Page 21 of Dominate

“Only the kind you get from a draw.”

He almost smiles. Writes something on his clipboard. Behind him, the locker room is a swamp of noise. Cruz keeps replaying the fifth round with his hands, throwing invisible elbows at Jonah. Theo paces by the door, phone pressed to his ear, saying, “No comment, no comment, yes, he’s fine, no comment,” in the bright voice he saves for reporters. Victor sits beside me on the bench, forearms on his knees, staring at the floor as if it owes him money.

“A draw,” he says.

“I know, boss.”

“Forty-seven, forty-seven.” He shakes his head. “Judge Novak needs his eyes checked.”

“Or his heart.”

“Both.” He squeezes the back of my neck, once, gentle for a man built like a brick wall. “You fought your ass off. Twelve wins against twenty-three, and neither of you walked away with a loss. You took the champion five rounds. That belongs in a museum.”

Coach Eli drifts over with a bag of ice and presses it against my knuckles without a word. He watches me for a moment, his green eyes calm, reading everything.

“Your head’s somewhere else,” he says.

“Just tired.”

“Mm.” He doesn’t buy it. Eli never buys anything. “Ice for twenty minutes. Then we’ll talk about that clinch in the fifth.”

The clinch. Sure.

I stare at the ice and hear it again, so low no mic could catch it, warm against my jaw.

I can’t stop thinking about you.

Four seconds of air. That’s all it took. I take punches for a living. Six words shouldn’t leave me this fucked up.

“Bathroom,” I announce, and stand.

Theo lowers his phone. His eyebrows go up.

“Doctor said you’re clear,” I tell him. “I’ll be two minutes.”

“Uh-huh.” His gaze travels from my split lip to my face to whatever my face is doing. “Take three.”

The corridor is cinder block painted white, scuffed to gray at hip height by decades of equipment carts. Overhead, a fluorescent tube flickers with a faint electric whine. Somewhere far off in the arena, a low, wet roar of eleven thousand people empties out, heading for the exits.

I walk past the bathroom.

I don’t decide to. My legs just decline the turn.

A sign on the next door says MEDICAL B in stenciled black letters, and a voice leaks from behind it, low, cutting, and furious.

I stop dead.

“Madre de Dios, Zane. A draw.”

I flatten myself into the alcove beside a supply cage, out of sight, pulse thudding in my split lip. The door isn’t fully latched. Through the gap comes the cool, clipped voice I heard in the showers, the one that peeled Zane off me like tape.

“Do you understand what happened tonight? Your father’s name is carved over that gym door. And you let a kid from a rainbow daycare hold you to a draw.”

Zane says nothing.

“Answer me.”

“No, sir.”