Chapter 38 Lance
Lance
It takes everything in me to go to the Lye.
Percy is on the table when I get there.
He’s curled on his side, one arm tucked against his ribs, the other hanging off the edge like he doesn’t have the strength to pull it back up. His eye is swollen on the left side. His breathing is wet and shallow. The kind of breathing that means something inside isn’t working right.
I crouch beside him, and his good eye finds me.
“Excalibur,” he rasps.
“Don’t talk.”
“He was big.”
“I said don’t talk.”
His mouth twitches, and there’s blood on his teeth. “You should see the other guy.”
“Percy.”
“He does look worse. Promise.”
He’s trying to grin. Eighteen years old with a face that looks like raw meat and he’s trying to grin at me, because that’s what I taught him to do. Shake it off. Get back up. Pretend the pain is temporary.
I’m a hell of a teacher.
My hand hovers over his shoulder, wanting to grip it, wanting to tell him something that matters. The medic, if you can call him that, a guy Benny pays to stitch wounds and keep his mouth shut, shoulders past me with gauze and a penlight, and I step back.
He’s just a kid. A kid I trained, knowing he’d be eaten alive.
I stare at his broken face and think about Art on the porch this morning. The easy smile. The casual tone. The way he delivered the fight order like it was a calendar reminder.
Tonight. Midnight. Lose.
But he forgets I know him well, even if this new version is wearing a different mask. And I know he’s hurting, and he’s lost, and he’s drowning and letting the tide take him under. The same way I know this is my punishment.
Congratulations, Art. Message received.
The Lye is louder than usual. I hear it through the concrete walls as I tape my hands in the back room, the roar of the crowd swelling and dipping like the moon with the tide. Clearly, Percy was the undercard, and now it’s my turn.
Fight, dog, fight.
Benny appears in the doorway, and I tense.
“Big night,” he says, leaning against the frame. “Myrddin’s here. VIP section…with Art.”
I keep wrapping my hands. Left, then right. Pull tight. Tuck the end. If I look at him, I’ll say something I can’t take back.
“You know what’s expected,” Benny continues. “You go in, you take what’s coming, and you go down in the third. Myrddin wants a show, he’s got important people betting on tonight’s fight.”
“And if I don’t?”
Benny’s expression doesn’t change, but something shifts behind his eyes. “Then it’s not just you who pays. You know how this works, Lance.”
I know how this works.
Benny leaves and I sit on the bench, my taped fists resting on my knees, and I try to do the thing I’ve always done before a fight. Turn it off. Find the quiet place in my head where nothing hurts and nothing matters and I’m just a body doing a job.
But I can’t find it.
Every time I reach for the numbness, I feel her hands on my face in my mom’s garden. Her voice in the dark. Promise everything will be okay? The weight of her against my chest in the armchair.
So when I walk out to the cage, I walk out awake. Every sound is sharp. The crowd pressing against the chain-link fencing, faces distorted in the dim light, mouths open, screaming for blood they didn’t pay enough to spill themselves. The smell of sweat and money and concrete.
The cage door opens and I step in.
My opponent is already inside, and when I see who it is, I falter.
Graves.
He’s the one they used to train me up at the beginning of all this. The one they used to break people before I became their shiny new sword. He’s six-four, easy, with a shaved head, and hands the size of dinner plates. I wasn’t sure he was even still alive until this very moment.
I scan the VIP section before the bell.
My breath whooshes out of me when I see Brutus Myrddin in the flesh.
The last time I saw him was at Marcus Montgomery’s funeral, standing off in the distance, blending in with the trees while we buried the man he helped my father steal from.
He looks the same. Shoulder-length black hair tucked behind his ears, expensive suit, sitting in a leather chair someone must have hauled down here for him like he’s watching opera.
He’s got a drink in his hand and a smile on his face, and he’s leaning in to listen to something being said by the person next to him.
When I realize who it is, my stomach bottoms out.
Art is beside him.
My best friend. Sitting beside the man who’s owned me for six years, hunched forward with his elbows on his knees, his jaw tight, his eyes on the cage. He doesn’t look comfortable. But he doesn’t look away, either.
Standing behind Myrddin like a shadow, and bending to murmur something in Art’s ear, is Bors. That same motherfucker who stalked Genevieve, who scared her half to death and made her have panic attacks on her linoleum floor.
The betrayal settles in my back like a knife.
Art’s far more complicit than I had imagined.
The bell rings.
Graves comes in fast. The first hit catches me in the ribs, and I let it land, because that’s the job.
Take what’s coming. Go down in the third.
The second hit finds my jaw, and my vision goes white at the edges.
I taste copper. My ears ring. Somewhere in the VIP section, Myrddin is probably sipping his drink.
I wonder if Art’s hurting or satisfied watching me get the shit beat out of me.
The next few minutes come in violent flashes.
Graves hits me in the stomach, and I double over, breath leaving in a rush.
An uppercut snaps my head back, and I stumble into the cage wall, the chain-link biting into my shoulders.
He drives a knee into my side, and something pops.
Fuck, that hurt.
I’m on one knee. The crowd is screaming. I spit blood onto the mat and think about Genevieve’s face in the morning when she’s half asleep, the sunlight casting little sparkles on her freckles.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
I get up.
Graves hits me again and I take it. And again.
And again. Each impact is a specific, located thing.
Not the blur I’m used to. Not the numb machine absorbing damage on autopilot.
I feel every knuckle, every point of contact, every rib bending under the force.
I feel it because I can’t turn off the part of me that feels anymore, and that part has her name written through it like letters carved in stone.
This is what you wanted, right? I think at Art, at Myrddin, at the whole sick circus. A show?
The third round starts. This is where I’m supposed to drop. Take a clean hit, drop, stay down. Convincing enough for Myrddin’s big players, and pathetic enough to satisfy whatever point Art’s trying to make.
I set my feet to take the fall.
And then I see her, and everything else falls away.
Genevieve’s at the back of the room. On the left side, near the tunnel entrance nobody uses, pressed against the wall in one of my hoodies with her hair tucked away.
Blending the way you can only blend when you know a space well enough to understand its blind spots.
She bartends above this room. She’s mopped these floors.
She knows the rhythm, the crowd, the noise. She’s not a stranger here.
And then I see Bors.
My heart stops.
He’s moved from VIP. He’s at the edge of the crowd, making his way toward the left wall with the calm, deliberate pace of a man who’s spotted prey. His eyes are fixed on the same point mine just were, and his hand is reaching into his jacket.
Everything after that is very simple.
Graves swings. I catch his fist.
The confusion on his face lasts about a second. Long enough for me to register that Myrddin is on his feet in VIP, that Art’s mouth is open, that Benny is shouting something I can’t hear over the blood rushing in my ears.
I don’t become Excalibur.
Excalibur is cold and sharp, and has, apparently, been wielded by Art for longer than I knew.
What I become doesn’t have a name because it operates below language, in the part of the brain that existed before humans learned to speak, where the only thought is her and the only directive is move.
I break Graves in three strikes. Throat. Temple. Jaw. He hits the mat and stays there.
The crowd goes insane. They think it’s part of the show. Let them.
I hit the cage door with my shoulder. It’s locked from the outside, because of course it is, so I climb.
The chain-link bites into my fingers, my taped hands slipping on the metal, and I haul myself over the top and drop to the concrete on the other side.
My ribs scream, and I’m pretty sure a few are broken, but I don’t care.
People scatter. Someone grabs my arm and I put them down without looking, already moving, already running toward the left wall where Bors is closing the distance and Genevieve still doesn’t realize he’s coming.
Bors sees me first.
He turns, and there’s a moment where our eyes meet across the crowd, and I watch him calculate. I’ve got six inches on him and at least thirty pounds, but he definitely has a weapon in his jacket.
I’ve got blood in my mouth and cracked ribs and the absolute certainty that if he takes one more step toward her, I will remove him from the earth.
He takes the step.
I cover the distance in seconds. He reaches into his jacket and I catch his wrist before his hand clears the fabric.
I twist, feel the joint give, hear the sound it makes.
The weapon clatters to the floor. His other hand comes up and I’m inside it, too close for him to swing, my forearm against his throat, driving him backward into the wall.
His pale eyes go wide. The same eyes that watched her through the trees. That tracked her through town. That made her afraid to sleep alone.
I don’t make it dramatic. I don’t make it slow. I do what I was trained to do, efficiently and without hesitation, and when it’s done, Bors slides down the wall and doesn’t get up.
My hands are steady. That’s the worst part. Six years of this, and my hands are always steady after.
The Lye erupts. The crowd doesn’t know what’s happening anymore.
Benny is screaming. Someone tips a table and bottles shatter across the concrete.
In VIP, Myrddin is saying something to Art, and Art is standing, horror painted across his face, and none of it matters because I’m already turning to her.
Genevieve is staring at me. Her face is white. Her eyes are on my hands.
“We have to go,” I say. My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. “Right now.”
She doesn’t move. And for one sick second, I think this is the part where she meets the monster and runs.
“Genevieve.”
Her chin lifts. Her jaw sets. And there she is, the woman who called me a dog and meant it, who said she sees me and doesn’t care about the rest.
The Queen.
“Then stop standing there and move.” She grabs my hand and we run.
Back through the tunnel she came in. The concrete is damp and the lights are sparse, one bare bulb every twenty feet, and our footsteps echo off the walls.
She’s fast, faster than I expected, and later I’ll reflect on how thankful I am that I made her run every day, but right now she doesn’t let go of my hand.
Her grip is so tight I feel her pulse in her fingers.
We come out behind Montgomery Manor into cold air and wet grass and a sky full of stars that don’t give a shit about what just happened.
I pull out my phone with a shaking hand and dial Paxton.
He answers on the first ring.
“It’s tonight,” I say. “Right now. It has to be right now.”
There’s a pause. Then Paxton’s voice, calm and surgical: “Twenty minutes. The address I gave you. Don’t stop for anything.”
He hangs up. That’s Pax. No questions. Just the plan.
We keep moving, and we don’t stop until I’m confident no one will find us.
Genevieve is leaning against a tree, breath coming in little puffy clouds, still gripping my hand like she’s daring me to pull away. She’s shaking. We’re both covered in someone else’s blood and the adrenaline is crashing and the reality of what I just did is settling in like cold water.
I killed a man tonight. Again.
But this time, I didn’t reach for the numbness or try to memorize something beautiful to hold on to before I did it.
I just looked at her.
She reaches up and touches my face. Her fingers come away red, and she stares at them for a second before wiping them on her jacket like it’s nothing. Like blood is just another thing she’s learned to handle since she moved to this town.
“You’re hurt,” she says.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re a terrible liar.” She sniffs. “I saw what happened to you.”
“I will be. Fine. Eventually.”
She steps closer. Cups my jaw with both hands, tilting my face to check the damage, and her touch is so careful it almost breaks me worse than anything Graves did.
“You shouldn’t have come,” I say.
Her eyes snap to mine. “They don’t get to put you in a cage and get away with it, Lance. Not anymore.”
Something cracks in my chest that has nothing to do with my ribs.
I pull her into me, one arm around her waist, the other cupping the back of her head, and I hold her in the dark while somewhere underground, the world I’ve been trapped in for six years burns.
She presses her face into my chest, still bare from the fight, and she holds on like I’m something worth keeping.
“Boston,” I say into her hair. “Tonight.”
She nods against me.
“We can’t stay here.”
“Then let’s move.”