Page 35 of Ghost’s Awakening

"Yeah." My voice came back level. "Take it. Trace it."

Tyler was up and moving before the second word landed, cutting between tables toward the kitchen line. He posted up at the counter and started talking at Nolan, low and fast, phone held out, and I watched Nolan's spatula change hands and his glasses come off in the space of one sentence.

"Oi!" Irish's voice rose over the griddle. "You do not get to poach my line cooks mid-service, we are plating for fifty—he's untying the apron, Declan, he's untying the apron⁠—"

Nolan untied the apron. Declan took the abandoned station without a word, and Irish pressed a spatula to his own chest like something in him had been sworn at.

I turned back to Ghost, who'd finally sat, pulling one of the plates toward himself. Eggs, bacon, roasted strips of red bell pepper laid across the top like somebody on that line took plating personally.

"Your people can track money now too?" I picked up my fork because Rosa was somewhere behind me and I valued my life. "Stealth, fighting, muscle, medical, and money trails?"

Ghost lifted a strip of bell pepper off his plate, a long one, cut clean, and smirked as he dropped it into his mouth. He took his time with it.

"Oh, you've seen nothing yet." He tipped his head toward the counter, where Nolan was already bent over my phone with Tyler at his shoulder, the two of them speaking a language made entirely of numbers. "That Graveb—" He stopped himself, physically, a hand coming up off the table. "No. Can't say it. He'd hear me. Gravedigger will get what's coming to him."

I looked down the room. Trenza was back on her parts list with Blade. Tank had survived his coffee. Mateo was watching Ghost and me with his head tipped, recalculating something. Fifty people ate breakfast at a disciplined hum while two of them pulled a wire transfer apart at the kitchen counter, and somewhere across thirteen miles of desert, a brother of mine breathed on a machine that a monster's money now touched.

For four months the number had been the whole war. I'd bled for it, run for it, built my nights around dragging it down a few thousand at a time, and this morning a stranger had knocked a hundred and fifty grand off it with one wire and a headstone emoji, and it had never felt heavier in my life.

Because Gravedigger thought he'd found my price. And for half a second, so had I. That was the part I'd be carrying out of this kitchen.

He could keep the receipt. When I came to settle what I owed him, it wouldn't be in dollars.

9

ASKING

GHOST

Nolan surfaced from his laptop screen at four in the afternoon blinking like he'd come up from a long dive, and the first thing he did was take his glasses off and rub the bridge of his nose, which with Nolan meant bad news arranged very neatly.

"The money's clean." He set the glasses back on. "Which is the problem."

We were in Hawk's office, a generous name for a room with a desk, a gun safe, and a window that looked at the fence. Hawk sat behind the desk. Reaper stood at the window with his arms crossed, watching the yard the way he watched everything, completely, without appearing to. Tyler leaned on the wall beside Nolan with a tablet against his hip, and I stood near the door because sitting had stopped being a thing my body agreed to do somewhere around breakfast.

"Define clean." Hawk's hands stayed folded on the desk.

"The wire originated from a promotions LLC in Henderson. That LLC is owned by a holding company in Delaware. The holding company is owned by a trust, and the trust's paperwork ends at a registered agent who files a thousand of these a year." Nolan turned the laptop so the screen faced the desk, a diagram on it like a family tree where everybody had disowned everybody. "Three layers, all legal, all boring. I could dig for a month and hit a fourth layer that looks exactly like the first three."

"So we got nothing." My knee wanted to bounce. I was standing, so it settled for my fingers drumming my thigh.

"We got plenty." Tyler pushed off the wall. "Nobody builds three layers of nothing to move money into a fight ring. That structure costs real money to set up and real money to maintain. And he dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fighter's hospital bill the way you'd buy a man a beer." He looked at Hawk. "The circuit isn't a side operation anymore. It's funded, it's laundering at professional volume, and every week it runs, he banks more and graduates more fighters into whatever he's building them for."

The room went quiet, everybody working.

Hawk looked at Reaper. Reaper looked back. Nobody said anything, and a whole conversation happened anyway, the way it did between two men who'd been finishing each other's decisions for fifteen years. I'd watched them do it my whole patched life and never once cracked how. Then Reaper gave a single nod, and Hawk's eyes came off him and swept the rest of us.

"Church. Seven o'clock. Everyone off gate and work rotation." He stood. "And Ghost. Bring Caleb."

My drumming fingers stopped. "You're putting him in the room." Something in my gut tipped sideways, because Hawk didn't walk outsiders into Church to hand them good news. "Whatever this is, he's five days out of that pit and one day out of the medical bay⁠—"

"It's his neck on the table." Hawk came around the desk. "A man gets to be in the room for that."

By seven the Church room held more bodies than it was built for.

Thirty-four patches. I counted twice, because counting is what my head does with a full room whether I ask it to or not. Every chair taken, brothers and sisters standing two deep along the back wall, the framed phoenix on the wall watching all of it come up out of its flames. The gate crew and the riders out on client work were the only ones missing. Tank had the far corner, Tyler beside him. Irish sat with Nolan and Declan in a row, and for once in his life Irish wasn't talking. Blade had his usual seat, still as furniture. Trenza two down from him. Mateo stood against the side wall with his arms crossed, and his eyes kept going where mine kept going.

Caleb stood by the door.