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“Maksim.” Sabine was beside me, one hand on my arm. Her face was white. “Maksim. Wait. It could be a trap.”

“It is a trap.”

“Then we must—”

“I know.” I looked at her. “I know it is a trap. I know exactly what it is. And I am going anyway.”

“You cannot save him if you are dead.”

“I cannot save him if I am not there. “

She held my eyes for a long moment. Then, unexpectedly, she smiled. It was a bright, wet, terrible smile, and she wiped her nose on her sleeve.

“Good,” she said. “I would have hit you if you’d said otherwise. Get the car.”

Chapter 27

LEX

The Pit

The Pit is a hole in the ground under a warehouse in the industrial district, and I want to say up front that I’m not proud of it.

It’s a converted loading bay, with a concrete floor, chain-link walls, and a ring of scarred folding chairs where forty or fifty men in good coats watch other men hurt each other. There’s a bar at the back that sells warm beer. There’s a woman named Vic, in a leather jacket, who takes your name and your cash and a signature on a waiver that would make a lawyer weep. There’s a low ceiling hung with bare bulbs. The air smells of sweat and bleach and old copper.

I found it at nineteen, the summer after my first season. My father had cut off my card for wrecking the Bentley. I was furious, and lonely, and shaking with something I couldn’t name, and I got in a cab and told the driver to take me somewhere I could hit somebody. He looked at me in the mirror and said, “Kid, I know a place.”

I’ve been coming back for seven years.

Here’s what my father meant, when he told Maksim about the card. He wasn’t lying. He never lies. I’d walk in and hand Vic five thousand dollars, sometimes ten, and she’d nod and disappear into the back, and a man would come out and stand in the ring, and I’d beat the hell out of him.

But he’d signed up, and I need you to understand that, because I’ve had to explain it to a lot of people since, including myself, and it’s the one thing I’ll defend. Every man who ever stood across from me in that ring had put his own name on a sheet. They were mostly retired boxers, broke men in their thirties and forties who’d once been contenders, who knew how to take a hit, and who came for the pay and the pride. They hit back, because they were allowed to. That was the rule I’d made with Vic at nineteen, sobbing in her office: never a man who couldn’t fight back, never a man tied, and never a man who hadn’t said yes.

There had been one time, only one, that it had gone wrong. A kid, nineteen, a college dropout who needed money for his mother’s rent. He’d been small and frightened and too proud to say so. I’d thrown three punches before I saw it, and stopped, and put him in a cab to the ER, and paid the bill, and never gone back for six months.

I told myself that made me a decent person.

I told myself a lot of things.

“Pendleton,” said Vic, when I came down the stairs. She looked up from her ledger without surprise. “You look like hell.”

“Thanks.”

“You want the usual?”

“Yeah.”

“Ten grand, then. Ozzy’s on tonight. You remember Ozzy?”

I remembered Ozzy. Oswaldo “Big Ozzy” Marchetti was forty-one, six-four, two-sixty, a former heavyweight with a broken nose and a gentle way of talking. He’d fought me four times. He’d knocked me down twice.

“He’ll do,” I said.

“He said if you came by, he wanted to fight you.” Vic’s mouth twisted. “He said, the kid has something to say. “

I didn’t like that.

I signed, and I handed over the card. I peeled off my hoodie and my shirt and stood in the light with my ribs still purple from Game Five and my knuckles taped, while the crowd, a thin scattering of coats and cigarettes and greed, looked up with interest. Then I climbed through the ropes.