Page 164 of Forsaking Midnight
He’s just a kid. A kid I trained, knowing he’d be eaten alive.
I stare at his broken face and think about Art on the porch this morning. The easy smile. The casual tone. The way he delivered the fight order like it was a calendar reminder.
Tonight. Midnight. Lose.
But he forgets I know him well, even if this new version is wearing a different mask. And I know he’s hurting, and he’s lost, and he’s drowning and letting the tide take him under. The same way I know this is my punishment.
Congratulations, Art. Message received.
The Lye is louder than usual. I hear it through the concrete walls as I tape my hands in the back room, the roar of the crowd swelling and dipping like the moon with the tide. Clearly, Percy was the undercard, and now it’s my turn.
Fight, dog, fight.
Benny appears in the doorway, and I tense.
“Big night,” he says, leaning against the frame. “Myrddin’s here. VIP section…with Art.”
I keep wrapping my hands. Left, then right. Pull tight. Tuck the end. If I look at him, I’ll say something I can’t take back.
“You know what’s expected,” Benny continues. “You go in, you take what’s coming, and you go down in the third. Myrddin wants a show, he’s got important people betting on tonight’s fight.”
“And if I don’t?”
Benny’s expression doesn’t change, but something shifts behind his eyes. “Then it’s not just you who pays. You know how this works, Lance.”
I know how this works.
Benny leaves and I sit on the bench, my taped fists resting on my knees, and I try to do the thing I’ve always done before a fight. Turn it off. Find the quiet place in my head where nothing hurts and nothing matters and I’m just a body doing a job.
But I can’t find it.
Every time I reach for the numbness, I feel her hands on my face in my mom’s garden. Her voice in the dark.Promise everything will be okay?The weight of her against my chest in the armchair.
So when I walk out to the cage, I walk out awake. Every sound is sharp. The crowd pressing against the chain-link fencing, faces distorted in the dim light, mouths open, screaming for blood they didn’t pay enough to spill themselves. The smell of sweat and money and concrete.
The cage door opens and I step in.
My opponent is already inside, and when I see who it is, I falter.
Graves.
He’s the one they used to train me up at the beginning of all this. The one they used to break people before I became their shiny new sword. He’s six-four, easy, with a shaved head, andhands the size of dinner plates. I wasn’t sure he was even still alive until this very moment.
I scan the VIP section before the bell.
My breath whooshes out of me when I see Brutus Myrddin in the flesh.
The last time I saw him was at Marcus Montgomery’s funeral, standing off in the distance, blending in with the trees while we buried the man he helped my father steal from.
He looks the same. Shoulder-length black hair tucked behind his ears, expensive suit, sitting in a leather chair someone must have hauled down here for him like he’s watching opera. He’s got a drink in his hand and a smile on his face, and he’s leaning in to listen to something being said by the person next to him.
When I realize who it is, my stomach bottoms out.
Art is beside him.
My best friend. Sitting beside the man who’s owned me for six years, hunched forward with his elbows on his knees, his jaw tight, his eyes on the cage. He doesn’t look comfortable. But he doesn’t look away, either.
Standing behind Myrddin like a shadow, and bending to murmur something in Art’s ear, isBors. That same motherfucker who stalked Genevieve, who scared her half to death and made her have panic attacks on her linoleum floor.
