Two trainedsecurity contractors stood at the steel door in dark jackets, wearing earpieces. One held a clipboard. The other held a metal-detector wand. A black plastic bin on a folding table beside them was half-full of phones and keys and a folded knife from someone who hadn’t read the rules.
The guard with the clipboard asked his name.
“Jake Russo. Plus two.”
The guard ran a finger down the list, found him, and nodded at the man with the wand. The wand passed over Blaze’s shoulders, his ribs, his waistband, his inner thighs, and his ankles. The guard checked Blaze’s waistband and the small of his back for a holster before he stepped back.
The guard with the wand swept it over Stella next, the same shoulders-ribs-hips pattern he’d run on Blaze, and then quickly patted her down. Ryder’s duffle went on the table. The guard opened it and pawed through. Hand wraps, athletic tape, a water bottle, a sealed roll of cotton, a small bottle of arnica gel. Theguard found nothing because there was nothing to find. Ryder zipped the bag back up.
The clipboard guard waved them through, and the steel door closed behind them. The smell of sweat, blood, concrete, alcohol, and perfume layered over each other. Voices rose over the low hum of music, and the clink of glassware came from the bar.
The pit sat at the center of the warehouse, a sunken concrete floor twenty feet across with a low cinderblock wall around its rim at chest height. Lighting rigs hung overhead, white and harsh. The pit’s concrete was stained dark in places that hadn’t fully washed clean.
The crowd was humans, mostly men, a handful of women. They drank and talked and moved with the steady ease of people who had paid for the night. Money showed in luxury watches, expensive leather shoes. Tailored coats over the backs of chairs. The women wore silk blouses and dark jeans with glittering diamond studs in their ears.
Stella’s hand tightened on his arm. She was scared, but she wasn’t showing it on her face. A man in a black polo shirt with an earpiece crossed the floor toward them. Mid-thirties, human, the same trained flatness as the guards at the door.
“Russo.”
“Yeah.”
“Fighters’ area is through the curtain at the back. Your corner man comes with you. Your girl can stay on the floor.”
He turned his head to Stella and put his mouth close to her ear, where her hair touched his cheek. The smell of her under the wigand the perfume was the maple-syrup-and-brown-sugar smell that belonged to him.
“Drink at the bar,” he said, low. “Don’t talk to anyone you don’t have to.”
“Go win your match, baby.”
The bond cranked open between them at the wordbaby. He looked at Stella in the wig and the makeup and the choker and the leather jacket. She turned toward the bar without looking back at him. The boots clicked on the concrete. The crowd parted and closed again behind her.
He turned and followed the floor manager toward the door at the back. Ryder was at his shoulder. The floor manager held it for them, and they stepped through. The light was fluorescent and bright after the dim of the floor. Two long wooden benches sat against the walls. A folding table held bottles of water, rolls of athletic tape, gauze, and a basket of disposable mouth guards in their wrappers.
The other fighters were already in. Two men sat close together on the left bench, talking in low voices in a language Blaze didn’t speak. They were in their mid-twenties, both tall and rangy like welterweights, with the long-limbed build cat shifters carried from their animal sides. A fighter who Blaze took for a brown bear stood at the table taping his own hands. He glanced at Blaze once, sized him with a working-man’s quick read, and went back to his hands.
Two other fighters Blaze clocked as wolves were on the back wall. The older one was maybe forty with bad scars down one side of his face. The younger one had a shaved head and tattoos that climbed out of his collar onto his neck. Blaze read thescarred older wolf as someone who had been doing this longer than him and who wasn’t afraid of anyone in the room.
Nobody talked. Greetings weren’t done in the holding room. The energy was focused and tight. He got quiet the way he used to go quiet in Bangkok. Blaze crossed to the empty bench on the right, dropped his duffel at the end of it, and sat. Ryder followed and set his own bag down beside it. He started on his wraps.
The door at the far side opened, and a man in a charcoal suit tailored for him stepped through. He was in his late forties and silver at the temples, tan with the face of someone with a skin care routine. He wore no tie, and the collar of his white shirt was open at the throat. He had a Rolex on his left wrist. The smell of money came off him in cologne and shoe leather.
He stopped in the center of the room and looked at every fighter in turn the way a man looks at livestock. He nodded at the bear. He smiled at the leopards. He nodded at the older wolf then crossed the room and stopped three feet from Blaze. He didn’t offer a hand to shake.
“Mister Russo.”
“Yeah. Who’s asking?”
“Vincent Pierce. I looked up your record Russo. Decent for the circuit you ran. Bare-knuckle. No-rules.”
“Sounds about right.”
“What brings you to me?”
“Heard you pay better than anyone else.”
“I do.” Pierce laughed, short and pleased. Blaze didn’t trust the laugh. It was the laugh of a man who had decided he liked a thing he intended to use up.
“You’re on the third bout,” Pierce said. “Leopard shifter out of Vancouver. He’s quick.”
