Page 85 of Bounced!

I looked around at them, my ridiculous, loud, magnificent family, off their heels for the first time since the card showed up on Mark’s counter, leaning in, ready to swing. I felt the old captain settle all the way back into my chest, the one I’d boxed up in a stadium twenty years earlier and sworn I’d never let out. For the first time since I’d caged him, I was glad he existed, glad I’d been fast and mean and good at reading a field, glad I knew how to look at chaos and find the play.

All those years, I’d thought the leaving of that life was the point. It turned out, I was just carrying the tool to the place it was actually made for. Not a stadium filled with screaming fans. This. These people. This bar.

“We’ll probably lose,” I told them, because they deserved the truth. “I want to say that once, out loud, and then never again. The odds are bad. The money is a mountain, and we aren’t that tall. We will very likely spend the next four months fighting for this and lose it anyway.”

Nobody moved.

“But we’re going to make them take it from us,” I said. “Every foot of it. We’re not going to pack up quietly and hand over seven years like it was nothing. If they want this bar, they’re going to have to come through a whole neighborhood to get it. They’re going to read about it in the paper. They’re going to see it on the news. They’ll know exactly what they knocked down. We fight for what’s ours, loud, all the way to December.”

Benji was crying.

Rod had his hand over his heart.

Jacks was already texting Skyler.

“For what’s ours,” Mark said from my side, and lifted his coffee. I heard him choose the word on purpose, heard him hand his whole life’s “mine” over to the room and let it become something larger.

“For what’s ours,” the family echoed in unison.

And we went to war.

Chapter 28

Mark

I’d spent my whole life giving the orders. It turned out I was terrible at taking them.

“You’re doing it again,” Dante said, without looking up from his notebook.

“Doing what?”

“Fixing. I gave you a task and you’re three steps past the task, already redesigning the whole thing.” He tapped the page. “I asked you to call the printer about the flyers, just the flyers, not to reroute the entire—”

“The printer had a better paper stock, a heavier one. If we’re going to blanket Ybor, I figured we’d want—”

“Mark.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you call about the flyers?”

I opened my mouth.

“Did you call about the flyers, or did you spend forty-five minutes designing a better flyer campaign than the one your general assigned you?”

I closed my mouth.

Dante set down his pen and looked at me with his dry patience, the traitor, enjoying every second of this. “You can’t help it. I know. After twenty years of running crews, you see a job and you optimize it, but I need you to do the small thing I asked, not the big thing you invented. I can’t keep track of the board otherwise.” He softened. “I know it’s an adjustment, being a soldier instead of the guy who owns the army. I get it. You’re doing great . . . for a first-timer.”

“I’m not a first-timer. I’ve—”

“When’s the last time somebody told you what to do and you just did it?”

I thought about it.

I thought about it for a while.

“That’s what I figured,” he said and went back to his notebook.