Page 9 of Ghost’s Awakening

The corridor swallowed the noise. Cool, damp, one fluorescent tube stuttering at the far end. Then, ahead, voices. And under the voices, the wet smack of a fist finding a body. A grunt. Another. I'd heard that sound enough times to know it from thirty feet.

I moved faster. The corridor turned, turned again, the voices closer now, one of them saying something about what happens to fighters who think they can say no.

I came around the corner into a hall and stopped.

Two enforcers. Monk between them, one behind him wrenching his arms up, the other standing over him with knuckles gone dark. The beaten man from the ring slumped against the far wall, barely moving.

Monk's face was a wreck. Split lip, one eye swelling, blood running off his chin. His chest bare, bruises stacked on bruises. But his eyes were open and locked on the man in front of him, and there was nothing in them that would kneel and nothing that would beg. Just a man who'd already decided what he'd do and what he wouldn't, waiting to take whatever came.

The standing enforcer drew his fist back.

I closed the gap from behind him in three steps. My head had already picked the move, something I'd watched Irish pull once. I dropped into a crouch, hooked both hands around the man's ankles, and hauled back with everything I had.

Gravity took the rest. His upper body pitched forward with no time to get a sound out, and his face met the concrete. The wet crack of it told me he was done.

The yank had sent the falling enforcer crashing into Monk, hard enough to knock both him and the man pinning his arms a step back.

Monk didn't waste the opportunity. He drove backward off both legs and slammed the big man into the wall behind them, and the grip the brute had on him broke. Monk dropped into a crouch and came around spinning, one leg whipping up straight into the man's chin. The kick snapped the thug's head back into the wall behind him, and the crack of skull on cinder block was the last of it. He slid down the block and folded on the floor, out cold.

I'd never seen a body move like that. I stared at Monk. He turned and stared at me.

Closer than the crowd, closer than the ring. Close enough to see the blood drying on his chin, the sweat sliding into the cut over his eye. His breathing was controlled through all of it, steady, chosen, a man running his own panic on a leash.

His eyes. Dark brown, and on me. Not skating past the way everyone's did, but landing. Staying. Seeing me.

"Move." My voice came out rougher than I meant.

He nodded once.

We ran.

I navigated on instinct. The width of the halls, the drift of the air, the way the sound changed as we pushed deeper and then started bending toward an outside wall.

"There's more of them." Monk, low, right beside me now, coming up from behind, his footsteps almost as quiet as mine. "Staging area's to the left. Two men in it, at least."

"Nearest exterior door?"

"South corridor. Metal door, push bar. Saw it my first night." A beat, his breathing levelled. "Never tried it."

"We try it now."

"Right at the junction, then straight."

We went into the south corridor. Behind us, shouting, boots on concrete, the search bleeding off the main floor into the back. They'd found the two men on the ground.

"Who are you?" He asked it without slowing. Flat, direct, like following a stranger through a locked building at least bought him a name.

"Ghost."

"That's not a name."

"It's the only one that matters right now."

"The giant man on the mezzanine. You know him?"

"He's why I was here tonight."

He took that in stride. Three steps. Four. "He's the one who put my brother in the hospital. I know it now."