Page 4 of Ghost’s Awakening

But my legs were already under him. Both of my feet planted on his stomach and chest before we'd finished falling, my legs bent and loaded. His momentum carried him forward, rolling him over me, and I shoved with everything I had.

He went flying over the edge of the platform. The scream that tore out of him was raw and involuntary. Spectators scrambled back, beer bursting across the concrete, bottles clattering as people shoved to clear the spot where he'd land.

The Jackal hit the floor with a dense, final slam that turned my stomach.

The roll had brought me from my back to my feet. I turned toward the crash.

One of the Jackal's arms was flung wide, palm up. His chest dragged in a slow breath. The landing had clearly knocked the air out of him. He was alive, but he wasn't getting up off that floor tonight by himself.

The room came apart. Two hundred people up on their feet at once, a wall of sound that shoved in from every side and set the work lights swinging on their chains, making the shadows tilt and slide. Down front, bills snapped from fist to fist, men squaring up their bets before the ref had even finished. A bottle tipped off somebody's seat and spun across the concrete, ringing thin and bright under all that noise.

The ref crouched over the Jackal, counting, his hand chopping the air. I stood in my corner and let my breath in and out, hauling the smoke-thick air down into lungs that had gone raw somewhere in the last ninety seconds. Sweat slid into the old scar above my eyebrow. The muscles in my thighs were still jumping from shoving a grown man. The rope burn across my shoulder blade had woken back up the moment I hit the mat during the roll, a hot stripe I'd be feeling every time I raised that arm for a week.

My fists shook when I unclenched them. From the after, not the impact, the adrenaline draining off and leaving everything loose and too bright at the edges.

I hadn't wanted to end the fight like that. A man hauled off a platform onto bare concrete breaks in ways that don't knit back together, and I'd thrown him knowing it. But a loss paid seven hundred. A win paid four grand. And four grand was another week of the machines breathing for Liam.

Two guys in stained shirts climbed up and hauled the Jackal off toward the back by his arms, his heels carving twin smears through the spilled beer. The crowd was already bored of him, the roar sliding back down toward its baseline hum, hungry for the next thing.

I rolled my shoulders loose, felt the tape pull tight over my knuckles, and turned for the ring's exit steps. The mat had gone tacky and sticky under my bare feet.

The speakers crackled to life.

"Hold up, hold up!" The announcer shouted, his voice riding over the settling noise. "Don't put your money away! We're holding a bonus bout for our undefeated champion!"

The cold went through me all at once.

Harlan was waiting at the foot of the steps, mouth tight, something moved into his eyes that hadn't been there when he'd told me not to bore the crowd.

"New fight." He spoke low, just for me. "Boss wants you in."

My pulse knocked against the tape on my wrists. "One fight, Harlan. That was the deal."

"I know what the deal was." A muscle ticked at the side of his neck. Whatever was coming, it cost him. "Just… be smart. Please."

The please dropped through me and kept on going. Harlan didn't say please. Harlan gave orders, blocked doorways, made sure fighters got to the ring, kept his face nailed shut. The word came out wrong in his mouth, and the wrongness of it told me everything about what was coming next.

Two huge and muscular enforcers came up from the opposite steps hauling a man between them. Mid-twenties. Already wrecked. The left side of his face was so swollen it shut over one eye. Blood dried above his ear, his wraps days old and coming apart. They dumped him at the center of the ring and he stayed on his knees, swaying, his one good eye fixed on nothing.

The crowd dropped off. The roar, the shouting, the slap of palms on wood, all of it drained out and left something lower and uglier behind. People shifting in their seats. I noticed a few of them finding somewhere else to look.

"Monk. Your opponent's waiting." The announcement blared out.

I looked at the man on his knees. Up close I could smell him over the bleach and the beer. He reeked of copper and stale sweat and something sourer underneath it. His breath came wet and dragging, forced out through a nose broken badly enough to keep his mouth hanging open. His shoulders curled inward. There was nothing left in him.

"No." I didn't wait for the rest of the request. It came out flat and clear and louder than I meant it to. "I'm not doing this."

A voice came down from overhead, magnified by a mic that shared the announcer's speakers. Deep and unhurried, a low rumble I felt in my back teeth a half-beat before the words caught up.

"Finish him, Monk. Or we go check on Liam at UMC."

My breath stopped.

I looked up. A mezzanine rode above the crowd. Tinted glass panels, a private box I'd noticed my first night and never once seen used. One panel stood open now. A man at the rail.

The biggest man I'd ever laid eyes on. His shoulders crowded the open panel, near enough to fill it, and even from down on the floor he read as someone who'd have to turn sideways through a normal door. A heavy, weathered face, the jaw thick and set hard. His eyes were small for all that bulk, dark, and they sat on me without a flicker of hurry, like he'd already watched how this ended and was only giving me the time to catch up to him. A plain black leather jacket over a dark shirt. There was nothing on him to say who he was or what he ran. Somehow the blankness of it landed worse than any name would have.

He looked at me the way you look at something you own.