Page 139 of Filled

I lie still and take inventory. Dakota’s cheek on my chest, her breath warm on my skin because none of us bothered with clothes. Eli behind her, one arm thrown over both of us. Dante on my other side, face peaceful in a way it never is when he’s awake. Cruz sprawled diagonally across the bottom of the mattress, occupying forty percent of the bed with zero shame.

This is what I’m fighting for. Not a belt. Not a record. This.

I extract myself one limb at a time, a grappling exit slower and more careful than anything I’ll do tonight. Dakota makes a small sound of protest and burrows into the warm spot I leave behind. Eli’s arm tightens around her.

In the bathroom, I study myself in the mirror. Fed and rehydrated since yesterday’s official weigh-in, lean muscle and veins standing up along my forearms. The bags under my eyes from the weight cut have faded. My hands are steady.

My head is quiet.

That’s the part that gets me. Every fight camp ends the same way—last week a slow drowning in what-ifs, my brain running disaster footage on a loop until I couldn’t eat, sleep, think.

This week should have been worse—the hidden relationship that could end our careers, the build-up to the fight, Brady Williams’ lifelong talent for punishing himself for wanting thingsfor himself.

Instead, I slept eight hours in a pile of people who love me, and the quiet in my skull feels like a superpower.

“You’re up early.” Eli leans in the doorway, sweatpants low on his hips, voice rough with sleep. He scans me head to toe. “How do you feel?”

“Honestly?” I turn from the mirror. “Dangerous.”

Something crosses his face—pride, heat, both. He crosses the small bathroom and puts his hand on the back of my neck, forehead to mine for one breath. Two.

“Good,” he says. “Keep it.”

The ceremonial weigh-ins at eleven are theater. Cameras, a stage, a scale that doesn’t count for anything since we made weight yesterday, but the promoters love a show. I step up in my shorts and the announcer calls out one fifty-four and a half, and the small crowd of media and hardcores makes their noise.

Marcus Henderson steps up after me. The Hammer. Six fights, five knockouts, all of them ugly brawls where he ate threepunches to land one bomb. He’s thick through the shoulders, already carrying water weight back, and when we square up for the staredown he does the thing brawlers do—juts his chin, flexes, tries to make his eyes dead.

I just look at him.

He blinks first. Looks away, covers it by turning to the cameras, but I see it and he knows I see it. Cruz sees it too, from the edge of the stage, and his grin turns wolfish.

“He’s already beat,” Cruz says in the van afterward. “Did you see that? The man looked at you and his soul left his body.”

“One staredown doesn’t win a fight,” I argue.

“No, but it tells you where his head’s at.” Cruz drapes his arm over the seat back. “His head’s hiding under the blankets. Yours is right where it needs to be to succeed, here.”

The van drops us at the host hotel a little after noon. The promotion books a room for every fighter on the card, even those of us who live fifteen minutes away—somewhere controlled to rest, close to the venue—and mine has sat empty all week. The afternoon crawls. This has always been the hardest part. Nothing to do but wait, and waiting is where my brain used to eat itself alive.

Dakota stays.

The others clear out with murmured excuses—Eli to review tape one last time, Cruz and Dante to get food and check the venue.

She doesn’t talk much, sitting cross-legged on the second bed while I lie on the first, and at some point her hand finds mine across the gap between mattresses and just stays there. Her fingers laced through my fingers, her thumb moving in slow circles over my knuckles. The tattooed letters across her fingers press against my skin.

“Are you nervous?” she asks around two o’clock, when the light through the curtains has gone flat.

“Is that a bad thing?”

“It doesn’t feel like me.” I watch the ceiling. “Every other fight, by now I can’t eat. Can’t lie still. This feels like I’ve forgotten to do something important.”

She rolls onto her side to look at me, blonde hair spilling across the pillow. “Or you finally stopped doing something you never needed to do.”

“Which is?”

“Fighting yourself first.” Her hazel eyes hold mine, her thumb still moving over my knuckles. “It’s all still in there, Brady. I can feel it in your hand. It’s just waiting for the cage door now instead of eating you alive in a hotel room.”

I turn that over while the clock crawls. She’s right. It hums under my skin like a struck tuning fork, every volt. It just doesn’t have anywhere bad to go anymore.