Page 1 of Ghosted

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JAGGER

THE GIRL BEHIND THE LENS

Blood always smells the fucking same.

Hot. Metallic.

Thick enough to settle at the back of your throat and stay there until morning. Until it sinks into the cracks in the concrete and mixes with the spilled beer, cigarette ash, and every other goddamn bad decision ever made inside this fucking warehouse.

Shit, the place has smelled like this for as long as I can remember.

The warehouse sits on the rotten edge of campus where the university stops pretending it cares about safety and the city starts showing its real teeth. From the outside, it looks abandoned. Boarded windows. Rusted loading bay doors. Graffiti sprayed across brick in layers so thick no one can tell who marked it first. The kind of building people walk past faster at night without knowing exactly why.

But inside, it’s alive.

Bodies pack the open floor shoulder to shoulder, pressed tight around the cage bolted into the center of the room. Cigarette smoke curls beneath rusted steel rafters, catching in the yellow industrial lights that flicker overhead like they’re tired of witnessing the same shit every weekend. Music pounds through speakers hidden somewhere in the shadows, bass rattling through the concrete hard enough to make the floor feel like a pulse.

People scream until their voices break. Money changes hands in fistfuls. Girls climb onto crates for a better view while guys get drunk on cheap liquor and false confidence shove each other near the fence, all of them hungry to see blood as long as it isn’t theirs.

Sure, University has its polished side. Red brick buildings, manicured grass, donors’ names carved into stone, professors pretending everyone here is chasing some kind of future.

Then there’s this.

The basement heartbeat.

The place where rich kids, scholarship kids, bored girls, violent boys, and anyone with a death wish come to watch men beat each other bloody for cash.

No school colors or fucking rules worth respecting. No pretending violence doesn’t live under everyone’s skin, because we all know it fucking does.

I like it better down here.

At least here, everyone’s fucking honest.

A fist cracks across my jaw hard enough to snap my head to the side.

Pain flashes bright behind my eyes. My teeth cut into the inside of my cheek, and blood floods my mouth, warm and familiar. The crowd erupts like that single hit bought them all a piece of me. They scream harder, pressing into the chain-link until the cage rattles around us.

The guy across from me grins.

That’s his first mistake.

Smiling means he thinks he did something. It means he still thinks this is a fight.

I roll my neck slowly, spit blood onto the canvas, and look back at him without blinking. His grin lasts maybe two seconds before uncertainty slides into its place.

There it is.

My favorite part.

Not the punch, or the pain. Fuck, not even the win.

The realization.

That tiny little moment when a man understands the version of me he built in his head isn’t the one standing in front of him. He thought the reputation was inflated. He thought because he landed one clean hit, he stood a fucking chance.

People think a lot of stupid things before they end up on the floor.