Page 40 of Ghost’s Awakening

"The mic." I put the marker on the ring. "There's an announcer's mic that hangs over the ropes on a cable, and big horn speakers bolted up in the roof beams. On fight nights you can hear the ten-count from the parking lot with your windows up. The whole building is built to be loud." I looked at Nolan. "If it's wired into speakers, the sound's traveling through something."

Nolan's glasses came up off the map. Behind them, something switched on. "Then I can listen in on it. Give me a van within range and I'll give you every word said over that ring, live." He was already writing. Beside him, Declan watched him write with the expression of a man watching his favorite thing happen.

"That gets my ears inside." Hawk's arms recrossed. "It doesn't tell them what to listen for. The signal itself. What is it?"

"You'll know it when you hear it." I set the marker down. "I promise you, there won't be any doubt."

A second passed. And from the corner of my eye I caught Ghost's neck snap toward me, fast, his eyes gone wide, and I let a small smile form and turned it on him, and watched him understand exactly, precisely, down to the syllable, what was going to come over those speakers.

Hawk's gaze moved between the two of us, once, twice. Whatever he read in Ghost's face, it must have been convincing, because something at the corner of his mouth shifted.

"Good enough." He let it go. A man didn't run a club this size without knowing when an answer was better left wrapped.

"Then we build toward that." Hawk straightened off the table and swept the room. "Eight days. We drill this map until every one of you can draw it drunk. Dismissed. Tyler, stay a minute."

Chairs scraped. And in the noise of it, Tyler flipped his folder closed, and I caught the top sheet before it disappeared, a list of names and dates from the night we ran, and one line near the top with a word in it that stopped my blood.

Deceased.

The room kept moving. I didn't. Five days I'd carried that word without seeing it anywhere, and seeing it in print did something the memory had stopped being able to do, made it new again, the hallway, the spin, the crack I'd felt through my heel and into my knee.

I looked up. Tyler was watching me over the folder. And beside him Ghost was watching me too, and between the two of them something passed, fast, a look with weight in it, there and covered in under a second, the way you palm a card.

Ghost's hand went to the chest pocket of his cut. Touched it. Came away.

"You good?" His voice came out at the wrong speed, a half-step quick.

"Fine." I filed the look, the pocket, the folder. "Mat at two?"

"Mat at two."

Blade gave us forty minutes of his afternoon, which he spent taking my game apart and putting it back together for a different kind of fight.

"Pit fighters brawl. Whoever they put across from you eight days from now won't." He walked a slow circle while Ghost and I worked the hold he'd set. "A trained man hunts your rhythm. So don't have one. Change your timing all night. Make him figure you out fresh, every exchange."

He drilled us until my lungs burned and Ghost's shirt went dark down the spine, and then he picked up his water and headed for the door.

"Run those entries until they're boring. Both of you." The door swung. "Boring is what survives."

And then it was the two of us and the mats and the low buzz of the fluorescents, the same room where he'd pinned me two days ago, the same room where I'd kissed him twelve hours ago, and every square foot of it knew things about us.

We ran the entries. For a while it was clean work. The gym had gone warm with the afternoon, and the mats gave off that smell they get under working bodies, rubber and salt and years of other people's sweat baked in under ours. Skin slapped skin on every clinch. His forearms were slick under my grip and mine under his, every hold a negotiation that had to be renegotiated a second later, chalk dust from the lifting corner hanging in the light between us. He was quick in ways that never stopped surprising me, angles instead of force, gone from where my weight expected him, his breath sawing bright and fast next to my ear on every tie-up.

I countered a duck-under and put him on the mat and followed him down into the pin Blade had taught us, forearm across, hips heavy, and his breath came up hot against the side of my neck and for one second neither of us was training.

His hands were on my waist. They'd landed there as grappling and stayed there as something else, thumbs just under the hem of my shirt, on skin, and my weight was on him the way it had been in a dream I'd told nobody about, and his eyes came up to mine, blown dark around the pale blue.

Then he tapped my arm twice and slid out from under me before I'd felt him go.

"Water break." He didn't take one. He stood by the wall with the bottle in his hand and didn't drink from it, rolling his shoulders, looking at the clock, the door, the bag. Everywhere that wasn't me.

We reset. It happened again, because in close work it can't not happen, bodies tight, hands inside each other's space, and I felt the exact moment the drill stopped being a drill, his grip going from technical to something with want in it, his hips coming half an inch closer than the move needed. And I felt the exact moment he caught himself doing it and pulled his weight back out, a retreat as clean and deliberate as a step, and cracked a joke about my elbows that arrived a beat too late and landed on nothing.

The third time, I stopped moving entirely.

I knew what a man's body said when it wanted forward and went backward. Twenty years on mats had taught me that language whether I'd asked for it or not. And Ghost, who twelve hours ago had pulled me back into a kiss by two hands on my shoulders, was fighting his own hands, and losing, and hating it.

He was pulling back because of last night. Because he'd had twelve hours to think about the kiss, and thinking had done to him what it does, and now he didn't know how to say it with the taste of me still in the room.