"There's a place. Underground fighting ring called the Iron Pit. Hidden beneath the gym where I work." He says it like he'stelling me about a hobby, not illegal cage matches. "I fight there."
I stare at him.
Underground fighting. Actual underground fighting.
"Is that legal?"
The corner of his mouth twitches. Not quite a smile. "No."
"And you just do it anyway?"
"Yeah." He leans back against the couch. "The gym owner, Rampage, he runs it. Ex-military like me. Gave me a job training people during the day, offered me fights at night. Turns out I'm good at it."
Good at it. I look at those scars again. At the one splitting his eyebrow. At the way he moves like violence is a language he speaks fluently.
"Does it hurt?" I ask. "Fighting like that?"
"Not really." He says it so casually. "Something happened overseas. I don't… I don't register pain the way I should. Can take hits that would put most people down and barely feel it."
That's not normal. That's not—
"Is that safe?"
"No." Honest. Direct. "But it makes me a hell of a fighter. Hard to knock out someone who doesn't know they should be knocked out."
I don't know what to say to that. Don't know how to process the fact that this man who stepped in to protect me, who invited me into his apartment, who's offering me shelter, fights in underground matches where he gets hurt and doesn't feel it.
"In the parking lot, when those men showed up, I saw you… You tilted your head. Like you were listening to something."
"Tinnitus. From an explosion in Kandahar. It's always there. Sometimes quiet, sometimes deafening. Fighting helps. When things get physical, it quiets down."
Oh.
Oh god.
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be." He looks at me directly. "I'm not. It's part of who I am now. The noise, the fighting, all of it. I made peace with it."
Have you though? I want to ask. Because the way he says it sounds like someone who's learned to survive something, not someone who's healed from it.
But I don't ask. Because I'm not healed either. I'm sitting in a stranger's apartment hiding from men who want to drag me back to a life I'd rather die than live.
We're both just surviving.
"Your turn," Marcus says.
"What?"
"I told you something. You tell me something." He shifts on the couch, angling toward me. "Something real. Not about Castellano or running. Something about you."
Something about me.
I can't remember the last time someone asked. Can't remember the last time anyone cared about who I was beyond what I could do for them.
"I like books," I finally say. "Always have. When I was growing up, my parents paid all their attention to my sister. She wasprettier, thinner, everything they wanted. So, I just disappeared into stories. Spent more time with fictional people than real ones."
"What kind of books?"
