“Hey. I know him.”

Jim stopped and looked over his shoulder. A guy with a Boston Fire Department T-shirt came over.

“My pops don’t like to get involved.” The guy nodded down at the flyer. “Who is he to you?”

“My brother.” And that wasn’t a total lie. They were related in a visceral way because of what he and Isaac had been through in XOps—plus there was that whole debt thing.

“He was arrested last night.”

Jim’s brows shot up. “No shit?”

“Bunch of my cousins are cops and they busted a fight ring. Your bro’s a straight-up killer. Only reason anyone ever got into the octo with him was for the big purse, but he never lost. Not once.”

“How long he been in town?”

“I only saw him fight, like, three times.” Saw was pronounced sore. “Listen, ’round here, bunch of fuckers want to get together and beat each other, we’ll let ’em do their thing. But you gotta keep it honest—that’s why they were raided. The promoter was throwing the bouts except for the ones your boy was in.”

Fuckin’ A. Isaac in the system was not a good thing.

“Pops, lemme have the Herald?” The guy reached over to his dad and took the newspaper, looking through it. “Here.”

Jim read the article fast. Underground fighting, blah, blah, blah—Isaac Rothe? Wait, he was in under his real name?

Talk about a target on his chest: Matthias could easily just send someone into the penal system to off the SOB.

“If you want to find your brother . . .” The firefighter’s face grew calculating. “I can tell you where he’ll be as soon as he gets out.”

Not more than two hours after Grier left her client and went to the judge, she was back behind the wheel of her Audi A6 and stuck in traffic around the Boston Common. Fortunately, the pace picked up through Chinatown and then she was out the other side on Tremont Street.

Part of her rush was that she didn’t really have time to take this diversion. She had a meeting with a Fortune Fifty company at one o’clock in her office in the Financial District . . . and all those skyscrapers were at the moment in her rearview mirror and getting smaller.

But she needed to know more.

Which was the other half of her burning hurry.

As she cursed herself, she braced for Daniel to make an appearance and glanced into the backseat. When he didn’t show up, she took a deep breath.

She really didn’t need her metaphysical editorial board at the moment.