Page 5
Instead, I scroll to the fight week photos, the kind every promotion runs for hype: serious, shirtless on the scale under bad lighting. Rivera’s photo loads and I stop scrolling entirely.
Tribal ink sleeves down one arm, dense and deliberate, telling some story I don’t know and suddenly want to. Muscle cut clean under brown skin, a scar through one eyebrow that doesn’t soften his face so much as sharpen it. And his eyes, dark and level, staring straight into the lens like he’s already decided he’s not afraid of whoever’s looking.
My stomach clenches.
Heat pools low in my stomach; before I can talk myself out of it, I sit there frozen for three full seconds before shame catches up and slams the door on it.
I shut the laptop hard enough that the sound cracks through the empty apartment.
“No,” I say, the word landing flat in a room with no one to hear it.
Twenty-eight years old. Twenty-three wins. Never let myself look at another man like that. I clear my browser history with hands that aren’t quite steady, delete the search, delete the cache, like erasing the record erases whatever just happened to my body.
The shower runs cold. I stand under it until my skin goes numb and my head stops replaying that laugh, that easy, open sound that had no business living in my head rent-free.
It doesn’t mean anything.
He’s the next name on a list. The next man I put down to keep the belt my father wore before he died. That’s all Rivera is. That’s all he gets to be.
I almost believe it by the time the water runs cold enough to hurt.
3
MICAH
Istop in the ballroom doorway, and Victor’s palm lands between my shoulder blades. Two hundred folding chairs. A long black table on a raised stage. A backdrop the size of a garage door, the promotion’s logo repeated forty times across it. Photographers stack three deep behind the barricade, and every lens swings toward us at once.
The flashes come in white bursts. I blink through them and keep walking.
“Chin up,” Theo mutters at my elbow. “You look like you’re walking into a courtroom.”
“I feel like I’m walking into a courtroom.”
“Then be the guy who’s already won the case.” He tugs my lapel flat and shifts my tie a quarter inch to the left. “There. Handsome. Devastating. Somebody’s going to put you on a poster.”
“Somebody’s going to put me in a headlock.”
“Also fine. Great angle for your jaw.”
Behind us, Cruz shuffles along in a borrowed jacket with sleeves that stop halfway down his forearms. Jonah trails him, scanning the room for threats. No one from Oath has ever sat on a stage like this. We take up a whole row of reserved seats, and every reporter in the front rows clocks it.
Victor steers me toward the steps and lowers his voice. “Three rules.”
“Boss.”
“Don’t swing at his mouth. Don’t swing at his people. Don’t swing at the table.” He holds up a thick finger for each one. “They’ll poke you. Ironside wants you angry, because angry Micah gets sloppy.”
I shake my head. “I’m not angry.”
“Good. Keep it that way.”
I’ve run this moment a hundred times. I know what I’ll say, how I’ll sit, where I’ll put my hands. Calm. Gracious. A man who can keep his shit together for one press conference.
I climb the steps, find the placard with my name, and sit. The chair at the far end of the table stays empty, its card face up. Twenty feet of black tablecloth between us. I roll my shoulders, press two fingers to the medal under my shirt, and breathe.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” a voice booms from the speakers, and the room quiets in layers. “Please welcome, representing Ironside MMA.”
The back doors open.
