Chapter 273: Fighting Rico

“You,” I said, pointing directly at Rico. “Fight me.”

The words landed in the middle of the park like something dropped from a height.

Everyone went quiet.

Cindy was the first one to find her voice, and even then it came out smaller than usual.

“Ryan?” She looked at me like she was checking whether I’d been replaced with someone else. Not angry, just genuinely thrown, trying to reconcile what she knew about me with what had just come out of my mouth.

She knew me well enough to know I didn’t pick fights for the sake of it. I didn’t posture, I didn’t chest-thump, I didn’t do the male performance of standing somewhere looking dangerous and waiting for someone to challenge it. That had never been me.

But this wasn’t that.

I could feel the place, the way Marlon was looking at me, the way Rico was looking at me, the way every person in this park had made their quiet calculation the moment I walked in and arrived at the same answer. Seventeen. Teenager. Young, probably lucky to still be alive, probably propped up by older people around him who did the actual work.

I could explain it. I could talk for twenty minutes about what we’d survived and what we’d done and what we were capable of, and by the end of it Marlon would nod politely and still look at me the same way, like just a special kid with an interesting story.

Some things couldn’t be argued. They had to be shown.

“What?” Rico finally unstuck himself, staring at me with his head tilted like he hadn’t heard right. “What did you just say?”

“You heard me,” I said. “Fight me. Right here, right now.” I looked him up and down as if assessing him. The extra height, the build, and presence. “You’ve got size, reach, muscle, experience. Take a weapon if it makes you feel better about the odds. A rod, a knife, whatever you need.”

“You little—” Rico stepped forward and the sound that came out of him was somewhere between a growl and a laugh.

“Rico.” Marlon’s hand came up.

Rico stopped, barely, but stopped.

Marlon turned his gaze to me, and his expression had shifted slightly. Not warmer. Just more attentive, like something had caught his interest that he hadn’t expected to find.

“What exactly are you trying to do here?” He asked.

“Proving a point,” I said. “You don’t trust what we’re capable of. I get it. We’re young, we look it, and you’ve got no reason to take our word for any of it. Fine.” I glanced past him to Rico. “Your man there seems like the toughest thing you’ve got standing up right now. So let me put him on the ground and then we can have the rest of this conversation as equals.”

Rico’s jaw locked. The muscle in his cheek twitched.

I had to give silent credit to Sydney for this particular skill set. Three months of watching her wind people up with surgical precision had apparently taught me more than I’d realized.

Marlon was quiet for a moment.

Then the corner of his mouth moved.

“Alright,” he said.

“F…Father?!”

Summer’s voice cut through the park with a sharpness that surprised everyone, including apparently herself. She’d come away from the table without anyone noticing, the apron still on, and she was looking at Marlon with an expression that was equal parts concern and disbelief.

Marlon turned to her with a slight frown. “What?”

“You can’t just let Rico fight him,” she said, dropping her voice slightly without it losing any of its force. “Look at him. He’s around my age. The difference between them is completely obvious. Rico has thirty pounds on him and a decade of training. This isn’t a fair—”

I honestly appreciated the concern. She was trying to help, working from what any reasonable person would see looking at the two of us standing next to each other. The problem was that what she’d seen me do yesterday apparently hadn’t fully recalibrated her reference point for what I was.

“The boy is exceptional for his age,” Molly added, coming to stand beside Summer with her arms folded and a skeptical set to her expression. “Genuinely exceptional, I’ll give him that. But Rico is trained. Properly trained. This isn’t—”

“I won’t break anything important,” Rico said with a smile. He reached down and unclipped his gun and knife from his sides, setting them both on the ground. Then he straightened up and cracked his knuckles with slow satisfaction. “Just going to give the kid an education. He asked for it with his eyes open, underage or not, that’s his call. Quite ungrateful from him.”

“Ungrateful,” I said, looking at him with a cold steadiness I didn’t have to manufacture. “That was the word you used. Ungrateful for what, exactly? Because the first time your group laid eyes on us you nearly put bullets in us first and asked questions later. I don’t remember being handed anything that required gratitude.”

Rico’s eyes narrowed.

“Leave it, Molly,” Marlon said quietly. “He’s made his choice. So has Rico.”

Summer turned on me with a glare for just adding fuel to the fire.

“I won’t touch a bone in your right hand,” I said with a slight smile. “On my honor.”

“Ryan,” Cindy breathed from behind me, trying hard to hold back a laugh.

I glanced back.

“You are so much hotter when you act like this. Sydney would absolutely lose her mind watching this right now you know?” She said jokingly.

“Please do not ever tell her about this,” I said.

“No promises.”

Daisy was standing beside her with a completely different expression — worry, plain and undecorated, her hands pressed together in front of her, glasses slightly crooked from the beach.

“Be careful,” she said quietly.

“Stay back, both of you,” I said. “You’ll be fine.”

I looked at Maribel last.

She was standing with her arms crossed and a grimace on her face that managed to communicate several things at once, skepticism about the situation, annoyance at Rico specifically, and a general reluctance to admit she was anything other than neutral about how this went.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll go easy on him.”

“Who said anything about worrying,” she said. Then, after a beat, more quietly: “Just give that muscle-headed idiot something to think about.”

“Maribel,” Molly said.

“What? I’ve been listening to him interrupt and dismiss people for the last ten minutes. I’m just being honest. He is too noisy for nothing,” she shrugged.

“You little girl,” Rico glared at her as well to which she just shrugged.

“You’re on our side then?” Cindy said, delighted. “Did Ryan’s charm get to you too?”

“Who is being charmed by what—” Maribel started, her voice going up.

Rico stepped into the space between us and the noise, rolling his neck once with a slow pop, his eyes settling on me grinning.

The park went quiet.

I turned to face him fully and let everything else go.

Rico came in without any preamble.

No circling, no posturing, he closed the distance fast and threw the first punch. Straight right, direct line to my jaw, his full bodyweight driving behind it.

I slipped left.

The fist passed my ear close enough that I heard it cut the air. I was already moving back to neutral before Rico had finished the follow-through.

He reset instantly, good footwork, no wasted motion and came back with a left hook that had real snap in it, tight arc, aimed at the side of my head.

I ducked under it and stepped back.

He drove a knee up toward my midsection immediately after, filling the space I’d moved into, reading my retreat before I’d finished it. I had to pivot hard to let it pass, and it clipped the outside of my hip as it went through, not enough to matter, but enough to confirm he wasn’t throwing blind.

“You are fast…”

He pulled back and looked at me.

His breathing was the same. His expression had shifted though, not angry yet, just recalibrating. Eyes moving across me differently than when we’d started.

He came again. Jab, jab, both of them fast and tight, meant to find my timing rather than hurt me, followed by a straight cross with his full shoulder behind it.

I let the jabs glance off my forearms and rolled under the cross, letting it pass over my shoulder, and stepped out to his right.

“Damn it!” He spun and found nothing.

A short silence. Just feet on the ground and the ambient sounds of the park.

Someone in the watching group shifted. I caught Molly from the corner of my eye, her arms crossed, the skepticism on her face doing something slightly different now.

Rico’s jaw tightened.

He pushed forward again, faster this time, less patient, a combination that was clearly practiced: jab to pull my guard, cross to follow, then an immediate elbow driving toward my temple to catch me in the movement between defense and recovery. It was the smartest thing he’d thrown. The elbow was meant for the half-second window when most people were still exposed from slipping the previous punch.

I slipped the cross, felt the elbow coming, and pulled back just enough that it grazed past my hairline instead of connecting.

“What the…!” Rico made a sharp sound shocked.

He came back in with a rush this time, trying to smother the space between us, take away my room to move. A clinch, a tie-up, get his weight on top of me, use what the size difference genuinely gave him rather than chasing a clean knockout against someone who kept not being where he aimed.

He got a hand on my collar.

I let him however.

His right hand came up to follow in a short punch to the ribs, trying to dig in now that he had me contained, and the moment it moved I caught his wrist.

Both hands, crossing over the inside of his arm, locking the joint. And I followed with one hard rotation against the natural line of it.

Rico’s breath hissed out sharply between his teeth. His grip on my collar broke immediately. The arm needed to go where I was directing it or the wrist was going to have a very bad day.

He tried to pivot with it, compensate, use his mass to roll the leverage.

But I didn’t give him time.

I brought my knee up hard and fast and drove it directly into his jaw.

“Garghh!”

The crack of it connecting echoed around the Brighton Park.

Rico’s head snapped back. His feet left the ground for a half second, just barely, just enough and then the whole weight of him came crashing down backward, shoulder and back hitting the park ground with a sound like something heavy dropped from a height. He skidded slightly on the impact and lay still.

Nobody in the park made a sound.

For a moment the only thing moving was the distant flicker of pigeons startled off a nearby rooftop.

Rico blinked at the sky. Once. Twice. His chest was rising and falling. He was conscious, I’d been careful about the angle, kept the force on the right side of the line.

And I was now on him before he’d stopped sliding.

I stepped forward and dropped my knee onto his chest, pressing down with enough force that the breath left him in a sharp involuntary gasp. His hands came up instinctively, fingers spreading against my knee, pushing, and getting nowhere. His eyes went wide as he felt the weight of it, the immovability of it, his arms straining and finding nothing to work against.

He was strong. Genuinely, properly strong. Under normal circumstances, a man his size with his training pushing up against a knee on his chest would have shifted it.

My knee didn’t move a millimeter.

The confusion that crossed his face was almost more satisfying than the fight itself. His body was telling him the math didn’t add up and he couldn’t find the error in it.

I looked down at him and let myself smile, just slightly. Not cruel. Just honest about what this was.

I pulled my right fist back slowly, loading it.

Rico’s jaw locked. He crossed his arms over his face immediately, bracing, every muscle in his body going rigid—

Nothing came.

The impact he’d tensed his whole body for didn’t arrive.

After a stretched-out second he cracked his arms open and looked up.

My fist was hanging in the air directly above him, knuckles stopped less than an inch from where his forearms had been, close enough that he could feel the proximity of it like heat.

I held it there and let him look at it.

“I hope you aren’t hurt, Rico,” I said pleasantly.

His face did several things in rapid succession. The braced terror shifted, then the relief of the unpunched, and what settled underneath both of those things was something uglier and harder to sit with, humiliation, hot and immediate, flushing up from his collar to his hairline. His teeth ground together audibly.

But there was something else in his eyes too. Deeper than the humiliation and more unsettling to him than losing the fight. Something that looked like the beginning of genuine confusion about what exactly he was looking at. A man who had fought enough people to know what was normal and what wasn’t, and what he’d just experienced wasn’t fitting into any category he had available.

“You—” he started, teeth still clenched.

“Ryan!”

Cindy called out at that time.

I tilted my head to the right on pure instinct and reached my hand out to the side without looking.

My fingers closed around a handle.

I straightened up off Rico’s chest and looked at what was in my hand.

Rico’s knife.

Still spinning slightly from the throw, the blade catching the afternoon light as I turned it over once in my fingers. I looked at it for a moment, then turned and looked at Marlon.

He was standing with his arm still extended from the throw, watching me with an expression that gave nothing away.

“That was dangerous,” I said glancing at him.

“Was it?” He replied.

The park went completely silent.

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