14. Seeing Red #2
"Three of them came out of that door while I was standing on it.
His inner circle, or close to it." Flat.
Like he was reading a bus schedule. "I went through a window across the alley and listened from there, thirty feet off them.
Thursday isn't a fight night. It's Initiation night.
Everybody he's been watching these last months gets one more fight, in front of him, in a building full of his people.
The ones who win go up the stairs into the box and collect.
Then he makes his offer. A place next to him. "
He looked at me then, just me, and I read it before he could say it.
"Let me guess." My voice came out level. "The night I walk back in."
"That's the night." His eyes didn't leave mine. "I heard your name, Caleb. Your pit name. His money's on you."
Thirty feet from three of Gravedigger's people in the dark, and he'd handed it over like it was a walk to the mailbox. I wondered, not for the first time, what every person at this table had been through for that to be an ordinary sentence.
"Let that Grave—" Ghost's eyes went wide, fast, and I watched him brace for it.
"—digger call it whatever he wants." His breath went out of him.
"Initiation. Fine. It doesn't change where I stand, and he'll get what's coming to him.
If all of you—" I looked down one side of the table and up the other, "—are still in, of course?—"
"The Phoenixes voted." Hawk didn't raise his voice. He never had to. "We don't take back our word."
I nodded. It was all I had. "Thank you."
"We know where you stand." Ghost, still on his feet. "Everybody at this table knows it. The problem is he might know it too, and a man like that doesn't leave a thing like that to chance, so he went and got himself insurance, I mean he tried to, it didn't, he?—"
"Ghost." Blade, from the wall. Low.
Ghost stopped. His hands went flat on the table, and I'd seen this stillness once before, in a small room with yellow light on the floor, right before he handed me a folded paper. My stomach knew before I did.
"Before I say it, hear this part first." He was looking at me and nobody else. "Liam is safe. He's in his bed, in his room, with more of ours on that hospital than there were yesterday. Tank's one of them." One second.
"Last night at two, Gravedigger sent five men to take him out of that hospital. A van, two of them in uniforms, and a transfer order with the right account number on it, so the paper checked. We got there first. They're here now, at the compound." He swallowed. "Prisoners, basically."
The words came across the table and landed on me, and for one second nothing happened.
I was calm. I'd been calm a second ago, and the calm was still there, and the words went into it the way a knife went into something left too long in the walk-in.
Slow. Then all at once. Take Liam. Liam with a tube down his throat, who'd found the strength this week to move his fingers twice and nothing else.
Strapped to something. Rolled through a door into the dark.
Then it moved.
It started low, at the base of my spine, and it climbed.
Up my back in a sheet, and down both arms to the hands, which had closed, and I hadn't closed them.
My scalp went tight. My ears roared, and under all of it my legs woke up.
That was the worst of it. My legs, the two things I'd spent twenty years teaching to end fights, filling up with heat like they'd been asked a question and knew the answer.
I stood up. Slowly. The chair went back an inch at a time, because slow was the only speed I had left that wasn't the other one.
"Are you…" It came out of me low. "…fucking…" Louder. "KIDDING ME?! That Gravebitch tried to what?!"
"Caleb." Reaper, from Hawk's right, his voice smooth and even, pitched to come in under mine instead of over it. "Calm down. Liam's safe. He's got more guards on his door than the governor, and Gravedigger's down five m?—"
"Don't fucking tell me to calm down!!"
Both fists came down. Hammer fists, the bottom edge of the hand, the way you broke a board at eight years old, both at once, and I put my whole back into them.
Decades of solid oak, and it still shook.
Coffee jumped in the mugs. Down the table, eyes went wide, brothers and sisters who'd been sitting easy now sitting the way you sat near a stove you weren't sure was off.
Good. Let them look. Let them see what his skull was going to look like, his and every one of the five he'd sent, every one of them, I'd go through them one at a?—
"I'm sorry about what happened to your brother."
I turned my head. Fists still on the wood, breathing like something in a cage, and my eyes went past a row of faces that were looking at me now like a thing that might need handling, and landed where the voice had come from.
The man in the flannel had come off the wall by a step, and he was looking straight at me, and there was no fear in it. No pity either. He'd put the words down the way you'd set a plate in front of somebody. His eyes were blue, and they held mine and didn't push and didn't let go.
I had nothing to give back.
Because nobody had said that. In all this time, not one person.
I'd had he'll pay in blood and a hand on my shoulder more times than I could count, and none of it had been this.
Sorry. For what happened. To my brother.
The man had seen the thing under the rage, four months of it, and named it out loud like it was the only thing in the room worth naming.
I kept my eyes on him and breathed. Seconds.
A minute. The sound coming out of me went from a cage to a man, and then I did it on purpose.
In through the nose. Four. Hold. Out through the mouth, four.
The drill I'd learned at fifteen for competition nerves, and it had never once had to work this hard.
The rage had come again, the way it had at that breakfast table, except this time it had gotten all the way out. My fists had turned over on their own, knuckles down, and I was leaning on them, bent over the table like I was over a sink.
"I'm sorry." It came out rough. I made myself lift my head and give it to the room. "I've got no right to bring that in here. You've all given me your help, your hands, and I stood at your table and—" I stopped, because the rest wasn't going to hold. "I'm sorry."
A hand came down on my shoulder. Ghost's. This time I'd felt it coming, and I didn't jump. I leaned into it a fraction and let it hold some of me up.
"Point of order." Irish, from my left, in a voice so serious it should have been standing at a podium. "Is anybody going to ask about the table? Because I was here. I watched it. That table's been through two wars and Tank sitting on it, and I have never once seen it shake?!"
Then they laughed. All of them. It came out of the room like it had been waiting behind a door, Trenza slapping the wood, Vega laughing with his one good eye squeezed shut.
They weren't laughing at me. They were laughing at Irish, at the fact that a table had nearly died.
These people were outlaws. They had lines and a man at the head of the table, and they still did not have rules, and a room like that laughed when it wanted to.
Hawk looked at me and nodded once, and then, for the first time in my hearing, he spoke into a joke instead of over it.
"Irish." Same voice as always. Same weight. "Price a new one." A beat. "Something heavier."
The room went again, louder, and Irish clutched the edge of the table like he'd been shot, and under the noise I got my legs to do the thing they'd spent the last minute refusing, and sat.
Hawk let it run out. "Ghost. That everything?"
Ghost's hand hadn't moved. My head was still going, a gurney, straps, a van with no windows, Liam's fingers, and that hand was the one thing in the room holding still, and I held on to it.
"That's everything." His voice came out even. "And again. Liam's safe. We took the bastards who came for him, and Tank's on that hospital right now with Cuervo, Santos, Valkyrie, and a shotgun that's bigger than his own torso."
"Good." Hawk's eyes went down the table. "Tyler. Reaper. Nolan. Stay. We take the plan apart with the door in it and put it back together. Two o'clock, Church again, everyone, and we walk it start to finish." He straightened off the wood. "Until then, train. This isn't going to be easy."
Chairs scraped and the room came apart. Ghost stayed in his seat and his hand stayed on me, and I sat there with the last of it still moving through my legs like heat in an empty pan.
Across the room, Blade and the man in the flannel came off the wall at the same moment, and Blade's hand went to the back of the other man's neck and stayed. The man in the flannel looked at me over Blade's arm. I nodded, and I mouthed it, because my voice wasn't a thing I trusted yet. Thank you.
He nodded once. A small smile, soft, gone fast. Then Blade turned him toward the door with the hand on his neck, and they went out together.
Irish hit the mat on his back and stayed there.
He was breathing hard. So was I. I stood over him with my hands still up, because you didn't drop them until the man on the floor told you he was done, and the lock I'd ended it with was still burning in my forearms where his weight had fought it. He'd fought it well.
He lay there and looked at the pipes.
"You're too good, kid." He told it to the ceiling.
"It's obscene. Very flowery, though. Very disciplined.
All that spinning." He lifted one hand off the mat and made a circle in the air.
"My revenge for the kitchen mutiny is delayed.
I want that on the record. Delayed only because I'm not fighting to kill. "
"Neither am I." I offered a hand down. "If I was, you wouldn't have seen the flowery part."
He took it, and I hauled him up grinning, sweat in his copper hair, a red mark going purple on his arm where he'd landed.