"Give me the badge, Ortega."
Levi Grant's hand closes over the lanyard at my throat before I even clock him crossing the hold. Knuckles cold. A signet ring drags along my collarbone on the way up, catching the edge of my collar, and I go still because pulling back means the cord bites.
"You want to choke me for it," I say, "or you want to ask like a person."
"I don't ask twice." He twists his wrist and the lanyard tightens half an inch. Close enough now I get the cedar-and-leather off his suit jacket, expensive, dry-cleaned, nothing like the bleach and blood smell baked into my scrubs. "That's a temp pass. Forty-eight hours. Signed by a promoter who didn't read the file."
"Read what file. I passed every panel this commission ever shoved in my face."
"You passed the ones we tested." His mouth is right at my ear now, low enough only I get it, breath hot enough I feel it move the hair at my temple. "There's a name on a ban letter, Nash. It's yours. Lifetime. I signed it myself."
I grab his wrist and shove it off my collar, and the lanyard snaps loose, badge skating across the floor tile and stopping under the medical cart.
"Yeah," I say. "I remember whose signature buried me. Real nice penmanship for a guy who never once looked at the actual bloodwork."
Levi doesn't chase the badge. He steps on it instead, heel grinding the plastic laminate into the grout, and looks at me like I'm the mess on his shoe.
"One more cut you wrap tonight," he says, "one more glove I catch on your hands anywhere near that cage, and it's not a hearing anymore. It's federal. Falsifying a commission panel isn't a suspension, it's a record."
"I never falsified anything." My voice cracks louder than I want it to, and that's the problem with Levi Grant, he finds the crack every time. "Somebody swapped that panel before it hit your desk and you signed off without blinking because it was easier than looking at your own family's numbers."
Something moves behind his eyes. Fast. Gone before I can call it.
"Careful," he says.
"Or what. You'll ban me twice?"
I drop and yank the badge out from under his boot before he can grind it further, and I feel his weight shift toward me like he's going to plant that heel again, right on my hand this time. I get there first. I pin the badge flat under my own boot, sole to sole with his, close enough his knee brushes mine.
"You don't get to bury me twice," I tell him. "Not in this room."
For a second neither of us moves the boot. The cart's fluorescent light buzzes over both our heads, and I can see the muscle working in his jaw, can see the exact second he decides not to shove me, and it does something stupid to my pulse that I don't have time to examine because that's when the lights cut.
Not the fluorescents. The mag-lock on the hold door.
A dead thunk, then the hiss of the seal engaging, and the little green light over the frame goes black.
"That's the fire panel," Levi says, already moving, already at the door, palm flat against steel that isn't going anywhere. "Somebody pulled a false alarm."
"Or the breaker's fried again, same as August." I'm at the door too, close enough his shoulder's against mine, both of us useless against six hundred pounds of pneumatic lock. "Either way we're not getting out till maintenance resets it."
"There's a card reader—"
"Card reader needs the same power the magnets do. Congratulations, Commissioner. You're locked in a supply closet with the guy you just tried to end."
He doesn't answer that. He's looking past me, toward the small wired-glass window in the door, toward the corridor where I can hear the muffled roar of the crowd two walls over — somebody's fight still going, somebody's nephew still in that cage, and for one second his whole face changes, worry cracking through the suit and the signature and the lifetime ban like it was never real to begin with.
Then he winces. Sharp, sudden, and his right hand comes off the door and presses flat against his own ribs.
"What," I say.
"Nothing."
"Your hand's under your jacket like you're holding something in, Grant, that's not nothing."
He pulls his hand back to look at it and there's blood on his fingers, dark and fresh, more than a nick should give up. Must've caught the door edge when it slammed, some burr in the frame nobody bothered to file down, and from the amount already soaking through his white cuff it went deeper than a scrape.
"It's fine," he says, which is what people say right before they're not fine.
"You're bleeding through a two-hundred-dollar shirt in a sealed room with no working comms and the only medic in a twenty-foot radius is standing on the badge you just tried to grind into the floor." I straighten up. "Kind of funny, if you think about it."
"I'm not laughing."
"Neither am I." I nod at his hand. "Let me see it."
"You're banned."
"I'm the guy in the room with a kit on that cart. You want to bleed out on principle, be my guest, but explain that to whoever's asking why the commissioner needed stitches an hour after he locked himself in with the man he banned."
His jaw works. The cuff's gone from red at the edge to soaked clean through, a dark stain crawling past his wrist bone, dripping now, one bright drop hitting the tile between his shoes and mine.
"Fine," he says, and for a second the commissioner voice cracks into something rawer, something that sounds almost like it costs him to say it. "Fine. Do it."
He reaches for his own buttons first, fingers slick and shaking just slightly at the top one, then stops, and looks at me the way you look at someone you've already decided you hate and can't stop needing anyway.
"Take my shirt off," he says.