Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
LUKE
Vegas in October is different from Vegas in January.
The January camp was about becoming something. October is about being it. The same city, the same gym Reyes uses when we travel, the same hotel two miles from the arena—but the air between them is different. Charged. Four weeks of work behind us, one fight in front of us, and nothing left to add.
Mack flies in Thursday. He doesn’t say much when he arrives—he looks at me the way he has since we first met, a trainer’s appraisal from a man who knows exactly what he’s looking at and is deciding whether it’s ready. He watches the Friday session from the corner without a word.
Afterward, he finds me in the locker room.
“You’re ready,” he says.
Two words. That’s Mack’s version of a standing ovation and a speech rolled into one.
“Thank you,” I say.
He briefly rests his hand on my shoulder—the same gesture he gave Andi after the sweep, the same gesture he gives to everything that matters and can’t be improved by more words. Then he walks out.
Reyes, from the doorway, chimes in. “He’s right.”
That’s the most words Reyes and Mack have exchanged all week.
Bill calls on Saturday morning.
I’m in the gym doing light work—nothing that risks the hands four days before the fight, just movement, focus, and the mental honing of someone who has been building toward a thing for months and can see it from here.
My phone is on the bench. I see Bill’s name, and I know from the timing—Saturday morning, four days out—that this isn’t routine.
I pick up.
“Two things,” he says. “I want to give you both before you decide how to carry them into the fight.”
“Tell me.”
“The psychology licensing board received a formal complaint yesterday. It was anonymous and filed through the board’s online system.
It alleges unprofessional conduct related to your work at the youth center—specifically, that you engaged in therapeutic relationships with minors without proper supervisory oversight and without maintaining required documentation.
” He keeps his voice flat, which is how I know he’s angry.
“The complaint is thin. It won’t survive formal review.
But the board is required to acknowledge it and open a preliminary inquiry, which creates a record. ”
I stand in the gym and think about the kids at the center.
About the Tuesday sessions I started running after Andi gave me back the license and the opportunity.
About a fifteen-year-old named Marcus who got into Georgia State, partly because someone took the time to sit across from him and take him seriously.
“And the second thing,” I say.
“The state bar association received a complaint about Andi. Also anonymous, also filed yesterday. Alleging she’s been providing legal counsel in connection with a matter in which she has a direct personal interest, without appropriate disclosure or client consent.
” Bill’s voice is level. “Also thin. Also requires acknowledgment and a preliminary inquiry.”
I set the weight down on the bench.
Three licenses. Three fronts. Timed to land four days before the fight, on a Saturday morning when neither of us can immediately reach our licensing boards, leaving us with nothing to do but sit with it until Monday.
“She knows,” I say.
“She knows we’re close to moving,” Bill says. “This is the final pressure campaign. She’s trying to create enough institutional noise that you both spend the next four days managing compliance rather than doing what you’re actually doing.”
“Does Andi know yet?”
“I’m calling her after you.”
I look at the gym. At the equipment, the ring, and the space Reyes has turned into a place that produces winners. At everything I’ve built toward this fight.
“Bill,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Is there anything either of us needs to do in the next four days that can’t wait until after the fight?”
Bill pauses to check something. “No. The complaints require responses within thirty days. The preliminary inquiries don’t require immediate action. Everything can wait until Monday of next week.”
“Then we don’t tell Reyes,” I say. “And we don’t let it change anything.”
“Agreed,” Bill says. “Luke—you’re four days out. Whatever she’s trying to do, don’t let her do it in that gym.”
“She’s not in this gym,” I say.
I hang up.
I stand in the empty gym for a moment, listening to the familiar sounds—the low hum of the lights, the distant echo of traffic outside, the quiet that only exists when a space built for violence is temporarily at rest.
Four days out. Every pressure point is exposed. Lawyers, boards, headlines, anonymous complaints—all of it designed to drag me somewhere else, to make me fight on terms that aren’t mine.
I don’t let it.
I tape my hands. Slow. Precise. The same way I always do. The ritual is the point. The repetition narrows things back down to what matters.
Then I get back to work.
Reyes finds me at the end of the session.
Not to give me notes—he did that during the session, and he doesn’t repeat himself.
He’s not there to add anything to the work.
He’s there for something else, which I know because he pulls up a chair and sits, which Reyes does not do in the gym unless he’s watching film or saying something that requires him to be at the same level as the person he’s talking to.
I sit across from him with a towel around my neck and water in my hand and wait.
“You know what I haven’t told you,” he says. Not a question.
“Tell me,” I say.
He looks at the ring. Not at me—at the ring. The canvas, the ropes, the corner pads. He looks at it the way someone looks at something they’ve spent their life inside of and have never once made peace with the fact that it asks what it asks.
“I’ve trained forty-one fighters to a world title fight,” he says.
“Forty-one. Twenty-two of them won the belt. Thirty-eight years in this sport, and twelve of those I was the one getting hit.” Reyes pauses, letting the numbers sit.
“You’re the first one I’ve trained who I thought could have been something different.
Not instead of this. Different as well. The license.
The kids at the center.” He’s quiet for a moment.
“That matters to me. I don’t say that to fighters. I’m saying it to you.”
The gym is empty around us. The Vegas afternoon light coming through the high windows, flat and gold.
“Tomorrow,” he says, “you’re going to be everything I trained you to be.
But you’re also going to be everything you built on your own.
The license. The woman who waited for you.
Everything that exists outside this ring.
” He looks at me now. “That’s not weakness.
A lot of trainers will tell you to leave it outside the arena.
I’m telling you the opposite. You carry all of it in with you.
That’s your advantage. Vega is fighting for the belt. You’re fighting for everything.”
I look at him. At the man who told me I was fighting like I was protecting something instead of taking something. Who spent twelve weeks making me into a different kind of fighter without once telling me who I was becoming.
“Thank you,” I say. “For all of it.”
He stands up. Puts the chair back. The conversation is over because it’s complete—not because something was cut short.
“Get some sleep,” he says. “Tomorrow we finish it.”
ANDI
Bill calls at nine-fifteen.
I’m on the hotel deck with coffee, the Vegas morning already warm, watching the city do what it does—relentless, indifferent, spectacular in its own way.
Luke is in the gym. I have my laptop open, the investigation files organized, and a call with Bill’s associate scheduled for ten about the documentation timeline.
When Bill tells me about the bar complaint, I’m quiet for a long moment.
Alleging she’s been providing legal counsel in connection with a matter in which she has a direct personal interest.
I set my coffee down.
It’s not wrong, technically. I’ve been advising on the investigation.
I have a direct personal interest in its outcome.
The complaint is thin because there are no clients, no fees, no formal engagement—but the allegation can be constructed from what actually happened if someone looks at it from the right angle with the right intent.
Which means Evelyn, or someone connected to her, has been watching closely enough to understand not just what I do but also how I’m licensed to do it.
“She filed both on the same day,” I say.
“Yesterday,” Bill confirms. “Within two hours of each other.”
“Psychology board and bar association simultaneously.” I look at the Vegas skyline. “She’s trying to split our attention across three licensing fronts while Luke is four days from the most important fight of his career.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what she’s doing. If she can divide your attention or divide and conquer the two of you, she can win much faster.”
“Does Luke know?”
“I told him first. He said nothing changes.”
I think about Luke in the gym right now. About Reyes watching him from the corner. About four days of work that a Saturday morning phone call cannot undo unless we let it.
“He’s right,” I say. “Nothing changes.” I close the laptop. “Bill, it’s a thirty-day response window for both complaints?”
“Yes.”
“Then we respond on day twenty-nine. After the fight, after the story breaks, after the evidentiary picture is complete enough that both complaints read as what they are—coordinated harassment from a network under federal scrutiny.” I pick up my coffee. “Right now, there’s a fight in four days.”
Bill is quiet for a moment. Then, with more certainty than I’ve heard from him in a while, he says, “That’s exactly right.”
“Call me Monday,” I say. “After.”
I hang up.
I sit on the deck for a few more minutes. The Vegas morning proceeds. Somewhere across the city, Luke is in a gym being sharp, and I am going to make sure nothing I do in the next four days gives Evelyn Carrington one inch of the ground she’s trying to take.
LUKE
Andi is on the deck when I get back from the gym.
She has the laptop closed, her feet up, and a second cup of coffee, which means she’s been sitting with something for a while. She looks at me when I come through the door, and the furrow of her brow tells me Bill called.
I sit beside her and wait for her to let me in her thoughts.
“Three fronts,” she says.
“Yeah, I heard.”
“Psychology Board, Boxing Commission, Bar Association.” She looks at the skyline. “She’s thorough.”
“She’s desperate,” I say. “Bill said so. You said so. Desperate people get thorough.”
Andi is quiet for a moment. “Luke?”
“Yeah, baby?”
“I want to say something, and I need you to actually hear it.”
I look at her, then turn my body toward her, fully open to accepting what she has to say.
“What you’ve built—the psychology license, your volunteer work at the center, what you did for Marcus and the other kids—doesn’t go away because someone filed a thin complaint using an anonymous form.
The board will clear it. The timeline is thirty days, and we respond on day twenty-nine.
” She holds my gaze. “But I want you to know that I see what that license means. What it cost you to put it away when you went to camp, and what it meant to pick it back up.” She doesn’t look away. “She’s not taking that from you.”
I look at her for a long moment.
“She’s not taking any of it,” I say.
“No,” Andi agrees. “She’s not.”
We sit on the deck until the Vegas morning gets too warm to stay outside comfortably.
Then we go in, order room service, and eat at the small table by the window, talking about things that aren’t the investigation—Mack’s expression when he watched the Friday session, whether Reyes has ever smiled in a professional context, and the absurdity of a city that never goes quiet.
At some point, she reaches across the table and takes my hand.
“Win tomorrow,” she says. She doesn’t wait until morning or when she’s ringside. She says it now, the way she says the important things before the moment arrives rather than in it.
“I’ll do my best, baby,” I say.
She looks at me, this time with obvious intensity.
“Win,” she says again.
That night, I lie awake for a while after Andi is asleep.
It’s not from nerves—I have made peace with the fight, similar to how you settle into something you’ve fully prepared for and can’t prepare for any additional details. It’s the calm of someone who has done the work and now just needs to trust it.
I lie in the dark and think about three licensing boards, a machine running out of moves, and a woman who has been operating for thirty years and is now filing anonymous complaints on a Saturday morning because the documentation is coming together and the clock is running, and she’s doing what cornered animals do.
She remains dangerous, possibly even more so in this setup. Mack explained that a fighter who believes they’re losing fights with less strategy and more desperation, making them harder to read than someone who thinks they’re winning.
But we’ve been reading her for months.
I close my eyes.
Four days.
I think about everything on the other side of it—the story breaking, the documentation going to the journalists, her hired henchman’s testimony linking the physical actions to the institutional ones, the machine finally having to answer to something other than itself.
I think about Andi saying ‘win’ across the room service table, like it was the simplest thing in the world.
I think about a beach somewhere with unlimited umbrella drinks and no governance councils within a hundred miles.
I go to sleep.