12. Everett
EVERETT
My head’s not in it tonight. I know it’s not in it, and that’s a problem, since I’m supposed to step into the circle in an hour and let somebody try to take my head off. The only thing I can think about, though, is the girl who told me not to follow her.
So I didn’t follow her. I let her go.
I stood there with my coffee and watched her walk away, and it felt like swallowing glass the whole time.
Every step she took, something in me was screaming to go after her.
I saw myself grabbing her arm and telling her she’s wrong.
Telling her I’m not the thing she’s afraid I am.
That I would never hurt anybody who actually matters.
Football is one thing. Fighting for money is another thing.
Other than that? I would never hurt anyone she cares about. Not ever.
But she didn’t ask me what I would or wouldn’t do, did she?
She looked at my hands and made up her mind, and it’s not like I can argue with the evidence.
My knuckles are still bruised. There’s still a scar on the third one from that last guy’s teeth.
She saw what she saw in the warehouse, and now she sees it every time she looks at me.
I get it. I hate it, but I get it.
The tape goes around my left hand first. I’m sitting on the tailgate of my truck in the parking lot behind the warehouse, doing this the way I always do: methodical, automatic. My hands know what to do even when the rest of me is somewhere else.
And the rest of me is definitely somewhere else tonight.
Should I cancel? The thought crosses my mind for maybe the tenth time in the last hour.
My head’s not right, and fighting when your head is somewhere else is how you get hurt for real.
Not bruised-knuckles hurt. Broken-jaw hurt.
Concussion hurt. The kind of hurt that ends a football career real fast.
But I need the money. This month might be okay, next month might be okay, but what about after that? Is there ever going to be a time when I can just fucking relax? And it doesn’t help that I bought a pair of new glasses for a girl who is probably trying to forget I exist.
So I keep wrapping and try my best to get my head where I need it to be, or else it’s going to get knocked off my neck.
My phone is sitting next to me, and I glance down at it when it buzzes. Probably Reece with the lineup, or maybe one of the guys asking what time I’m showing up.
It’s Isla. She’s on a video call.
I hate the way my heart lurches when I see her name. I was never supposed to get this attached. I still can’t believe I did.
Only when I answer, it’s not her.
I mean, it is her. She’s on the screen. But she’s not holding the phone.
She’s sitting in a metal folding chair with her hands behind her back. Her glasses are crooked. Her face is chalky white, and her eyes are wide and wet, locked on something I can’t see.
Everything in my body goes cold. She’s tied to that chair. There’s a strip of duct tape hanging loose from her jaw, like she was wearing it, but someone ripped it off.
“There he is.” A male voice, off-camera. Casual, cold. “The man of the hour.”
“What the fuck is this?” Every muscle in my body is locked, but my voice is steady. If I let it shake, he wins. Whoever he is. “Who the fuck are you?”
“It doesn’t matter who I am,” he replies off-camera. I hear the smile in his voice. He’s smug. Proud of himself. “What matters is who she is.”
Her whole body is trembling in the chair. She’s biting down on her lip hard enough that I can see the dent from here. “Cute girl,” he says. “Tiny, though. Feels like she’d break easily.”
My hand clenches around the phone, but that’s nothing compared to the way my jaw clenches. “If you touch her, I swear—”
“Relax, Stone.” He chuckles, and Isla flinches at the cold sound. “Nobody’s touching anybody. Not if you do what I need you to do. Isn’t that right, little girl?”
Isla’s whole jaw quivers, and the tears filling her eyes spill over onto her pale cheeks. “You’ve got a fight tonight. Everybody knows you’re undefeated. Everybody’s betting on you. Which means there’s a lot of money on the table for the guys smart enough to bet against you.”
My body is cold. Icy. I know where this is going.
“Tonight, you’re going to lose. Convincingly,” he adds while I watch Isla struggle not to cry, and there’s nothing I can do about it. “Make it look real, and your girl goes home safe. You still get paid. Not as much, but enough. And everybody walks away happy.”
“And if I don’t?” I grit out.
“You’re a smart guy.” He chuckles again, which makes Isla do the funniest thing. She doesn’t shiver or tremble, or beg. She bares her teeth at him. All right. Maybe she’s handling herself better than I thought. But still. “I don’t think I need to spell it out for you.”
The call ends. For a long time, I stare at the screen. There’s still tape hanging from my left hand. I’m still sitting on my open tailgate, and all I can see is her. All I hear is the blood pounding in my ears, drowning out everything else.
Do I call the cops? The question races through my head, but I dismiss it right away.
Of course I can’t call the cops. I’m about to participate in an illegal underground fight in a warehouse that doesn’t officially exist. The girl has been kidnapped and tied to a chair because of me, because someone figured out she matters to me.
Because I was too fucking stupid to keep her at a distance, the way I keep everyone at a distance.
This is my fault. All of it.
I don’t lose. I never lose.
But what if it means losing her?
My jaw is clenched tight enough to make my teeth ache by the time I get down from the tailgate. My feet carry me across the littered lot to where people are gathering near the warehouse. I have nothing to do with my body’s actions. It took over because my brain can’t handle it.
What am I going to do? I can’t let her suffer. If I tell Reece or anybody else involved in the fight, there’s no guarantee whoever’s behind this won’t take it out on Isla. It’s too big a risk.
When I get inside, the crowd is already thick.
It’s the same setup as always, not that I notice much of it.
Reece finds me near the entrance and starts going over the matchup, but I’m not listening.
I’m not paying much attention to the first or second fight either.
I’m too busy scanning the floor until my gaze lifts to the catwalk running along the upper wall of the warehouse, where nobody usually stands because there’s nothing up there but old electrical panels and dust.
Except for tonight. Tonight, there’s something up there.
Isla.
She’s standing between two men I’ve never seen before.
Her hands are free now, but her posture tells me everything I need to know.
She’s stiff, rigid, with her arms pressed against her sides like she’s trying to make herself as small as possible.
One of the guys stands close behind her, with his right hand tucked against her lower back in a way that looks casual from the floor but isn’t casual at all.
I know what’s in his hand. I don’t have to see it to know.
She sees me. Our eyes lock across the distance, and I watch her face crumple for half a second before she pulls it back together.
She’s trying to be brave. She’s trying to be the girl who stood up to me in bed and told me to stop lying to her.
The girl who doesn’t back down, the girl with steel in her spine.
But she’s so scared. I can see it from thirty feet away.
“Who am I against?” I ask Reece after the second fight ends.
“A guy named Vasquez,” he tells me. “Southpaw. Good. Fast hands.”
I nod but don’t say anything else. I won’t tell Reece what’s happening, because there’s nothing he can do. The more people who know, the more chance of things getting worse for her.
So I step into the circle.
Vasquez is already there. A few inches shorter than me, but he’s built like a fire hydrant, compact and dense. He’s bouncing on his toes with the kind of energy that tells me he came here to win.
It has to look real. That’s what the guy said. Convincing.
The first round, I do what I always do. I move, I jab.
I test his range. I let him think I’m warming up.
The crowd is buzzing the way it always buzzes when I fight—they’ve seen me put guys on their backs in under two minutes, so they’re expecting fireworks.
I can hear my name in the noise. They’re calling out bets.
Someone shouts the word “Stone” like it’s a war cry.
I don’t look up at the catwalk. I can’t.
In the second round, I start pulling my punches. Not obviously—I still throw them, I still connect. I still make the right sounds. But I’m holding back. I’m taking shots I would normally slip. I let Vasquez land a jab that catches me on the chin, then another one that splits the skin above my eye.
The crowd noise changes. They can feel something is off. Somebody boos.
The blood runs down my temple and into my eye. I let it. It looks more real that way.
In the third round, Vasquez throws a right hook I see coming a full second before it lands. I could’ve dodged it. I could’ve stepped inside and put him on the floor with a body shot. That would end this in three seconds flat.
Instead, I let the blow land. And while I do, I think of her.
I see her in my head when my head snaps sideways, and my vision goes white for a second.
My knees buckle, and one knee goes down, then the other.
My hands hit the concrete, and the crowd goes insane—not happy insane either.
Angry insane. Shocked insane. There are people in this warehouse who put their rent money on Everett Stone and just watched him drop for the first time in two years.
They don’t understand, so they’re pissed.
I don’t care. I stay down.