Chapter 8 #2
She is on Garrett with the surgical kit before the Iron's medic has gotten his bag open, and she is — I see this from the corner — working on Garrett's throat with the same hands that worked on Cade Whitlow's bleeding shoulder in a van in Roanoke and on the Kentucky alpha's chest in this same chamber a month and a half ago and on my own neck on an examination table the night that started everything.
She works on Garrett because Garrett needs her, and the Iron's medic is competent but Petra is better, and the Iron medic has the sense to step back and let her work.
She saves the throat. She gets the bleeding stopped. Garrett is going to live and is going to keep his vocal cords, which I have learned matters more than I would have guessed in dominance bouts, because alphas who lose their voice tend to lose their pack soon after.
The bout is over.
The Sinners have won.
The territory is ours.
I am standing in the corner.
Spite is on the pit floor, in human form now, blood across his chest and his arm and his face, and he is — he is howling.
The kind of howl that comes out of a young wolf when he has just done the most important thing he is ever going to do, and the chamber is howling back, and the Sinners are on their feet in the bleachers, and the Iron is on its feet in the upper terrace because they know they have lost and they are giving the win the respect it earned, and Conrad is in the center of the pit shaking Spite's hand and the moment is the cleanest moment I have been part of in three years.
I have just won a fight.
I have not thrown a punch.
I have just won a fight.
The wolf in me is singing.
Not raging. Not pacing. Not howling against the cage of the body. Singing. A clear, high, steady song, the song a wolf makes when the pack has done what the pack came to do. The wolf in me has been alive for three years and has been a problem for three years and tonight he is at peace.
I look across the chamber.
I find Petra in the crowd.
She has finished with Garrett. She has handed him off to the Iron's medic.
She is on her feet at the eastern edge of the pit, blood on her arms, sweat on her temples, her hair coming loose from its clip.
She is looking at me. The crowd is moving around her and she is not moving.
She is just looking at me, the way she looked at me across the chamber the night I shifted on the upper terrace, the way she looked at me when she said I will sedate you myself in front of the council, the way she has been looking at me since the morning she walked into the medical suite and said you walk like a fighter.
I walk to her.
I walk through the crowd. The Sinners part for me. The Iron part for me. The bookmakers and the prospects and the strangers from a dozen packs part for me, and I am in front of her, and she is in front of me, and the chamber is around us.
She grabs my face.
She pulls me down.
She says, "That was the best coaching I have ever seen in eleven years on the circuit."
"Yeah?"
"You found it, Damon. The thing you were afraid of losing. It was never the fight. It was the fire."
The fire.
The thing I have spent three years thinking I had lost.
The thing I have been carrying without knowing I was carrying it.
The thing in me that makes me get up. The thing that makes me act. The thing that makes me step between danger and the people behind me. The thing that has been the man under the fighter all along — the wolf that I thought was the cage, that was actually the inhabitant.
The fire.
I kiss her.
I kiss her in front of three hundred witnesses.
In front of the Sinners and the Iron and the Hollow Pit and Conrad and Reaper and Hex and Jo and Lena and Amara and the prospects I have trained and the trainees she has trained, and the wolf in me howls against the inside of my ribs — silent, mine, but unmistakable — and I do not care who hears him.
I kiss her with blood on her arms and sand under our feet and the crowd around us and my whole life from this moment forward visible in front of me for the first time since I was twenty-nine years old.
She kisses me back.
She is laughing into the kiss.
I have heard her laugh four times now.
I am counting too.
When we break, she looks up at me and her eyes are wet and her mouth is wide and she says, "I stopped running. And the ground held."
"I know."
"It held."
"I know."
I look around the chamber. The Sinners are watching us with the kind of attention that is half pride and half affection and half finally, and the Iron is watching us with the kind of resigned respect of a pack that has lost a fight and is going to lose a few more before they understand what they walked into.
Conrad is in the booth and he is, I see, smiling.
Conrad does not smile. Conrad is smiling.
The pit chamber smells like blood and victory and the particular ozone-and-iron smell that the mine shaft makes when the air pressure changes from a long bout.
It is the best moment of my life.
It is not in the pit.
It is at the edge of the pit, with a human woman in my arms whose hands have saved more lives than I have ever taken, in a compound that I helped build, in a packs-and-territory war that I just won without throwing a single punch, and the fire in me is steady, and the wolf in me is singing, and Petra Kazan has stopped running, and the ground has held, and the ground is going to keep holding because the ground is us, and we built it.
I kiss her again.
She lets me.
The Sinners cheer.
I let them.
Spite comes up and claps a bloody hand on my shoulder and says, "Boss. Coach. Damon. I — I —"
"I know, kid."
"Did I —"
"You won. You won clean. You won the way I trained you to win. You are the champion now. Go enjoy it. Go find your girlfriend. I'll see you in the morning."
He nods. He is twenty-eight and he is bleeding and he is grinning, and he walks off through the crowd toward the corridor where his girlfriend is waiting, and he is the new champion of the Bone Hollow Sinners, and I am his coach, and that is my fight now, and that is enough.
Petra puts her hand in mine.
We walk out of the pit chamber together.
I do not look back.
There is nothing back there.
Everything I want is in front of me.