Two weeks and Troy had a life.
The apartment was on the fourth floor of a walk-up in Chelsea, Felicia's building, a place she owned through a shell company she'd set up when she was nineteen. One bedroom, a kitchen with a stove that worked and a fridge that hummed, a bathroom with hot water. He'd furnished it from a thrift store on Eighth Avenue: a couch, a table, two chairs, a bed frame with a mattress that had springs and padding. Luxury.
He had a phone. He had money. He had a contact list that included a fence, a cleaner, a bartender named Sal who poured without asking questions, and a woman who could get him identification documents that would survive anything short of a federal database check. He had a closet with clothes that fit and a drawer with socks that matched.
He had a rhythm. Mornings: gym, heavy bag, the speed and strength gains settling into muscle memory. Afternoons: recon, whatever job Felicia was planning next, the Silvermane documents spread across his kitchen table. Evenings: the bar, cash under the table, a cover that explained why he existed. Nights: Felicia, when she came, which was most nights.
She had a key. They'd never discussed it. One morning she'd pulled a spare from the lockbox downstairs and the next time she came over it was on her keyring next to the grapple hook and the lockpick set and she let herself in at one AM and climbed into his bed without turning on a light.
Two weeks. He'd gone from a bench to a flophouse to this. The system was running its math in the background, his stats holding at level two, the LP bar crawling toward level three on the trickle from gym glances and bar customers and the sustained multiplier that came from sleeping next to Felicia four nights a week.
The documents from Silvermane's safe were the reason he was in Meatpacking at eleven PM on a Thursday.
The fighting ring was in the basement of a meatpacking warehouse that hadn't packed meat in twenty years. The entrance was a loading dock door, rusted, propped open with a cinder block. You went down a ramp, past a guy on a stool who took twenty dollars and stamped your hand, and into a concrete room that smelled like sweat and copper and old blood.
The cage was in the center. Chain-link, floor-to-ceiling, bolted to a concrete platform. Folding chairs around it in loose rows. A bar in the corner, bottles behind chicken wire. Maybe a hundred people, mostly men, the kind of crowd that wore leather and denim and had opinions about which fights were fixed.
Troy was here for a Maggia lieutenant named Caruso. The documents connected him to the Hand's supply chain. He ran book at this ring, which meant he was here every Thursday, which meant Troy could get close without an invitation.
He found a spot near the back wall with a beer he didn't drink and watched.
The fights were bare-knuckle. No gloves, no mouthguards, minimal rules. The first three were quick and ugly. Big men hitting each other until one of them dropped. The crowd yelled, money changed hands, the concrete floor got stained. Troy tracked Caruso, who sat ringside with two guys who were definitely armed and a woman keeping records in a notebook.
The fourth fight was announced and the crowd shifted. Louder. People standing. Money moving faster. Troy couldn't see the fighters through the press of bodies so he moved to the side of the cage where the gap between heads was wider.
The first fighter was already in the cage. Big. Two-twenty at least, thick through the shoulders and neck, arms covered in prison tattoos. He bounced on his feet and cracked his knuckles and spat through the chain-link.
The cage door opened for the second fighter.
She was smaller than every man in the room.
Dark hair, pulled back tight. Olive skin. A face with angles that caught the overhead light in hard lines. Tank top, black, tucked into tactical pants that sat low on her hips. Bare feet. Her hands were unwrapped. Her knuckles had scar tissue layered so thick the skin looked white at the peaks.
She stepped into the cage and rolled her neck once and looked at the man across from her and didn't change her expression.
The big man came forward. He threw a right cross that would have cracked Troy's skull at his current durability. She wasn't where the fist went. She'd moved before the arm finished extending, a lateral step that was so small it looked like she'd barely shifted, and his fist went through the air where her head had been and his momentum carried him forward half a step too many.
She hit his elbow.
The joint went the wrong way. He screamed. She was already past him, behind him, and her shin connected with the back of his knee and his leg buckled and he went down to one knee. She caught his other arm, the good one, and twisted it behind his back and the angle of the lock was precise, mechanical, the kind of thing you learned in a room with mats and a teacher who'd hurt you until you did it right.
He tried to stand. She shifted her weight and his shoulder popped. Not dislocated. Subluxed. He screamed again, different pitch, and his face hit the concrete inside the cage.
She stepped back. Waited.
He got up. One arm hanging, the other cradling it. His face was bleeding from the concrete. He was angry, which was stupid, because angry meant he came forward again and she wanted him to come forward.
He rushed her. Both arms, a tackle, using his weight.
She dropped under it. Her palm struck upward into his solar plexus and the air went out of him in a grunt and he folded and her knee came up into his jaw and his head snapped back and his feet left the ground for a second and he landed on his back and didn't move.
Forty seconds. Maybe less.
The crowd was screaming. Money was flying. She stood in the cage with her hands at her sides, breathing through her nose, not sweating. The man at her feet was conscious but his eyes weren't tracking. She hadn't broken anything except his elbow and even that was a controlled break, an injury that would heal in six weeks, not permanent damage. She'd beaten him the way you'd solve a math problem. Step by step. Each move leading to the next.
Troy's LP bar spiked.
Hard. Not like Felicia. Felicia's spike had been a slow climb, proximity and attraction and the system feeding on her enhanced tier. This was a jolt. The number jumped eight points in under a second and the gain felt different in his body, not the warm flush of Felicia's proximity but a sharpening, his senses pulling into focus, the noise of the crowd getting crisper, the details of the room getting clearer.
She turned her head.
She was looking at him. Across the cage, through the chain-link, through the crowd. Her eyes found his and held them. Dark eyes. Flat. No smirk, no curiosity, no amusement. She was assessing him the way she'd assessed the man she'd just put on the floor. Measuring what he could do and how fast and whether he was worth the calories it would take to deal with him.
She looked away. Stepped over the unconscious man. Walked out of the cage. The crowd parted for her and nobody touched her and she went up the ramp and through the loading dock door and into the dark.
Troy didn't follow.
He wanted to. His feet wanted to move and his body was still buzzing from the LP spike and he was already plotting a route to the door. But he'd watched her take a man apart in forty seconds without raising her heart rate. He stayed.
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He went to the bar. Ordered a drink he didn't want. The bartender was forties, thick forearms, a face that had absorbed a lot of information and kept most of it.
"Who was that."
The bartender looked at him. Looked at the cage. Looked back.
"Nobody asks about her twice."
"I'm asking once."
"She fights here when she wants to. Comes in, picks a fight, wins, leaves. Been doing it for months. Nobody knows her name, nobody knows where she goes. A couple of guys tried following her one time." He wiped the bar with a rag. "They came back with their arms in slings."
Troy paid for the drink he hadn't touched. Left.
His apartment was dark. He let himself in and didn't turn on the lights. The city came through the windows, amber and blue, and the room had shapes he was getting used to: the couch, the table, the kitchen counter, the bedroom door.
Felicia's catsuit was draped over the chair by the window. She'd left it there two days ago and hadn't come back for it. Her perfume was on his sheets, faint, the vetiver and vanilla mixed with laundry detergent. A hair tie on the bathroom counter. A mug in the sink she'd used for coffee and left unwashed.
He sat on the edge of the bed. The sheets smelled like her. The bite mark on his shoulder was fading to yellow at the edges.
The fighter.
Her scarred knuckles. The white peaks of scar tissue, years of them, impact after impact layered into the skin. The elbow folding the wrong way and her face not changing. The angle calculated in the fraction of a second between his fist passing her head and her hand reaching his arm.
Her eyes across the cage. One second. Flat. Dark. Giving him nothing.
He caught himself.
Felicia's perfume was on the pillow next to his. Her key was on his kitchen counter. Her catsuit was on his chair.
He lay back. Closed his eyes. Didn't sleep for a while.
The LP bar had stopped climbing. The eight-point spike was still there, banked, and underneath it the system was doing something he hadn't seen before. A new tracker, pending, unlabeled. No name. No tier. No affection level.
Just a question mark.