Page 26 of Ghost’s Awakening

In through the nose. Hold for four. Out through the mouth. The pattern I'd watched Caleb run twice now, the one his body fell into when the rest of him was coming apart. I'd picked it up somewhere without deciding to.

I opened my eyes. Footsteps down the corridor, firm and set. The nurse rounded the corner, glasses on, pen in hand, coming for 217 at a pace that said five minutes was five minutes.

I pushed off the wall and walked back into the room with the hiss-clicks, the green numbers and the bruised man in the chair who still hadn't touched his brother's hand.

Caleb looked up.

"We need to go." I kept my voice under the ventilator. "But I'm not leaving without you. Not this time."

He held my eyes. The crack was still there, running through the anger and the grief and the exhaustion. But something else sat behind it now. Short of trust. Closer to the look he'd given me in the ring ten hours ago, when his eyes found mine through two hundred strangers.

Recognition. The decision to stop doing this alone.

He stood. Winced at the pain. Leaned down and pressed his forehead to Liam's, careful, the lightest touch he could make it, his lips moving with no sound behind them.

Then he straightened, stepped back from the bed, and came toward me.

The ventilator kept its rhythm. Hiss-click. Hiss-click. The green numbers held.

And I held the door open and let him through.

7

THE MAT

GHOST

Church took twenty minutes.

Caleb wasn't in the room. Rosa had intercepted him in the lot the second we pulled in, her voice pitched to that volume she used when she was worried and furious about being worried, and she'd walked him back to the medical bay with one hand clamped on his elbow and a stream of Spanish I caught maybe half of, at the speed she was going. Something about barefoot. Something about idiota. Caleb had gone without a word, which told me he was either too tired to fight or smart enough to know Rosa wasn't a woman you argued with.

So Church was just the five of us. Hawk at the head, Reaper to his right, Tank and Irish along the sides, and me standing, because I couldn't sit.

I ran the hospital again. Fast this time. The gate first, because Hawk asked: the tower had clocked a barefoot man going out the personnel door at ten past four and figured a guest wasn't a prisoner, and nobody had thought to wake Rosa. The nurse, the room, Liam on the bed, Caleb in the chair. Gravedigger's men catching him in the parking structure before he'd made it inside. Four riders, the message handed over flat: two weeks, come back to the pit, or find out what came next.

And then came the part that sat low in my gut like a swallowed stone. The enforcers from the corridor. One dead. One with brain damage bad enough to end him. They thought Caleb did both.

Gravedigger had seen me in the pit. He was onto us, but he wasn't connecting Caleb to the Phoenixes. Not yet.

"Two weeks." Hawk leaned back, fingers laced over his stomach, eyes on the ceiling, the posture he wore when he was already three moves down the board. "That's a timeline, not a threat. He gave the kid a window because he wants something specific."

"He wants Caleb as a recruit." My voice came out flat.

"He wants Caleb as a weapon." Hawk's eyes came down off the ceiling. "There's a difference. Recruits are disposable. Weapons get maintained." Hawk set his forearms on the table. "He's not grabbing people at random, Ghost. Every fighter who makes it through that pit and into his circle is as good as Caleb. Sit with that for a second. He's building a crew where the weakest man in the room is still dangerous enough to put two enforcers on a concrete floor. That's what the pit is. A filter. Whatever he's assembling out there, every last man in it is a weapon."

Irish shifted in his seat. The grin had been gone since I'd said the word dead, and now his jaw worked, the humor peeled back to show what lived under it. This wasn't one fighter. It was dozens, maybe more, all being funneled into whatever Gravedigger was building, every one of them as skilled and as cornered as the man Rosa had just marched off to bed.

"The two weeks buy us time." Hawk looked at Reaper. "We build something. A plan, not a reaction. Axel and I will work on the options."

Reaper nodded once. His silver-gray eyes cut to me. "In the meantime, Caleb stays inside the wire. No solo trips. No midnight marathons."

"He's not going to love that." I offered it up like a weather report.

"He doesn't have to love it. He has to be breathing to hate it." Reaper's voice stayed flat, but there was nothing unkind in it. "Keep him close, Ghost. That's your job now."

Keep him close. I filed the order in the part of my head that had already been doing it without being told.

"Dismissed." Hawk pushed back from the table. "Three days. We'll have something worth a vote."