MAFIA BOSS LAUGHED AND TOLD A POOR WAITRESS, “BEAT MY CHAMPION AND I'LL MARRY YOU”—BUT WHEN SHE TOOK HER FIRST STEP TOWARD THE CAGE, HIS SMILE SUDDENLY DISAPPEARED.

Sadi's ribs hurt each time she inhaled. Her left shoulder was beginning to stiffen, and someone had brought her an ice pack wrapped in a bar towel that smelled faintly of bourbon. She accepted it because refusing care would not make her pain less visible.

Across the Foundry, Dominic was having an argument that looked like a conversation.

"Get Voss back here," he told his security chief, a narrow-faced man named Rafe Bell.

"His vehicle's gone."

"Then find out who authorized him to leave."

"Boss, he had authorization. He signs his own movements."

Dominic stared at Rafe until the other man stopped explaining.

Sadi had expected rage, perhaps a broken bottle. Instead, Dominic seemed most dangerous when he was forced to revise something he had believed certain. Men who owned rooms did not enjoy discovering doors they had never been shown.

Jo brought a chair. "Sit down before you fall down."

"What happened to the boy from the docks?"

"Ambulance came. He's conscious. His name's Dario Tran. Nineteen, if anybody bothers to ask."

"I bothered."

"I know you did. That's why I'm still talking to you."

Sadi sat. She needed to leave, to get to her rented room before the silence of the night swallowed the opportunity. She had photographed a transport manifest once and received a message under her door the next morning: Stop looking for ghosts. The handwriting resembled none of the threatening letters she had kept over four years.

Noah approached with his arm in a sling. He moved like a man wearing chains other people could not see. A doctor had come after all—not Dr. Park, but a paramedic Dominic ordered to remain until the fighters were evaluated.

"Can we talk alone?" Noah asked.

Dominic heard him. "You can use the office."

"Not yours," Noah said instantly.

The answer changed the air. Dominic's jaw hardened, but he said, "Then choose another room."

Sadi gestured toward the kitchen, where the exhaust fans made a steady roar. Jo walked them through the swinging doors and warned two dishwashers to take their break outside. She positioned herself by the entrance without being asked.

Noah stared at the stainless-steel sink for a long time.

"I didn't know you were here," he said.

"I've been looking for you since Amir disappeared."

"I thought you'd stopped."

"That's what people kept telling me to do."

He swallowed. "I watched you on a street camera once. You were standing outside the county morgue with a blue folder."

"That was two years ago. Why didn't you come to me?"

"Because every time I tried, someone else suffered."

The kitchen was suddenly too hot. Sadi pulled her towel tighter against her ribs.

"Start at the beginning."

Noah told her about Larkspur, a private training program hidden inside a disused freight building near the Chicago River. Recruits arrived through debt contracts, prison reentry referrals, and promises of professional careers. Amir had joined because he wanted to earn enough money to cover his mother's pharmacy expenses. Sadi had begged him to leave. By then he owed the training company thousands for meals, equipment, and injuries incurred while working for free.

"He tried to copy the contracts," Noah said. "Not just ours. The girls who cleaned the rooms. The kids who carried the equipment. People they'd borrowed against before the money existed."

Sadi stared at him. "I knew about the training debts. I didn't know there were children."

"Neither did I. Amir found lists. He thought if he got them to a reporter, they'd have to close the place."

"And?"

"They caught him in the records room. A week later they told us he walked out."

"You saw him afterward."

Noah's chin dropped.

"Once. There was a holding room below the training floor. He was alive. He asked me to tell you he was sorry about the peach."

A sound escaped Sadi before she could hold it back. Her brother had never apologized for the peach. It was their joke: he owed her one, plus interest, and had promised to deliver it whenever she finally won a national wrestling title.

"When?" she asked.

"Three nights after they said he left."

"Four years ago."

Noah nodded.

"Was he hurt?"

"Yes."

Sadi gripped the towel until her fingers cramped. "Why didn't you tell the police?"

"I did." He laughed once, without humor. "An officer took my statement and repeated it to Voss. The next day I was told my younger sister's foster placement could be revoked. They knew where she slept, Sadi. They knew the name of her school."

"Who was the officer?"

"Detective Warren Pike. He's a captain now."

Sadi wrote the name on the back of a kitchen ticket. Noah watched the movement with a terrible tenderness.

"You still write everything down," he said.

"Somebody has to."

"Amir left a card. An ordinary library card. He said the number wasn't for a book. It was a locker, or a drawer, I didn't know. He put it inside the old red speed bag at Larkspur."

"That building was demolished."

"The equipment was moved to the Foundry when Russo bought the lease."

Sadi looked toward the kitchen door. "Dominic bought Larkspur?"

"The holding company did. Three years ago. Voss managed it before that."

Jo stepped inside. "You're not going to like the next part. Russo wants everybody to stay until he sees the paperwork."

"He doesn't get to hold me," Sadi said.

"I told him as much," Jo answered. "He said any employee who wants to go can go. He's keeping the management team."

Sadi followed Jo into the bar. The remaining fighters sat in a nervous line waiting for examinations. Leo was nowhere to be seen. A crew was laying absorbent mats over the blood in the cage, but the red speed bag hanging near the far wall remained untouched.

Dominic met her halfway. "Noah told you something."

"That's between us."

"If it concerns criminal activity on my property—"

"Then the person responsible should have known before an injured waitress told him."

He absorbed the insult. "Fair."

She had expected an argument. The acknowledgment left her briefly unbalanced.

"I want to see Larkspur's records," she said.

"You and a lawyer. Not alone."

"I didn't ask for a chaperone."

"I'm not offering protection as a favor. I'm acknowledging that somebody inside this organization is willing to attack witnesses. I want the records preserved."

"And I want copies that don't belong to your people."

Dominic took out his phone and called someone named Mara Chen, introducing her as outside counsel whose office had no business relationship with the Foundry. He asked her to attend the next morning. Sadi insisted on bringing her own attorney, though the truth was she had no attorney and could barely afford groceries. Mara told her about a legal clinic that would be able to appoint one without taking money from Dominic.

"You can't buy my silence with a lawyer," Sadi said after the call.

"I know."

"I'm not grateful because you decided to stop people getting hurt in a building you own."

"You shouldn't be."

The answer came without hesitation. That frightened her more than a charming lie would have.

He looked at the cage. "I knew they fought here. I knew the money was ugly. I was told the participants had contracts, medical staff, and the freedom to leave. I should have checked."

"Yes," Sadi said.

"You're not going to make it easier for me, are you?"

"No."

For the first time, Dominic smiled without an audience. It vanished when Rafe approached with a folded sheet.

"We found the locker level," Rafe said. "And something else."

They entered the freight elevator together: Sadi, Noah, Dominic, Rafe, and Jo, who insisted that somebody sensible ought to accompany them. The car smelled of rust and damp concrete. It descended below the public basement, past a level that did not appear on the posted directory.

The doors opened onto a long corridor lined with steel cabinets. A camera above the elevator had been cut at its cable. On the floor lay a medical bracelet, a torn training contract, and a small pair of athletic shoes.

Sadi stopped breathing for a moment.

Those shoes were not Amir's. They belonged to somebody younger, somebody whose feet had barely reached adult size.

"Don't touch anything," Mara Chen said from Dominic's phone, on speaker. "Photograph first. We're getting a preservation order."

Rafe shone his flashlight over a wall of numbered lockers. Many had been emptied in a hurry. Some doors hung open. Beside cabinet seventeen stood a metal wastebasket filled with burned fragments of paper.

Noah headed straight for a corner storeroom.

"The speed bag," he said. "This way."

The equipment was stacked behind a locked chain gate. Dominic handed Rafe the key ring that had been found in the office desk. None opened it. Sadi crouched, looking at the chain.

"No breaking it," she said. "Not until someone independent photographs it."

"We can get a warrant," Mara's voice said. "And you can all step away from the scene."

Dominic appeared ready to object. Sadi watched him decide against it.

A faint scraping sound came from behind the far cabinets.

Jo raised her flashlight. "Hello?"

A teenage boy emerged from a recessed doorway, his face chalky with fear. He wore a Foundry crew shirt and carried a canvas backpack. He looked from Dominic to Rafe, then at Sadi.

"They said you wouldn't come down," he whispered.

"Who said?" Sadi asked.

"The people who told me to burn the papers."

His name was Mateo Flores. He was sixteen. He had been paid in cash to clean cages and sort equipment, then threatened when he asked why some men disappeared between fights. He said Voss had sent a truck an hour earlier to empty the lower level. Mateo had hidden rather than go along.

"I kept one thing," he said, opening his backpack.

It was a red speed bag, frayed at the seams, heavy with dust. Across the side someone had written a name in black marker. Sadi recognized Amir's handwriting before she could read it.

NO FREE ROUNDS.

The phrase had been his rule after anyone asked him to fight for exposure instead of wages.

Mateo handed the bag to her. "I was supposed to cut it open. I couldn't. I thought somebody might come looking."

Sadi held it without moving. Four years had passed since she last touched anything her brother had owned. Her hands shook in a way they had not shaken inside the cage.

"Thank you," she said.

Mateo began to cry.

Sadi placed the bag gently on a clean piece of plastic Rafe spread across a cabinet. She photographed every side. Only after Mara confirmed that the preservation officer was minutes away did she allow the bag to be opened in everyone's presence.

The padding contained a library card, an old photograph of Amir and Noah, and a narrow strip of paper wrapped around a single key.

The paper bore five words.

SADI, TRUST THE SECOND LEDGER.

Below them was a number that matched no locker on the wall.

Dominic saw the number and went completely still.

"What?" Sadi demanded.

"That's not a locker," he said. "It's a shipping berth. One my father sealed after a worker died."

"What worker?"

He looked at the photograph in her hand.

"A man named Rahman."