Chapter 49
VICTOR
The conference room is set up wrong.
I notice it the moment Patricia opens the door for me—three chairs, a closed folder on the table, a glass of water already poured. Patricia is already standing, and there’s a man in the corner I haven’t met. Tall, thin, late fifties. The kind of charcoal suit that costs as much as my rent.
“Victor. Thank you for coming in.” Patricia’s smile is warmer than the room. “You remember Mr. Linwood. From credit.”
I don’t remember Mr. Linwood. I’ve never met Mr. Linwood. We both know it. He’s here because the meeting requires institutional weight, and Patricia is here because the meeting requires a face I trust.
We shake hands. Linwood’s grip is the practiced one of a man who shakes hands forty times a week. I sit. They sit.
I have a folder of my own. Cashflow projections. The expansion budget restructured. Three downside scenarios. Two days of work. I set it on the table.
Linwood doesn’t look at it.
“Victor, I’ll be direct,” he says. “Given current market conditions and considering certain reputational factors that have entered the public conversation in the last few days, the bank is going to pause on the expansion line of credit.”
There it is. Forty seconds in.
“Pause.”
“Defer,” he corrects himself. “We’ll plan to revisit at the start of Q2.”
Q2. Months from now.
I look at Patricia. She’s holding a pen she isn’t using.
“The numbers are still strong,” I say. Not a plea. Just the fact. “Q4 was the best quarter on record. Memberships are up. The sponsor pull-down is real, but it’s recoverable inside this fiscal year.”
Linwood nods the way men nod when they’re not listening. “All considerations, the credit committee will review at the appropriate time, Victor. We aren’t denying. We’re deferring.”
We aren’t denying.
The folder I brought sits closed on the table. Linwood hasn’t asked to see it. Patricia is looking at the pen.
I count three more breaths. Decide what’s worth saying. Decide it isn’t anything.
“All right.”
I stand. They stand. Linwood hands me a card. Patricia walks me out. In the hallway by the elevators, she finally meets my eyes for half a second.
“Victor, I—” She stops herself. Starts again. “We’ll do what we can in Q2.”
Q2. There it is again. The other person in the room had said it; she’s saying it now. Whatever she’d been about to say first didn’t survive the corridor.
“Thank you, Patricia.”
The elevator opens. I get in alone.
Outside, the air has that early-evening edge to it that catches in the throat. Five-fifteen. I cross the lot to the Charger. Get in. Close the door. The folder is on the passenger seat where I left it.
I don’t open it.
I turn the key, and I drive.
Twenty minutes downtown.
The Southwest Financial building takes up half a block. Glass and steel and the kind of lobby that smells like nothing—like air conditioning and the faintest suggestion of money.
I walk in through the front. No briefcase, no appointment. Forty minutes of business day left.
The receptionist looks up from her monitor with the practiced smile she gives unannounced visitors. It dies a little when she sees me. She knows the face. Everyone with a phone does this week.
“I’m here to see Robert Hartwell.”
“Do you have an appointment, Mr. Kaine?”
“No.”
She hesitates, then picks up the phone. I watch her say my name. I watch her listen. I watch her color shift slightly.
“Mr. Hartwell will see you. Twentieth floor.”
The elevator is mirrored on three sides. I look like a man who hasn’t slept. I don’t fix anything.
Hartwell’s office sits at the end of a long-carpeted hallway.
He’s standing when I come in, the way a man stands when he wants the moment to be his to control.
Mid-fifties. Suit that costs more than a fighter’s monthly cut.
Hair gone grey at the temples in the deliberate way of men who’ve decided to look distinguished rather than pretend otherwise.
“Victor.”
“Robert.”
I don’t shake his hand. I sit down in the chair across his desk without being asked. He sits a beat after.
“I’d offer you coffee, but I’m guessing this isn’t that kind of visit.”
“No.”
The pause stretches. He’s letting me go first. I let it stretch back. A man in his position doesn’t do small talk to fill silence; he uses silence as a tool. Fine. So can I.
Eventually he folds. “I’ve been expecting this.”
“Why.”
It isn’t a question the way I say it.
He sets his pen down. Picks his words. “Stakeholder considerations. Compliance review came back unfavorable. The brand exposure given the current news cycle is—challenging.” He says the words the way a doctor reads a diagnosis. “The decision wasn’t mine alone, Victor.”
“How long has the conversation been going.”
“Some time. These things don’t move quickly.”
“How long.”
He looks at me. Decides what the truth is going to cost him. Says it anyway.
“Closer to a year, Victor. It’s been a long process.”
Closer to a year.
He’d signed our renewal a month before the Hunt.
A month after the Hunt, he was already in conversations with Dawson.
Three weeks after that, the formal switch was on his desk.
I’d watched him at the bar of a fight night in those same three weeks, his hand on Dawson’s shoulder, and decided to file it under noise.
I look at his hand. It’s resting flat on the desk now. Same hand. Same gesture I’d seen at the rail of the warehouse—steady, practiced, the hand of a man who’s done a thousand polished sit-downs like this one.
I’d watched that hand and told myself I’d deal with it Monday.
“You’ve been talking to Dawson about us since shortly after we signed,” I say. Not a question.
“I have a working relationship with Mr. Dawson. I had one with you.”
“Had. With me.”
He doesn’t correct me. He could. He doesn’t.
I sit there for another three seconds. Long enough to know I could keep going—could ask the things I came in here thinking I wanted to ask.
About when the photographs first came up.
About whether he’d been told what was coming.
About whether the Hartwell who shook my hand at the renewal already knew that hand was a lie.
I find I don’t want any of those answers anymore. The shape of the thing is enough.
I stand.
“You should have told me to my face, Robert. At any point in the last year.”
His expression doesn’t change. He doesn’t reach for an apology. Doesn’t reach for anything.
I take that as the confirmation it is. Walk out without closing the door behind me. The carpet swallows my footsteps on the way to the elevator.
In the parking garage I sit in the Charger for a long time before I turn the key.
I drive for hours after that. The city empties around me. The radio stays off. I don’t take the route home, and I don’t take the route to Theo’s. I drive until the only place left is the one I’ve been avoiding all night.
I let myself in through the side door at quarter to one in the morning.
The gym is the kind of dark you don’t get during business hours—no fluorescent hum, no music bleeding from the speakers Cruz never turns off when he’s on the mats.
Just the standby lights on the cardio equipment, small red dots scattered like coordinates across a black room.
The smell is the same as always. Sweat in the rubber.
Iron in the air. The faint chemical of the disinfectant the cleaning crew sprays on the bags.
I don’t turn on the overheads. I don’t want to see the place properly tonight.
I walk the perimeter the way I do every night before I lock up, the way I’ve done a thousand times.
Past the lockers. Past the rack of gloves where someone’s left a wrap on the floor.
Past the spot where Jenkins used to stretch before sparring and where, yesterday, his locker stood empty for the first time in three years.
I count the empty lockers without meaning to. Seven.
The mats are clean. The ring sits in the center of the warehouse, ropes slack, canvas catching what little light there is. I climb in.
I’ve done this since the night we opened.
Stood inside the ring after everyone left, just to feel the space—the give of the canvas under my weight, the way sound dies inside the ropes.
A king surveying his kingdom. That’s what I called it the night of Jonah’s big win, alone in this same warehouse with my chest still warm from the noise of the crowd.
I remember it because I let myself feel it, and feeling it was a thing I used to know how to do.
Tonight the canvas just feels like canvas.
I sit down in the corner. Press my back into the turnbuckle pad. Look at the ceiling—the network of ductwork and exposed beams I picked out of a real-estate listing seven years ago because the owner couldn’t move it and knocked twenty percent off the lease.
Forty thousand dollars in savings. A contact who knew about the warehouse space.
That’s how I built it the first time. From a hospital bed and a knee that wouldn’t straighten and a career that ended on a single pop somewhere in the lateral ligament.
Everyone said I was crazy. Everyone said I’d burn through the money in eight months.
And I did the math anyway and signed the lease anyway and stood in this empty warehouse for the first time at thirty-one years old, terrified out of my fucking mind, knowing I had nothing else.
I knew how to build a thing from nothing. That’s the part I’ve been telling myself all night.
What I don’t know is whether I have it in me to do it twice.
My knee aches. Phantom ache, mostly. The reconstruction was clean. But it always reminds me, this hour of the night, when I’ve been standing too long. Like the body has its own way of keeping score.
Seven fighters. Eight sponsors by the morning, probably.
Thirty percent revenue minimum, Ray said, and that’s before he factored in what the bank told me at four-thirty this afternoon—deferral on the expansion line, polite voice, no eye contact, the kind of “we’ll revisit in Q2” that everyone in the room understood meant no.
I could rebuild. I know how. I’m thirty-eight years old and I know how.
I just don’t know if I want to.
That’s the thought I’ve been avoiding all day, and now it’s sitting in the ring with me.
I built this place because I had no other version of myself left after the knee.
I poured everything I was into the walls.
And what scares me—sitting here in the dark with the ductwork and the smell of disinfectant—isn’t losing it.
I’ve lost things before. What scares me is the version of me that would build it again would have to be someone I haven’t met yet.
Someone who doesn’t hide. Someone who walks into a banker’s office as the man in the photographs and asks for the loan anyway.
I don’t know that man.
I haven’t even been him for a full week.
I sit there for a long time. Long enough that one of the cardio standby lights times out and the room gets darker by one small dot. Long enough that I lose track of whether my eyes are open or closed.
My phone is in my jacket pocket. I haven’t looked at it in two hours. I think about the last text I read—Theo’s, before the bank meeting.
Walk in with your head high. You’re not alone in this fight. Not anymore.
I had walked in with my head high. I had walked out without expansion funding.
I pull out my phone. Don’t text him. Don’t want a record of how I sound at one in the morning, sitting in the dark of my own gym.
I climb out of the ring. Lock up the side door. The Charger is the only car in the lot. The engine catches on the first turn, the way it always does, and the warmth of the cabin hits my face like something I forgot I was allowed to feel.
I don’t decide to drive to Theo’s. There’s just nowhere else for the night to go.
I walk through Theo’s door. My body feels like I’ve gone fifteen rounds, every muscle aching with the day’s tension. Theo’s waiting, eyes searching my face for signs of disaster.
I collapse into his arms, burying my face in his neck. I don’t have words for him. Not yet.
His hands stroke my back, gentle but firm. He doesn’t ask. He waits.
After a long minute, I manage: “Hartwell’s been with Dawson for nearly a year. The bank deferred until Q2. I went back to the gym after.”
“And?”
“And I sat there until I had nowhere else to be.”
“You’re home now.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s enough for tonight.”
Theo guides me to the couch, his hands never leaving my body. I should feel weak for needing this—this comfort, this anchoring touch. But I don’t. For the first time in my life, I let myself lean into someone else’s strength without questioning what it costs my own.
“How do you feel?” he asks against my temple.
“Tired,” I say. “Down to the bone.”
“I’m proud of you,” he whispers, pressing his lips there.
I close my eyes, focusing on the warmth of his breath, the steadiness of his heartbeat against mine.
He kisses me then, slow and soft—nothing like our usual hunger. This is something else entirely. Comfort. Acceptance. His lips move against mine like a promise.
When we break apart, I cup his face in my hands. My hands that have broken noses, split lips, and knocked men unconscious. These same hands now touch Theo with a gentleness I never knew I possessed.
“I’ve never needed anyone before,” I admit, the words scraping my throat raw. “Never let myself.”
Theo smiles, that smile that reached inside me from the very beginning. “And now?”
“Now I need you. And it should terrify me, but...” I take a shaky breath. “It feels like finally putting down something heavy I’ve been carrying my whole life.”
He rests his forehead against mine, our breath mingling in the quiet space between us. No demands. No expectations. Just this moment of being completely seen and still wanted.
I’ve spent my life being strong for others. The protector. The fighter. The unflinching coach. But here, wrapped in Theo’s arms, I discover that allowing myself to be held is its own kind of strength.