Prologue #2
We pull off the unnamed road onto a gravel drive that climbs through trees so tall and dense the morning light barely makes it to the ground.
Three switchbacks later we come out into a clearing the size of a small fairground.
Cabins around the perimeter. A central building that looks like an old lodge.
A motorcycle paddock. And, at the back of the clearing, a structure built into the rock face of the mountain itself — a great iron-bound door set into stone, twenty feet tall, with the Sinners' colors painted above the lintel.
The mine entrance.
Wren stops the SUV. He doesn't get out yet. He looks at me sideways.
"You good, ma'am?"
"I'm good."
"Coordinator's gonna meet you in the main shaft. He'll want to walk you through the medical setup himself. Just so you know what to expect — he's. Uh. He has a manner."
"A manner."
"He runs the pit. He's intense about it. Don't take it personal if he comes across rough."
"Wren, I have been doing this for eleven years."
"Yeah." Wren almost smiles. "I figured. I just like to give people a heads-up. Last medic he brought through here, that wasn't a Sinner — that was a couple years ago — they didn't make it past day one."
"Did the medic quit, or did he?"
Wren's almost-smile widens into a real one. "She quit. He told her she could leave whenever she wanted, and she did."
"Got it."
I get out of the SUV. Wren takes my kit again.
We walk across the clearing toward the iron door.
The mountain air is sharp and cold even in the late summer — wet pine and old stone and something underneath that's harder to name, something that prickles the back of my neck the way a fight crowd does before the first bout.
Anticipation. Heat. The hum of a place where things happen.
The iron door opens before we reach it. Two men, both patched Sinners, both armed, both reading me the way bouncers read a stranger at a bar. They nod to Wren. They look at me. One of them says, "Medic," in a voice that isn't a question. I say, "Yeah," in a voice that isn't an answer.
They step aside.
Inside, the shaft drops away. The first chamber is enormous — easily a hundred feet across, ceiling lost in the dark above, the walls smooth where they've been worked and rough where they haven't.
Industrial lights on cabling. The smell of cool rock and old machinery and the faint copper-tang ghost of blood that no amount of cleaning will ever get out of a fighting venue.
Tunnels branch off in three directions. Distantly, somewhere down one of them, I can hear voices.
A man is walking toward me up the central tunnel.
He moves like a fighter. That's the first thing.
Even before I can see his face I can see the gait — the weight distribution, the rolling balance through the hips, the slight forward lean that says if you came at me, I'd be ready.
He's tall but not enormous. Built dense.
Muscle on muscle. Dark skin, close-cropped hair, a black t-shirt and worn jeans and a cut over the t-shirt that says BONE HOLLOW SINNERS in the same arched lettering as Wren's, but his bottom rocker says PIT COORDINATOR.
His face comes into the light.
Broken twice in the jaw, by the look of it — the left side has that slight asymmetry that comes from a healed fracture.
Cheekbones high. Mouth set hard. Eyes dark and unreadable except for the part that isn't unreadable, which is the part that's tracking me across the room like I'm the most dangerous thing he's seen tonight, and we both know I'm not, and the fact that he's looking at me like that anyway is interesting.
He stops six feet away. He gives me a once-over that isn't disrespectful, exactly, but isn't polite either. It's the way a coach measures a fighter. Reach, weight, balance, what you might do if pushed.
"You're the medic."
The voice matches the body. Low. Smoke and gravel.
I'm aware, in some distant clinical way, that he's holding his head at a slight angle.
Protecting the right side of his neck. There's a thin pink scar there, just visible above his collar — surgical, well-healed, the kind of incision that goes in from the lateral approach for a posterior cervical fusion.
I read his injury report on the plane down to South Carolina last month, because I read injury reports on the coordinators of every venue I work, because information is the only thing that's kept me alive in this world for eleven years.
C4 hairline fracture, surgical repair, full mobility restored, return-to-fight clearance denied.
I drop my kit at my feet. I match his look.
"You're the one who can't fight anymore."
He stops moving. Completely. The kind of stillness that isn't a pause — it's a body deciding what it wants to do.
His jaw flexes. Something flashes behind his eyes — gold, sudden, gone — and for one heartbeat his wolf is right there at the surface, and I am one second away from finding out what kind of self-control this man has.
Then he exhales, slow, and the gold fades.
I keep my voice even.
"Relax. I read the injury reports on every coordinator before I take a job. C4 hairline fracture. Posterior fusion. One good hit to the right place and you're a vegetable or a corpse. That's not me being cruel. That's me being thorough."
A beat.
"You always this charming?"
"I'm a combat medic. Charm is not in my kit."
The corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile. The ghost of one. The place a smile would go if he let it. He doesn't.
He says, "Vice."
"Petra."
"I know."
He picks up my kit before I can stop him. He turns. He starts walking down the central tunnel without checking to see if I'm following.
I follow.
Behind me, Wren and the two patched men close the iron door, and the mountain swallows the morning light, and I am inside Bone Hollow, and I do not yet know that this is the place where eleven years of running is going to stop.