Page 140 of Filled

At four thirty she squeezes my hand once and lets go. “Time to go to work, baby.”

The venue takes us in through the loading dock forty minutes later. The place holds three thousand and sounds like it. Even backstage, the crowd is palpable—a bass rumble in the concrete that rises and falls with every fight on the undercard. The hallway smells like liniment and canvas and the specific coppery, adrenaline-soaked stink of nervous fighters, and my body responds like it’s been trained to. Heart rate up. Senses sharp.

Eli is in coach mode now. The man who pressed his forehead to mine this morning is packed away somewhere, and what’s left here now is the professional.

“Shadow. Five minutes. Loose, don’t burn anything.”

I shadow-box in the corner of the warm-up room while other fighters and other corners flow around us. Cruz wraps my hands himself, those huge fingers laying each strip of gauze with the care of a man wrapping a gift. He doesn’t joke while he doesit. This part is sacred to him. He learned it from Victor and he passes it down like scripture.

“There,” he says, taping the last wrap. “Weapons are hot.”

Mitt work next. Cruz holds and calls combinations, and my fists find the pads on rails—one-two, one-two-three, slip the counter, pivot out. The smack of leather on leather settles the last of my nerves the way nothing else can. This is ten thousand hours of muscle memory taking the wheel.

“Jab’s crisp,” Eli says, circling us. “Henderson carries his right hand low when he gets tired. Round two, that door opens. Don’t kick it down in round one. Let him open it himself.”

“Yes, Coach,” I reply.

“He’ll swing wide when he’s hurt. Every time. It’s on all six fights of tape. When you hurt him, don’t admire your work. Angle out or change levels. He’s dangerous exactly as long as he’s conscious and not one second longer.”

“Yes, Coach.”

Cruz lowers the mitts and grins at me. “And if he shoots on you?—”

“Sprawl, hips back, look for the neck.” The choke we’ve drilled a hundred times. His choke, really, the one he broke down for me angle by angle until it lived in my body instead of my brain.

“My boy.” He says it quietly, just for me, and then the moment’s gone and he’s loud Cruz again, hollering at a passing official about the temperature in the room.

Out there in the arena, Dakota is ringside, second row next to Dante, sitting with Jonah and Micah and the rest of the Oath crowd who turned out.

Then the runner is at the door saying ten minutes, and the world narrows.

The fights before mine happened. I know they happened because I heard the crowd shouting through the walls, but Icouldn’t tell you who won. I’m in the tunnel now, hood up, Eli on my left and Cruz on my right, and my walkout music kicks in—drums like a heartbeat at war—and we’re moving.

The arena cracks wide open at the doorway like a thunderstorm. Three thousand voices, heat and light and noise crashing down all at once, and my vision tunnels to the cage glowing under the rig at the center of it all.

I find her without meaning to. Second row, blonde hair catching the light, and for a second our eyes connect, and everything else falls silent.

Then I force myself to look away.

Vaseline on my brows. Mouthguard in. The cage door swings open and I climb the steps and the fence closes behind me and everything—the crowd, the cameras, the secret sleeping in my chest—falls away.

Just me and Henderson and eight sides of chain link.

The ref checks us both, gives his instructions, brings us to the center. Henderson tries the dead eyes again. Up close I can see the sweat already on his upper lip.

We touch knuckles.

The bell rings.

My jab finds him in the first ten seconds. Just a range-finder, but it snaps his head back. He comes forward the way Coach said he would, heavy on his lead leg, right hand cocked like he’s carrying an axe. I slip outside, touch his body, angle away before the counter arrives.

Again. Jab, jab, pivot.

The rhythm builds and it’s mine, all mine, and there’s a purity to this that I could never explain to anyone who hasn’t lived it. No shame in the cage. No confusion. No thirteen-year-old boy learning that wanting things gets you beaten. Just distance and timing and a target in front of me that my body knows how to solve.

Henderson lands one glancing right high on my head in the last minute of the round, and the crowd gasps. I smile at him through my mouthguard because it told me everything about his power, and it isn’t enough, not for the win.

The horn sounds. I walk to my corner and sit.