9. Asking #2
I hadn't decided to. That's the honest report. I'd had a position built all afternoon, a good one, tactical, load-bearing, and the plan was to deliver it in four calm sentences, and instead my heart was going like a two-stroke and the words came out at speed.
"Gravedigger's seen my face." Okay. Fine.
That was the start I'd rehearsed. "Five nights ago he clocked me in that building because I held a look too long, and the look I held too long was at Caleb, so if there is one thread in the entire world that connects this club to that fighter, it's me, it already exists, and we're talking about sending Caleb into a sealed building owned by a man whose whole talent is pulling threads—" Breathe, Jake.
"—and if he pulls that one, if anybody in that room saw the extraction, saw the bikes, saw anything, then Caleb isn't an asset inside an operation, he's a hostage standing in a locked box miles from any help, and the last man who disappointed Gravedigger in that ring got dragged in half-dead as a prop, and?—"
"Ghost." Hawk. Level.
"—and he's been here five days." It came out before the brake line caught.
Louder than the rest. The room heard the difference, I heard them hear it, thirty-four faces and every one of them turning toward me with the same slow math, and Irish's eyebrows were climbing and Kai had gone soft-eyed in the way I hated because it meant he was ahead of me, and I stood there with my ears burning and finished the sentence because leaving it hanging would've been worse.
"Five days, and that place has already tried to make him a body once.
I watched them drag a man into that ring who said no to Gravedigger.
I'm not building a plan where we hand him back the only person who ever?—"
I shut my mouth.
The clock on the wall was extremely loud.
"Where we hand him back a man who said no," I finished, flat, which fooled exactly nobody, least of all the man standing at the door, whose eyes I could feel on the side of my face like heat off an engine, and whose expression I could not afford to check.
"Your concern's on the record." Hawk let a beat pass, and there was no mockery anywhere in him, which somehow made it worse. "The thread is real. It's why Ghost will never be inside that building on his own again, and why the plan gets built to account for it. Anything else?"
Mateo's arms uncrossed at the wall. Crossed again. He didn't speak.
"Hands, then. First vote. The circuit comes down."
Thirty-four hands. Even mine. Even Mateo's.
"Second vote. The plan goes through Caleb."
Hands went up around that table like a wave coming down it. Tank. Blade. Irish, slower, watching me while he did it. Trenza, high and steady. Reaper. All down the line, hand after hand after hand.
I kept mine on the table.
Across the room, against the side wall, Mateo kept his down too. Hawk's eyes found him.
"Mateo. You're a no. The table hears reasons if you've got them."
The kid's jaw worked. He looked at Caleb, and at me, and at the floor. "I don't have one that makes sense out loud." His shoulders pulled in. "It just sits wrong. That's all I've got."
"Then it sits wrong on the record." Hawk didn't push. He turned last to me, and he didn't ask, because everybody in that room already had my reasons, they'd arrived at two hundred words a minute with my ears on fire behind them.
"Thirty-two for, two against. Motion carries." Hawk's knuckles came down on the wood once, our whole gavel. Then his eyes went to the door. "Caleb. The table's voted to ask. So I'm asking."
Caleb came off the wall by an inch. He looked down the length of the table, all those faces, all that leather, and his voice came out the way it had come out of him in the ring five nights ago, flat and clear and pitched to carry.
"I was going back into that pit whether you voted or not.
He knows where my brother sleeps." He let that land.
"The only thing tonight changes is that now I walk in with thirty people at my back instead of none.
" His eyes crossed the room and hit mine, held for half a second, and moved off. "I'm in."
"Then Church is done. Planning starts tomorrow, seven sharp, this room." Hawk swept the table one last time. "Nine days. We use every one of them."
Chairs scraped. The room came apart into noise and motion, and I sat there with my hand still flat on the table where my no vote had lived, and watched Caleb push off the wall and walk out the door without looking at me again.
He was waiting in the corridor.
Well. Waiting is the wrong word. He was standing in the corridor in the way a wall stands in a corridor, and the brothers filing out of Church took one read of his face and found other routes to the common room.
I came out last and he fell into step beside me and neither of us said anything until the hallway emptied.
"Thirty-two to two." His voice stayed level, which from Caleb was a warning sign I'd learned by day three. "You told me this morning he'd pay in blood. First chance anyone gives you to make that real, and your hand stays on the table."
"It's not about?—"
"You went into that pit alone with no comms five nights ago.
" He stopped walking. Turned. The corridor light sat hard on the healing cut through his eyebrow.
"That was fine. That was a regular Tuesday for you.
But I go in with thirty-four people building the ground under me, and that's the plan you can't vote for. "
"That's different."
"How?" One word, dropped flat between us like a dumbbell.
And there it was. The question with the true answer standing right behind it, and the true answer was enormous and had my name on it and I could no more say it in that corridor than I could lift the building. So my mouth, which never once in my life has run out of words, produced nothing at all.
Caleb watched me not answer. Something shifted in his face, and it wasn't anger anymore, it was worse, it was disappointment adding me up.
"That's what I thought." He stepped past me. "Tell Hawk I'll be at planning at seven."
I stood in the empty corridor for a long time, listening to his footsteps go, and my brain, my endless, roaring, twelve-channel brain, had absolutely nothing to offer.
Sleep and I gave up on each other around one in the morning.
I'd run it every way a thing can be run.
Ceiling. Left side. Right side. Ceiling again.
Every time I closed my eyes the projector kicked on and played the same footage, Caleb walking through a steel door into a building full of Gravedigger's men, the door swinging shut, the chains going on, and me on the outside with my one thread already pulled.
My heart would spike, my knee would start going under the blanket, and I'd be awake again, staring at a dark ceiling with my head roaring like a casino floor.
So I did what I always do when the noise wins. I got up to go throw it at something heavy.
The compound at one in the morning was floodlight and generator hum and cold that bit through my hoodie the second I stepped out.
October stars sat hard and close over the desert, a sky that made the yard feel small.
I crossed the gravel to the gym with my hands jammed in my pockets and my breath showing, and I was reaching for the door when I heard it.
The bag. Somebody was on the heavy bag.
A worked rhythm, not an angry one. Three-beat combinations with resets between, the chain up top singing on every impact, and I knew before I opened the door, I knew from the timing alone, because I'd spent five days learning the sound of him.
One row of fluorescents was on, the row over the mats, and the rest of the gym sat in shadow.
Caleb worked the bag in the cone of light, barefoot, shirtless, gym shorts, the fading bruises across his back shifting as he moved.
Sweat down his spine. Wraps on his hands, fresh ones, white against his skin.
He put a low kick into the bag that folded it sideways on the chain and caught it on the return with his palm, killing the swing, and he did all of it without turning around.
"Couldn't sleep either?" He set the bag still. His voice bounced flat off the concrete.
"My brain doesn't have an off switch. It has a dimmer, and the dimmer's broken." I let the door close behind me. The gym smelled like it always did at night, rubber and iron and cold concrete, all of it sharper without bodies to warm it. "I came to break the dimmer worse."
He turned around. The light sat on the sweat across his collarbones, and his dark eyes found me and did their thing, the read, the full-body inventory, missing nothing, and I stood there in my hoodie by the door and let myself be counted.
"Nine days." He pulled at the wrap on his left hand, unwinding it slow. "I need every session I can get, so if you came to train, the mat's free. If you came to keep not answering my question, the door's behind you."
He wasn't going to make it easy, and some ruined part of me was glad, because easy had never once gotten the truth out of me.