Page 28 of Ghost’s Awakening

Tank stopped hitting the bag. Tyler let it swing.

"So this is the kid." Tank's voice rolled across the room. He stripped his gloves and looked Caleb over with that calm, thorough read of his, eyes tracking face to shoulders to hands. "Ghost talks about you a lot."

Heat crawled up my neck. "I don't talk about him a⁠—"

"A lot," Irish confirmed from the rack. He'd given up pretending to lift. Just stood there grinning, watching it unfold like a show he'd paid good money for.

Caleb slid a glance my way. I found something fascinating on the ceiling.

"I'd like to see what you can do." Hawk's voice came from behind us. I turned and there he was, in the doorway we'd just walked through, arms crossed, the gray in his hair catching the fluorescents. He'd followed us from the main building without a sound. "Ghost's report was thorough. But a report is words. I want to see it."

Caleb turned to face him. No hesitation anywhere in him. "Who, and where?"

"Tank." Hawk tipped his head toward the mat space at the center, where the heavy bag had been shoved aside and the rubber mats were laid out. "Start there."

I stepped back toward the wall. My brain was already splitting into channels, one tracking the spar about to happen, one running a low background worry about Caleb's bruises and Kai's warning to stop at the first wrong twinge, and one I was working hard to ignore, locked on the way Caleb peeled off his T-shirt and dropped it on the bench.

His torso was mapped in fading yellow-green, the marks from the pit and the corridor still there but dulled, and under them the muscle ran lean and hard, built from decades of kicking and grappling and core work that doesn't show until a man moves. His shoulders were broader than the shirt had let on. His stomach flat, the definition there without being put on display.

I was staring. I stopped. I stared again. I picked a rivet on the far wall and committed to it like my life depended on the choice.

Tank stepped onto the mat.

The room adjusted. Tank on a mat changes the gravity of a place. He was in a sleeveless shirt that showed arms most people only see carved into marble, and he crossed to the center slowly, taking his time, because nothing in the room was going anywhere until he was done with it.

"How do you want to run this?" Tank's voice stayed low and even.

"No kicks to the head." Caleb rolled his neck. "Everything else is fair."

"Works for me."

They squared up. Caleb low and loose, hands open at his sides. Tank wider, hands high, chin tucked behind them.

Tank threw a testing jab. Caleb slipped it, his upper body tilting two inches right while his feet stayed rooted, and Tank's fist sailed past his ear. Then Caleb's right leg came up, fast, and the shin cracked into Tank's outer thigh hard enough that the slap of it bounced off the concrete. Tank ate it, but his weight rocked, and his left side hung open for a fraction of a second.

"Oh, shit! That kick came out of nowhere!" Irish's voice pulled my eyes off the mat for a second. Beside him, Blade watched the spar with his arms crossed, saying nothing.

My eyes snapped back to the mat. Caleb took the gap with a straight kick to the midsection that drove Tank back a full step.

Tank's eyes narrowed. The warm-up was over.

Tank came forward heavy, combinations disciplined, each punch feeding the next. Caleb moved through them like he'd been handed the combinations in advance. Slipping, pivoting, threading angles that shouldn't have fit between Tank's fists. When he couldn't slip he redirected. When he found an opening he was already inside it.

Caleb shot a body kick that folded Tank at the waist. Then a low sweep that made two-hundred-and-sixty pounds of man hop, followed by a spinning back kick that Tank caught on crossed forearms and still got shoved backward for.

"His kicks are insane!" Tyler had come forward on the bench, his water bottle forgotten in his hand.

"His everything is insane." Irish wasn't grinning now. He'd gone still and locked in, the way he watched an op.

Tank snatched a kick out of the air, trapped Caleb's shin against his side, and swept the standing leg. Caleb went down and rolled straight through it, back on his feet before Tank could close, coming up already throwing.

Hawk hadn't moved from the doorway. Arms still crossed. But the angle of his head had changed.

Tank put a hand up. "Alright." He was breathing harder than I'd ever heard him breathe in training. Working, not gassed. "I've seen enough. You're good."

"You're still standing." Caleb was slick with sweat, his breath coming quick. "That makes you tougher than most men I've sparred with."

"Most men you've sparred with don't weigh two-sixty," Tank responded, rolling a shoulder, still catching his breath.