Page 8 of Ghost’s Awakening

"They're not really gonna⁠—"

"Shut up and watch."

They ordered Monk to finish him. The announcer put it through the horns like it was a bout, and the command was plain, and the answer was even plainer.

Monk said no.

My breath snagged. I'd watched men buckle under pressure before. Watched them bend, bargain, find the road that kept them breathing even when it cost them something they'd never buy back. This one looked at the men who owned his time and his sweat and his blood and told them no.

A voice boomed down from the mezzanine, deep enough to move the air, to land low in me before the words did.

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

I looked up. The glass stood open. The mezzanine wasn't empty anymore.

Recognition hit my blood before my eyes even reached his face. My body knew before I did, the way your foot finds the brake before your head sees the wall. Adrenaline dumped through me. My heartbeat kicked into my ears. Every muscle locked into that still, humming readiness that comes right before violence or a sprint.

Gravedigger. Victor Graves, at the rail, looking down at the ring.

The man who killed Whitfield in her own safe house. Who smiled at Hawk with the smile that was worse than his gun, told him next time might go differently, and walked off into the desert like he'd bought it.

He was watching Monk. And Monk was looking back up at him, that flat defiance breaking apart as I watched, something raw flooding in under it. Whatever the words about UMC meant, they'd gone deep enough to drag the whole point of why he was in this room back up.

He refused again. The two enforcers moved, one fist into his gut, then both of them driving Monk back into the hemp with the beaten man dragged along behind.

His eyes weren't on the mezzanine now. As they shoved him into the ropes, he swept the crowd.

His dark brown eyes found me.

They carried everything I'd just watched land on him. The rage, the fear, the shock after his world had shrunk and sharpened in the space of one sentence. He looked at me and I looked at him and the crowd between us collapsed to nothing, and for one beat I held it, fixed in place.

Something moved in me I didn't recognize. Nothing I'd ever drilled myself to run. Something with no name on it at all.

One beat. Two.

I should have cut it. Every hour Blade ever put into me said drop your eyes, shift your weight, blend. I held his gaze anyway. Because this man had just refused to kill someone and was about to bleed for it, and he was looking at me like I was the only real thing in the building.

Then one of the brutes pulled on his arm. My training caught up and I flicked my eyes up, reflex, checking the threat, past his shoulder to the rail.

Gravedigger wasn't watching Monk. He was scanning the crowd, running the line down from Monk's face into the bodies. Hunting the far end of it.

His eyes found mine.

I watched it land. No alarm. No surprise. Just the small dark eyes going from sweeping to locked. He knew my face. He'd seen it the last time we took his world apart, and Gravedigger didn't lose faces.

I dropped between two bodies. Put the man beside me between us. Slid left. Disappeared.

But it was too late. I heard it before I understood it. Metal, rolling through the building from everywhere at once. Chains dragged through handles. Padlocks snapping shut. Bolts driving home. The front and staff doors sealing.

Lockdown.

My heart hammered. My hands stayed steady. My brain was everywhere and my body was locked in, and that's the trade I'd learned to make. Let the thoughts scatter as far and fast as they need to, so long as the body stays quiet. The thoughts ran distances and enforcer positions and the odds of a sealed room. The body breathed even and slid through the crowd, every step chosen for the cover it bought.

The announcer said something about a technical delay. A distraction. The crowd grumbled and stayed put. Most of them hadn't clocked what just happened. They would.

Enforcers peeled off their stations, six of the twelve, working in pairs, starting where Gravedigger last had me and sweeping outward in a grid. Ninety seconds, maybe, before a pair would reach me.

I angled for the northwest corridor. The enforcer in the mouth of it watched the crowd, not the space behind him, his eyes sweeping faces left to right, pause, reset. Two-second gap. I closed in behind four guys heading for the bar, wore them like a screen, and slipped past his shoulder on the reset. Close enough to smell his deodorant.