Every cell in my body wants to go over the bar at him.
I stay where I am.
The part of me the pits made, the part I have kept on a chain in the deepest basement of myself for fifteen years, strains against the chain and doesn't snap it. Putting my fist through this man's face proves I'm still Number Seven. That's the report he'll take back.
I hold the stillness.
The man holds my eyes for two more seconds. Then he reads whatever he sees in them and decides the room has shifted past his control. He nods once.
"Think about it." Then he walks out.
The door swings shut behind him. The bell over it rings once.
Rex stays standing until the taillights turn out of the lot. Then he sits. Colt's hand comes off his gun and picks up his beer. The halves of the card lie on the wood like two dead things.
Rex stares straight ahead, giving me a moment.
"We're calling Knox from the parking lot," he says.
I nod.
Church runs long.
Knox calls it the second we clear the clubhouse door. Finn is already there. Rex phoned ahead from the parking lot. Dawson comes in from the shop in his coveralls. Colt takes the seat on Finn's left. Every patched brother at the oak by the time I take my seat.
Knox doesn't sit. He stands at the head of the table with his hands flat on the wood and looks at me.
The room waits.
I've been sitting at this table for seven years. In those seven years I have spoken in Church twice. Once to second a motion.Once to vote. Both times a single word. Knox has carried the weight of my silence for me, spoken for me at tables where my silence would have been read as weakness, translated my nods and shakes and stillness into club language without ever asking if I need it, because he already knows.
I nod.
The words are already stacked inside me. They have been stacked since I was ten, every night in the cage, every morning in the chute, every year since I walked out of the Kuznetsov compound and never looked back.
"The Kuznetsov family." My voice scrapes out of me, like a hinge after a winter. "Underground fighting ring. Pacific Northwest. Runs out of Spokane and Portland and three smaller towns. Monsters. Illegal. The illegal local cops get paid to overlook."
I stop. I drag air in through my nose. The next sentence weighs heavier than the first.
"They took me when I was ten."
Dawson's wristwatch ticks in the silence.
"Border conflict. My herd got split. The Kuznetsov people found me before anyone else did. I was young. They knew what I was worth. They put me in a truck." Another breath. "Fifteen years. Hundreds of fights on the books. More off the books. I was good at it. Some called me Gore because crowds wanted a name that sold tickets. But my handlers called me Number Seven between fights. I was the seventh minotaur they'd broken."
Finn exhales.
"Handlers ran the pen. They muzzled us between fights. A leather and steel rig that pinned the jaw and ran a strap behindmy horns." I touch the base of my left horn without meaning to. Put my hand back on the oak. "Some of us bit. I bit for the first two years and then I stopped because it didn't change anything and it cost me teeth."
Knox hasn't moved.
"I broke out at twenty-five. Walked north eleven months. Ended up here during the fire. Fought alongside Knox and the rest of them. When the smoke cleared he took me home. He knows the rest."
I swallow.
"Man at the Anchor tonight. Kuznetsov scout. They're expanding. Recruiting old fighters. He knows my face. He knows this town and he knows about Nina."
The name comes out of my mouth rougher than the rest of it. Finn's head turns toward me.
