hall, door closed. I knocked, two knuckles, light.

No answer. I pushed it open and stepped through.

The ventilator was the first thing I heard. Hiss-click. Hiss-click. It filled the little white room like a second heartbeat, steady and mechanical, the rhythm of a machine holding a body on this side of the line.

The room was bare. White walls, a single window with the blinds half down, morning light laid across the linoleum in bars. A bedside table with a plastic pitcher and a paper cup. Monitors on a rolling cart, green numbers blinking. An IV stand, a tangle of clear tubing and a clip on a finger.

And the bed.

Liam was smaller than I'd braced for. A long stretch in a hospital bed shrinks anyone, so that shouldn't have caught me, but he was young, early twenties, and the brown curls on the pillow and the soft line of his jaw made him look younger still. Eyes closed. The tube ran from the base of his throat to the machine, taped flat against his collarbone. His hands lay at his sides on the white sheet, palms up, so still that my eyes went to the sheet over his chest and held there until I saw it rise.

Caleb sat in the chair beside the bed.

He looked up, and his dark eyes met mine, and the room went small.

He was in worse shape than when I'd left him. The swelling under his left eye had gone deep purple. The split in his lip had opened again, a thin line of dried blood down his chin. Bruises stacked across his bare torso, old and new, the yellow-green from last week's fights bleeding into the fresh purple from the ring and the corridor, his taped knuckles smudged with something that could've been blood or grit or both. His feet were flat on the floor, bare, and I could only imagine the raw torn skin on the soles where thirteen miles of asphalt and gravel had taken their cut.

His hands rested on the sheet beside his brother's. Close. An inch of white cotton between his fingers and Liam's. Not touching. I looked at his knuckles, the dried blood and the desert still crusted into the tape, and I understood. He wouldn't put that on Liam's skin. Wouldn't let a single thing he'd walked through land on his brother's clean hands.

That hit me harder than anything I'd seen in the pit.

"Hey." My voice came out quieter than I'd meant.

Caleb looked at me and said nothing. His jaw was set and his eyes were flat and dark and his whole body sat coiled in that chair, coiled tight enough that I could read it from the door. He was holding something in that was hunting for a way out.

I opened my mouth to keep going, because that was what I did when the quiet got heavy, I filled it. "I'm glad I found you. With everything happening, you being out here alone isn't safe. If you'd told me you wanted to come I'd have brought you mys⁠—"

"What the fuck is going on?!"

His voice was steady. Almost. A crack ran under it that hadn't split open yet, a fault line in glass, and I could hear the pressure stacking up behind it.

"That psycho with the grave fetish is recruiting fighters. Using the pit like a tryout. Forcing people in." Each sentence came down harder than the one before it. "How is he not in prison? How is a man running fight rings and putting people in hospitals walking around free? And what's your crew's part in this? How long has it been going on? And why—" He turned toward Liam, and his hand almost reached for his brother's face before he caught it, fingers stopping an inch from the pillow and drawing back. "Why him? Why us? What did we do?"

The last word cracked. He shut his mouth. I watched him pull air in through his nose, hold it, then he let it out slowly through his lips. The same controlled breathing from the medical bay.

I didn't answer for a few seconds. Not to pick my words. Because looking at him in that chair, bloody and barefoot, his hands held off his brother's because he'd decided they were too dirty… Something in me turned over, from wanting to explain to wanting to take apart whoever had done this to him.

I didn't feel pity toward him. Caleb would have chewed through anyone who handed him that. It was fury, hot and personal, pointed at the men who'd worked him over, at the operation that had put Liam in that bed, at Gravedigger for breathing.

I crossed the room. His eyes tracked me. I stopped near the foot of the bed, close enough to talk low, far enough that he didn't have to crane up at me.

"Gravedigger's using the pit to recruit fighters into something bigger. We're sure of it now. And I think you're right, he forces people in. He builds the debt, then he builds the only road out of it." I looked at Liam. The sheet rising and falling. The small green numbers keeping his heartbeat. "He put your brother here to put you in that ring. You were never random."

His jaw tightened. He didn't interrupt.

"For years the man was untouchable. He had people inside federal law enforcement, corrupted FBI agents, a badge that scrubbed his record and looked the other way. That's finished. The agents who covered for him are dead, and he's got no friends left in any agency." My hands were at my sides, and I caught myself gripping my own fingers white. I let go. "But now he's desperate. And desperate men build fast and ugly. Whatever he's putting together out there, if we give him the time to finish it, the next people he hurts won't be fighters in a warehouse. It'll be anyone standing in his way."