Page 64 of Ghost’s Awakening

His knee stopped.

I felt his eyes before I looked up and met them. The half-grin was nowhere on him now, and what sat in its place had a blade under it, and the blade was pointed at me.

"How do you…?" His voice had dropped low and gone rough. "Cal. How do you know that?"

"Because it's the same story." I held his stare. "Renzo, this place is hell with a betting window. The men paying you are the ones who put your wife in that bed. Mine too. My brother. They find fighters with a name on the mats, and then something happens to somebody they love, and the bills start, and there's a warehouse out past Henderson paying cash on Thursdays. You following me? They build the hole, then they sell you the shovel. The ones who dig deep enough get one last offer."

He stared at me with his mouth partway open, and nothing came out of it. Behind his eyes I could see him running his own year back through this new machine. The timing of her accident. The flyer. The first fight.

"I'm telling you this for one reason." I dropped my voice to almost nothing. "Harlan told me I'm on first. And after tonight, there are no more Thursdays. No more fights, for any of us. The man at the middle of all this is going to pay every hospital bill in this building, whether he likes it or not. I'll make him."

"Cal, what the hell are you⁠—"

The curtain at the end of the hall snapped aside on its rings, and Harlan filled the gap.

My head came around fast. Too much, too loud. The words were still hanging in the hallway air with nothing to hide behind, and I ran the last ten seconds back, hunting how far they'd carried, whether the curtain had moved before he touched it.

But Harlan's face was doing what it always did, which was nothing. Shaved head, fence-post forearms, the doorway too small around him.

"Rossi." My real name, out of his mouth for the first time, flat as a plate. "You're on."

I stood and rolled my shoulders loose.

"Don't disappoint the boss." His eyes moved from me to Renzo and back, and something worked behind them. "He's watching tonight. Again. And for the love of everything, if you win, just take what he offers you."

"You're not sure I can win?"

"You'll see what I mean." He turned sideways to let me past, and up close the muscles in his jaw stood out in cords. "Go."

Harlan didn't walk me in this time.

He'd peeled off at the mouth of the hall with two words about handling something in the back, and so I came out onto the main floor alone, and the noise hit me alone.

Two weeks away, and the floor had grown.

The heat arrived first, three hundred bodies' worth of it sitting on my skin before I'd cleared the hall. Then the smell, smoke and old beer, the copper underneath that never left. But the sound was bigger. Two hundred voices used to pack this place to the rafters. Tonight it was pushing three hundred, bodies doubled along the walls, and a rope line ran from the back hall to the ring steps, a cleared lane through the crush. The place had been dressed up for a show.

More men in black, too. Twelve on the floor was the number I knew from months of Thursdays. Tonight I quit counting at twenty.

I went up the three plywood steps, and the sodium lamps came on, hard yellow-white, and the roar rose with the light and rattled my teeth. The mat was tacky under my bare feet. Fresh mop, old blood. Some things they didn't change, even tonight.

I swung my arms across my body and started the blood moving. Deep lunge, switch, deep lunge. My hamstrings woke sore in the good way, a week of Blade's drills still living in them. And while I warmed up, I looked at what wasn't there.

No opponent.

Nobody on the far steps, no name running through the front rows for odds. Just the ref in his corner, and the announcer, a thin man with a gray ponytail who had never once in seventeen nights stood still, standing dead still against the ropes with his hands folded. A man told where to stand and how. He wasn't even chewing. He always chewed.

High over the center of the ring, up where the lamps hung off their clamps, the announcer's mic hung dead on its cable. Small, silver, fifteen feet above the mat, swaying a little in the rising heat. Every Thursday I'd ever fought, that mic came down between bouts so the ponytail could talk into it.

That mic was the whole plan. Nolan's ears lived inside its wire. Win, wait for it to come down, and put one word into it.

It hadn't moved all night. I ran the evening back and couldn't find one announcement that had come out of it, and I'd been too deep in tape and Renzo to clock it.

My mouth went dry a beat before I could've said why.

"Welcome, everyone!"

The voice came down from everywhere at once, the horn speakers slamming awake overhead, and the crowd cut out like a thrown breaker. Deep. Unhurried. I felt it in the floor through the soles of my feet before my ears finished with it.