Page 9 of Dominate

ZANE

Three days, and the staredown still repeats on loop behind my eyes.

Rivera’s mouth, the corner of it lifting when he said I’d break. The pulse ticking at his throat. My own gaze had dropped where it had no business going.

I run twelve miles before sunrise. Then the bag. Then rounds with Reyes, who has the reach of a heron and the patience of a cinder block. By noon I’ve put him on his back twice, and he’s holding his ribs and eyeing the door.

“Again,” I tell him.

“Man, I got a kid’s recital at two.”

“Then you’d better hurry.”

He hurries. I catch him with a body shot that folds him like a lawn chair, and Dan’s voice cuts across the gym before Reyes finishes hitting the mat.

“Enough.”

“I’m not done.”

“Reyes is.” Dan walks over with his arms crossed, gray stubble catching the light. He crouches beside Reyes, checks him over, and sends him to the locker room with a slap on the shoulder. Then he stands and looks at me for a long time. “That’s your third session today.”

“Fourth, if you count the run.”

“I don’t.” He tips his head at the wall clock. “You’ve got the network shoot at four. Go home, eat something that didn’t come out of a blender, and put on a shirt with buttons.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“You’ve been fine since Tuesday. Fine looks a lot like a man chewing on his own teeth.” He waits. I say nothing. “Your father used to do that. Train the problem out of his body. Didn’t work for him either.”

That lands where he aims it.

I peel off my wraps and walk to the showers, turning the water cold.

The studio sits in a glass building downtown, the kind with a lobby fountain. A production assistant with a lanyard and headset leads me down a corridor lined with framed posters, past a makeup chair where a woman dusts powder across my forehead and tells me to relax my jaw.

I didn’t know it was clenched.

“Joint sit-down,” Dan mutters from behind me, thumbing his phone. He manages me the way some men manage restaurants, with a clipboard and a permanent squint. “Fifteen minutes. Ratings bump. Be charming.”

“I don’t do charming.”

“Then be presentable.”

The set is a fake living room built for people who don’t live in one. White leather couch, two mics clipped to a lamp, and a coffee table with a bowl of decorative lemons. The host, Jill Marston, sits in an armchair angled toward the couch, silver bob, reading glasses pushed into her hair, a smile that has ended careers.

I take the left side of the couch. The leather sighs under me.

Then Micah Rivera walks in.

Black henley, sleeves shoved to the elbows so the tribal ink on his left forearm shows dark against his skin. Silver catching at his collarbone, the little medal on its chain. The scar through his right eyebrow looks sharper under studio lights, a pale seam through the dark arch. He shakes Jill’s hand, says something that makes her laugh, and turns.

Finds me.

Nothing shifts in his face. That’s what gets me. I’ve been unraveling for three days, and he looks like a man who slept eight hours and ate a real breakfast.

“Butler.”

“Rivera.”