Eight Gyms vs. The Useless Heiress The Masked 10-0 Underground Queen Just Came Downstairs novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Two Flights
Birdie fails a water bottle in front of forty reporters, her father hires a caretaker with a bruised jaw, and that night she wins her tenth hooded fight, then learns her brother Dev has entered to face her.
The water bottle had a safety seal, and forty reporters watched me lose to it.
I sat at the end of the press table at Kilbride Boxing with my sleeves pulled over my hands.
Behind me, my brothers stood under the banner with a championship belt each.
Dad stood between them in his windbreaker, holding the belt he won in 1994.
I twisted the cap with two fingers and a small, sad grunt.
It didn't move.
I twisted it with both hands and made my face go pink.
It still didn't move.
"Could someone help?" I asked the front row.
A cameraman reached over, opened it with one flick of his thumb, and handed it back.
I thanked him twice.
A woman in the second row held up her phone. "Birdie, is it true you've never opened a bottle in public?"
"I open them in private," I said. "It's a policy."
She wrote that down.
Then I saw her screen. The caption on the livestream said KILBRIDE DAUGHTER LOSES TO WATER BOTTLE, and forty thousand people were watching.
Behind me, Dad's microphone picked up the Short Sigh.
Dad has four sighs, and I know them all. The Short Sigh is the one he saves for me.
I drank my water, and I didn't feel bad about it.
My brother Finn texted me from three feet away: Dev bet you'd get it open by the second try. I'm up twenty dollars.
The banner over our heads said Declan Kilbride's Eight Gyms, which is what the city calls Dad's chain.
After the press conference, I stretched out on the couch in his office with my hands behind my head.
Dad stood over me. He had the Bills Sigh ready too, but he saved it.
"Birdie, you took the elevator to the second floor of your own gym."
"It's a slow elevator, Dad. I like to be in it."
"I hired you a caretaker. He starts today."
"Great," I said. "Does he come with snacks?"
The man in the doorway had a duffel bag over one shoulder and a yellow-green bruise along his left jaw.
He was tall and had a nose that had been broken at least twice.
"Cal Marek," he said. "My father cornered for yours."
"What happened to your face?"
"Cupboard door."
He crossed the office and took a fresh bottle off Dad's desk.
He turned the cap a quarter turn, no more, and set the bottle in my hand.
"Thank you," I said.
"That's the job."
At home, our row house has three floors, and my room is on the third.
Cal carried my bag. He was behind me on the stairs when I reached the first landing.
He stopped before I'd said a word.
"Rest here," he said. "Your dad says you need to stop at the half."
I had planned to stop at the second landing.
I sat down on the step and took my rest.
At eleven that night, I lay in bed and watched the line of light under the guest room door across the hall.
It went out at eleven twenty.
I waited another ten minutes. Then I went downstairs.
The Cellar sits under a shut bottling plant on Delaware Avenue.
You get to it by four flights of iron stairs, all the way down.
Going down has never tired me.
At the bottom, I pulled a black hood over my head, tied my wraps, and became Hush.
My opponent was a hooded man with a neck wider than his head.
In the second round, I stepped in and threw my left.
He sat down on the canvas and looked at the ceiling.
Ten and zero.
Eight hundred people stood up in the dark and shouted my name, which wasn't my name.
Victor Stahl climbed through the ropes in his camel coat with a microphone and rings on both hands.
"Ladies and gentlemen, ten and zero. The city is asking who she is, and the Cellar says, never mind."
The crowd laughed.
"So let's give the city something else to ask. Eight Gyms Night, nine weeks from tonight. Eight gyms, eight hooded fighters, and Hush takes them all in one night."
He held up a hand for quiet.
"Seven gyms have signed. The last slot, Kilbride Boxing's, was filled an hour ago by the middleweight champion himself."
Stahl smiled at me through the eyeholes.
"Dev Kilbride wants to meet you, Hush."
My brother, who thought I was too weak to open a bottle, had put his name down to fight me.
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