6. Protection #2
"That psycho with the grave fetish is recruiting fighters.
Using the pit like a tryout. Forcing people in.
" Each sentence came down harder than the one before it.
"How is he not in prison? How is a man running fight rings and putting people in hospitals walking around free?
And what's your crew's part in this? How long has it been going on?
And why—" He turned toward Liam, and his hand almost reached for his brother's face before he caught it, fingers stopping an inch from the pillow and drawing back. "Why him? Why us? What did we do?"
The last word cracked. He shut his mouth. I watched him pull air in through his nose, hold it, then he let it out slowly through his lips. The same controlled breathing from the medical bay.
I didn't answer for a few seconds. Not to pick my words. Because looking at him in that chair, bloody and barefoot, his hands held off his brother's because he'd decided they were too dirty… Something in me turned over, from wanting to explain to wanting to take apart whoever had done this to him.
I didn't feel pity toward him. Caleb would have chewed through anyone who handed him that. It was fury, hot and personal, pointed at the men who'd worked him over, at the operation that had put Liam in that bed, at Gravedigger for breathing.
I crossed the room. His eyes tracked me. I stopped near the foot of the bed, close enough to talk low, far enough that he didn't have to crane up at me.
"Gravedigger's using the pit to recruit fighters into something bigger.
We're sure of it now. And I think you're right, he forces people in.
He builds the debt, then he builds the only road out of it.
" I looked at Liam. The sheet rising and falling.
The small green numbers keeping his heartbeat.
"He put your brother here to put you in that ring. You were never random."
His jaw tightened. He didn't interrupt.
"For years the man was untouchable. He had people inside federal law enforcement, corrupted FBI agents, a badge that scrubbed his record and looked the other way.
That's finished. The agents who covered for him are dead, and he's got no friends left in any agency.
" My hands were at my sides, and I caught myself gripping my own fingers white.
I let go. "But now he's desperate. And desperate men build fast and ugly.
Whatever he's putting together out there, if we give him the time to finish it, the next people he hurts won't be fighters in a warehouse. It'll be anyone standing in his way."
I took a breath. I was making promises that hadn't been to a vote at Church, and I knew it, and I couldn't stop.
"We're going to end this. Him. All of it."
Caleb was looking at Liam. For a long beat I thought he wasn't going to answer, that he'd heard all of it and decided it wasn't enough, or that it was just noise from a stranger making claims he couldn't back.
I wouldn't have blamed him. I'd known him less than a day.
He had no reason to trust me, or my brothers, or any of it.
Then I caught it. A small movement, nearly nothing. His little finger, the one nearest Liam's hand, curled an inch closer over the sheet. Still not touching, but narrowing the gap.
"How'd you figure out they were recruiting?" I kept my voice low.
Caleb turned his head and looked at me. My stomach dropped an inch.
"They found me." His voice dropped into something darker.
No fear in it. Something harder than fear.
"Before I got inside. Four of them on three bikes.
One got off, the rest stayed mounted. The one who talked had pit bruises.
Healing split lip, week-old mark over the eye. He'd been in the ring too."
He paused. His eyes went to Liam and back to me.
"That Gravebitch's thug told me his boss wants me back in the pit in two weeks."
I almost choked. My brain snagged on Gravebitch for half a second and I had to wrestle down the wildly wrong urge to grin, because this was not the time, but the sheer nerve of calling Victor Graves that in a room with a ventilator running was something I was going to be keeping for a long while.
"He told me the two enforcers from the corridor are down. One dead. One brain-damaged." His voice went flat. "They think I did both. They don't know about you."
The weight of that came down on me. They didn't know I'd been there. My work in that corridor, the ankle sweep that dropped the first man headfirst onto concrete, they'd pinned it on Caleb. But Gravedigger did see me snooping. The Phoenixes were not invisible.
And it meant Caleb was carrying a body count that was half mine.
"Caleb—"
"Two weeks." He cut across me. "Two weeks, or Liam and I find out what comes next. Those were the guy's words." He looked at his brother. "I don't know which is worse. That I killed someone in that corridor. Or that it made the man who put Liam here want me more."
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it, saw the screen, held up a finger to Caleb, and stepped back through the door, easing it to a crack behind me.
The corridor was empty but for the squeak of a cart somewhere off down the hall.
"Status, Ghost." Hawk's voice, flat and demanding and exactly itself.
"I'm with Caleb. He's at UMC, with his brother.
He's safe. We all are." It came in a rush.
"Hawk, Gravedigger's men got to Caleb before he made it inside.
Delivered a message. He's got two weeks before they want him back in the pit.
They're recruiting him, it's confirmed. And there are others, other fighters pulled in the same way, and his brother's lying right there with a tube down his?—"
"Ghost." Hawk cut clean through it. "Gravedigger wants him.
Gravedigger also saw you, which means he knows we're watching.
That makes this dangerous for both of you.
" A pause. "I can hear you want to protect this kid.
I heard it the second you opened your mouth in Church.
So I'm going to ask you a straight question and I want a straight answer. "
I swallowed.
"What are your thoughts?"
"He's a great asset, Hawk." The tactical answer.
The one that made sense, that squared the time and the fuel and the four brothers who'd crossed the city.
"He's been inside the operation. He can give us names, locations, how the circuit moves.
He wants Gravedigger finished more than we do.
He fights, he's smart, he had the recruitment angle worked out. He could be?—"
"And that's all." Hawk's voice didn't rise. It didn't shift at all. But it landed like a hand closing over a wheel. "You see this kid as an asset. A weapon you're pointing at Gravedigger."
The quiet after that one was mine, and it was ugly, and Hawk let it sit.
I'd given him the tactical answer because the tactical answer was easier than the true one, and he'd seen through it in a sentence, the way he saw through everything.
Because the true one was that thing turning over in me every time Caleb's eyes found mine.
It was a man's bloody hands held off his brother's clean ones.
It was that I'd crossed the whole city with the throttle pinned and the only thing in my head the entire way had been his face.
"No." It came out louder than I'd ever spoken to Hawk. Firmer. "He's not that. I don't want to recruit him. I want to help him." My back straightened against the corridor wall. "He's under my protection, Hawk. Whatever that means and whatever it costs."
Hawk didn't drag the silence this time. "Good. That's what I needed to hear." A beat. "Come back when you're done. Finish your report. And bring him with you, if he'll come."
The line went dead.
I pocketed the phone. Leaned my head back against the wall. Closed my eyes.
In through the nose. Hold for four. Out through the mouth. The pattern I'd watched Caleb run twice now, the one his body fell into when the rest of him was coming apart. I'd picked it up somewhere without deciding to.
I opened my eyes. Footsteps down the corridor, firm and set. The nurse rounded the corner, glasses on, pen in hand, coming for 217 at a pace that said five minutes was five minutes.
I pushed off the wall and walked back into the room with the hiss-clicks, the green numbers and the bruised man in the chair who still hadn't touched his brother's hand.
Caleb looked up.
"We need to go." I kept my voice under the ventilator. "But I'm not leaving without you. Not this time."
He held my eyes. The crack was still there, running through the anger and the grief and the exhaustion. But something else sat behind it now. Short of trust. Closer to the look he'd given me in the ring ten hours ago, when his eyes found mine through two hundred strangers.
Recognition. The decision to stop doing this alone.
He stood. Winced at the pain. Leaned down and pressed his forehead to Liam's, careful, the lightest touch he could make it, his lips moving with no sound behind them.
Then he straightened, stepped back from the bed, and came toward me.
The ventilator kept its rhythm. Hiss-click. Hiss-click. The green numbers held.
And I held the door open and let him through.