Chapter 3 #2
"No. I see a man who understands violence better than anyone in that pit. The fighters are in it. You see it. You read every bout like you're inside both of them at once. You called the Tennessee technical's footwork issue before the fight started tonight, didn't you? Reaper told me."
"I called it during the weigh-in."
"And I clocked it midway through round one.
That's about a forty-five-minute delta. In coordinator time, that's a lifetime.
You see fights, Vice. You see them better than the wolves who are in them.
That's not a desk job. That's the rarest skill in this sport and you have it more than anyone I've worked with. "
He stares at me.
He stares at me for a long time.
"I have never had anyone describe it to me that way."
"Maybe nobody's been paying attention."
"Maybe nobody has."
We drink.
The room is warm. The bourbon is warm. Somewhere in the conversation the table-distance between us has become a different distance — not closed, not closing, but no longer the distance between strangers.
I have done this work for eleven years. I have learned, in those years, when someone is opening to you and when they are performing the opening.
Vice is not performing. He is opening. He is also, I think, opening in a way he doesn't fully realize he is doing, which is the kind of opening that matters most.
He says, "Tell me the four names."
I look up sharply.
"Reaper mentioned them. He said you carry names."
I drink. I think about lying. I don't.
"Henry. Brick. Jameson. Theo."
"Tell me."
I tell him. Henry, the first, in the barn outside Lexington — bled out from a femoral I couldn't clamp because I was twenty-one and I didn't know enough yet.
Brick, in a warehouse in Pittsburgh — sepsis from a bite wound I'd cleaned, but not well enough, and he didn't tell anyone he was running a fever until he was forty-eight hours past saving.
Jameson, in a parking lot outside Atlanta — full feral break that I tranq-darted three times before he came down, and the dose was high enough to suppress his heart, and his heart did not come back.
Theo, last year, in a strip mall basement in Pensacola — clean hit to the temple, brain bleed I caught on field exam, but the closest hospital that would treat a shifter without questions was four hours away, and we didn't make it.
I tell him every name and every detail. I have never told anyone all of them at once. I do not know why I am telling him.
He listens.
He does not say it wasn't your fault. He does not say you did your best. He does not say anything. He listens. He drinks his bourbon. He watches my face while I talk. When I am done, he says, "Thank you for telling me."
"You're welcome."
"I have one. Just one. A wolf I was supposed to corner for in my second year on the circuit. I missed his pre-fight check because I was drunk. He went feral mid-bout and got himself killed. His name was Castor. I think about him every time a young wolf walks into a weigh-in."
"That's the right thing to think about."
"Yeah."
We sit with that.
I look at the clock on the wall. It's almost three a.m.
"I need to check on the concussion," I say.
"I know."
I stand. He stands. The bourbon between us is half-gone. He picks up the tumblers and puts them on the tray with the bottle. I walk past him toward the door.
His hand closes around my wrist.
Not hard. Not gripping. Just — settled. The way you'd put your hand around a coffee cup you weren't sure you were going to lift. His thumb is just barely against my pulse, and his fingers wrap loose around the back of my wrist, and the warmth of his hand is suddenly very loud.
I do not pull away.
I look at his hand on my wrist. Then I look at his face.
His eyes are dark and the gold is there at the edges of his pupils and his mouth is not moving and his jaw is not flexing. He is very still. He is asking a question without asking it.
I think about saying yes.
I think about saying no.
I say neither.
"After the tournament," I say.
"After the tournament what."
"Whatever this is. After."
His thumb moves once across my pulse. Just once. Just enough that I know he felt me say it through the skin and not just the words.
His hand opens.
I leave.
I walk down the corridor to the observation room. I check on the Virginia alpha. His pupils are even. He is sleeping. I write 0257, pupils 3mm bilateral, GCS 15 in his chart. I go to my own small bunk in the suite annex. I sit on the edge of the bed. I look at my wrist.
There is no mark.
There is no mark, and I can still feel his hand.
I lie down. I close my eyes. I think about the four names.
I think about a fifth name — Vice — and how easy it would be to add it to the notebook, and how I have been very, very careful for eleven years to never let anyone be a name in my notebook except the ones I lost, and how Vice is not lost yet but is sitting on a fault line that any one bad bout could send him over.
I will not let him be the fifth name.
I do not know yet if that is professional concern or something else, and I do not let myself ask, because I have only just told him after the tournament, and a promise made at three a.m. in a mine shaft is still a promise.
I sleep.
I dream about a wolf with gold eyes standing in a doorway, not coming in, not leaving, just watching, and when I wake up in the morning the dream is still on my skin like the heat of someone else's hand.