Page 44 of Knuckles & Knives
My heart stops when I see a familiar name on one of the forms.
“Angel Rivera,” I read aloud, holding up a registration sheet with a photograph that makes my breath catch. It’s a younger Axel, his face unmarked by the small scars he carries now. The silver streak in his hair is already there, but everything else about him looks softer.
And less haunted.
Axel goes perfectly still beside me, and for the first time since I’ve known him, he seems truly caught off guard.
“That’s not possible,” he whispers, but his voice lacks conviction.
“Age nineteen. Registered under Angel Rivera instead of Axel.” I study the photograph more closely. “This was taken at my father’s gym, Axel, the one attached to our original compound. You fought in my father’s circuit.”
Angel—Axel—was part of my father’s world before I ever met him at the Obsidian. Before he appeared like a phantom and dominated every opponent. Before he became Ghost.
“How is this possible?” I ask again, my voice sharp now. “You would have been fighting when I was still living here. How did I never see you?”
Axel—Angel—runs both hands through his hair, destroying the carefully tousled style. When he looks at me, his brown-amber eyes are filled with something I’ve never seen from him before.
Fear.
“Because you weren’t supposed to see me.” His voice is rough, stripped of its usual playful cadence. “Vincent made sure of that.”
“My father knew you?”
“Your father saved me.” The admission comes out like a confession, like something torn from his chest. “I was nineteen, homeless, fighting in back-alley circuits just to eat. I’d been on the streets since I was fifteen, bouncing between foster homes and juvenile facilities. Vincent found me after I’d been fighting illegally for three years.”
I sink back on my heels. “He brought you into his organization?”
“He gave me a chance to be something other than a street rat with anger issues.” Axel’s fingers trace the edge of the photograph. “A place to train properly, decent opponents, enough money to get off the streets… but there was a condition.”
“Which was?”
“Stay away from you.” His laugh is bitter. “Vincent said his daughter didn’t need to be exposed to someone like me. Someone with my background, my… issues. He kept me on the outer circuits, the satellite gyms, and made sure our paths never crossed.”
The pieces are falling into place now, forming a picture that makes my chest tight with emotions I can’t name. “But you saw me anyway.”
“From a distance. Always from a distance.” His voice drops to almost a whisper. “You’d come to the main gym sometimes with Vincent, usually after my training sessions were over, but Iwould linger, find excuses to stick around. Watch you spar with your instructors, see you laugh with the other fighters. I saw you enough to know that you had a crush on Dom even back then.”
“Axel…”
“You were seventeen the last time I saw you before everything went to hell. Wearing that black tank top and those ridiculous pink boxing gloves that Vincent bought you because he said you needed something ‘feminine’ to balance out all the violence.” His smile is wistful, tinged with old pain. “You dropped one of the gloves after practice, and I picked it up. Held it for maybe thirty seconds before one of Vincent’s men saw me and reminded me of the rules.”
My jaw drops. I remember those pink gloves, remember losing one and finding it later in my gym bag. I never questioned how it got there.
“That was you.”
“That was me. Ghost before I became Ghost.”
I stare at the photograph in my hands, trying to reconcile the young man in the image with the dangerous, unpredictable fighter I’ve come to admire. “What happened after my father died?”
“I disappeared. The Sterling takeover scattered Vincent’s people in every direction, and I was nobody important enough to hunt down or recruit. I went back to street fighting, back to being nothing.” His jaw tightens. “Until I had enough. I had to start to build my own way, and I was a good enough fighter.”
“Undefeated for two years.”
He shakes his head. “I pegged you immediately. The little girl with the pink boxing gloves had grown up to be as fierce as her father. I… I hoped she’d inherited his ability to see potential in broken things.” He meets my gaze directly. “Turns out she inherited something better—the ability to make broken things feel whole.”
My heart skips a beat, and the sorrow I feel for him… This is why Axel has always seemed to understand me on some instinctive level, why his loyalty felt so immediate and complete. He’s been watching over me longer than I knew, carrying feelings that started when we were both just kids in my father’s world. He’s maybe two years older than I am, but he’s strong in ways other than the physical.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask.
