Page 33 of Ghost’s Awakening

"Ghost." Blade's voice came in low, without hurry. "Give him a break. He hasn't eaten and you're making him memorize a roster."

Ghost went pink from the neck up. It happened fast, the same flood I'd watched under the fluorescents on my first night. "Right. Food. Plates are lining up, I saw them come off the—I'll grab two." He was up and moving before he'd finished the sentence, sliding through the tables toward the counter without touching a single chair.

The bench felt different with him gone. Colder on that side, though the room hadn't changed a degree. I put my attention on the table instead of on that fact.

The table put its attention on me.

"Twenty years of that footwork." Tank set his mug down. "Where'd it start?"

"A strip-mall gym. Taekwondo base, then whatever each new coach stacked on top. Judo for two years. Some boxing." I turned my glass a quarter turn on the wood. "The kicks stuck best."

"They stuck." He rubbed the thigh my shin had found yesterday, and something that wasn't quite a smile moved through his face.

Trenza leaned in on her forearms, and her eyes did a pass over my face, cheekbones, coloring, running some private math. "Where's your family from? You have something in you. Spanish? Italian? I had money on Cuban until you opened your mouth."

"Italian. My mother came over from Sicily." The word mother went over the table smooth and landed rough somewhere behind my sternum, one shower removed from having her in my head. "The other half is Nevada nothing. Sorry to cost you the bet."

"Sicily." She sat back, braid shifting across her shoulder, and pointed at me with her fork. "So you can actually cook, or it's only the blood?"

"I cook for a living."

Her eyebrows went up, and she opened her mouth on what was clearly going to be a follow-up with teeth in it, and my phone buzzed.

One buzz, and then the chime. A bright, clean chime that cut through the table talk.

I froze with my hand flat on the wood.

Two notification sounds existed on that phone, and I'd built it that way on my second day here, when Ghost had walked into the medical bay carrying a replacement handset and a look of enormous self-satisfaction, my old number already ported onto it. My old phone was still in that warehouse, on a bench, and my car was still in the dirt lot outside it with the keys in my bag on that back-hall bench, all of it in his territory, which was a thought I kept in a drawer and didn't open. On the new one I'd allowed exactly two things to make noise. The restaurant, and the hospital.

The restaurant was handled. I'd messaged my chef from the compound on the second day, sent him the photo of my face while the bruising was still doing its worst, told him I'd been jumped and was down for the count. He'd called back inside a minute and yelled worried Italian at me for five, most of it saints' names, and ordered me to take two weeks minimum. That door was shut.

Which left the hospital.

I got the phone out. On the screen, one line.

Your current bill balance has been updated.

Updated. My stomach dropped through the bench. Updates only ever ran one direction. Another scan, another specialist reading, another week of the machine that breathed for him, the number always climbed, and I braced for the new total the way I braced for a body kick, and opened the app.

The balance had gone down.

I read it twice. Ninety-seven thousand and change, sitting where two hundred forty-seven thousand had been for so long the digits had a shape in my head, a weight I carried up and down stairs. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars was gone from the number.

Wrong. It had to be wrong. I hadn't paid anything. I'd left the pit without collecting, there'd been no four grand, no envelope, nothing. There was no payment that could exist.

In through the nose. Hold. Out through the mouth. My hands steadied on the second cycle.

An app error, then. A glitch, a decimal in the wrong place, and in an hour the number would snap back and I'd take the beating of losing that relief all over again. I opened the payment history to find the error.

There was no error. One entry sat at the top of the history, posted at 4:02 that morning.

Payment received: $150,000.00.

And under it, in the portal's note field, a message.

See you in the pit, Monk.

My eyes locked onto the little gray headstone and wouldn't come off it.