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“You crazy bitch! you broke my?—”

“Stay down, Gerald.”

He stays down.

I stand over him for a moment and breathe. My heart rate is elevated but not spiked. Training does that. It turns panic into process, terror into technique.

He’s groaning, one hand curled around his shoulder, face pressed sideways against the carpet with its pattern of faded brown diamonds.

The fourteen-year-old girl inside me is screaming, but the woman I’ve become is steady.

I step back and go to the closet, pulling my duffel bag from the shelf.

I pack fast. Clothes. Wraps. My good mouthguard in its case. The folder of documents from the top drawer—passport, birth certificate, and social security card. The three hundred dollars in cash I’ve been saving from the envelope behind the loose baseboard by the window. My phone and charger.

Gerald hasn’t moved. His breathing is ragged and loud.

“You’re crazy,” he groans. “Out of your goddamn mind.”

I zip up the bag and check the folder one more time. Everything I need to start over.

“She would’ve been ashamed of you,” he spits.

I pick up the bag, sling it over my shoulder, and walk out of my bedroom without looking back at him.

Because nothing he can say has any power over me anymore.

I walk through the kitchen and unlock the front door, stepping out into the Florida night—warm and thick, smelling of jasmine from the neighbor’s yard and exhaust fumes from the highway two streets over.

I pull the door shut behind me. The sound echoes in the quiet street like a gunshot. Like an ending.

My phone says the Greyhound station is a twenty-minute walk away. The first bus north leaves at 4:50 AM. I looked it uplast night, some part of me understanding before the rest of me caught up that this night was coming.

A connection in Georgia. Another in North Carolina. By tomorrow evening, I’ll be pulling into Ravenwood Hollow, Virginia.

I start walking.

Behind me, the house where I spent fourteen years learning to be small and quiet now sits dark against the sky. Inside, Gerald Fitch is on the floor of my bedroom, bleeding and broken and finally, finally afraid.

I don’t look back.

I learned to fight so this night could happen. So I could break free of him the same way I learned to break bones—with precision, with power, with the absolute certainty that I would never let anyone make me feel powerless again.

The Greyhound station glows ahead like a beacon.

I’m going north. I’m going to a gym called Oath, run by a man named Victor who believes in building something real. I’m going to train with people who won’t ask questions about the girl I used to be.

I’m going to become someone Gerald Fitch will never touch again.

He wouldn’t even try.

2

ELI

Six months at Oath MMA, and I still can’t get used to the openness of it. Fighters greet each other regardless of who they’re sleeping with, and the locker rooms hum with easy conversation instead of the tight-jawed silence I’d grown accustomed to at my last gym. Victor runs a different kind of operation here. Better, maybe. Definitely more complicated.

He also hired me over coaches who've held this floor down for years. Ray's coached more corners in a fight than most men ever see, and the day I started he just shook my hand and told me where the mitts lived. No territory. No cold shoulder. Six months in, I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.