Chapter 44
UNDISPUTED (LEO)
The crack of the door hitting the frame cuts through the gym harder than any bell.
Nobody moves.
Not Ray at my shoulder. Not Jessica by the camera.
Not Lukas near the wall with his jaw locked hard enough to splinter teeth.
Not Nate, still planted there like he’s deciding whether to stay or go after them.
Even the idiot Drake brought seems to understand the room just changed shape.
He stands by the stool in Drake’s corner with a towel over one shoulder and a cut kit at his feet, looking less like a cornerman than a man who wandered into the wrong church.
Drake is still outside the ropes, chest bare, wrist tape peeling at one edge, watching the door she just walked through with that stupid little smile.
As if he thinks that ending belonged to him.
It didn’t.
Ray reaches for my glove, yanks the laces tight, then gives me one hard look. A final check to see whether I’m still in there enough to hear him.
I am.
Barely.
The sound of that door is still in my teeth.
He presses my mouthguard into my palm. “Inside.”
I shove it in, duck through the ropes and step into the ring.
Across from me, Drake climbs in slower, rolling his neck once. He gives the ropes a theatrical bounce, glances toward the cameras, then looks at me with bloodless amusement.
“She always does that. Gets hysterical. Runs out. Comes back when she’s done.”
I say nothing.
He lifts his gloves while his guy fumbles with the second strap. “She’s my wife. You’re just the asshole she climbed on while she threw her tantrum.”
Ray’s voice comes from somewhere beyond my shoulder. “Keep it clean. Keep it short.”
I hear him. I don’t answer.
Drake settles into his stance across from me, chin a little too high, weight too proud over the lead foot.
Stronger than average. Better built than most men who run their mouths in bars and call it masculinity.
Good shoulders. Good reach. Enough muscle to fool people who don’t know what they’re looking at.
Ray gives the signal.
Drake comes out fast, trying to make a point with the first exchange. Hard jab. Right hand behind it. Too much shoulder. Too much ego.
I slip left. His right hand cuts air.
He oversteps.
I split his guard with a straight right.
His head snaps back. He stumbles a step, shocked more than hurt.
Then the blood comes.
A split opens at his lip, bright red against his teeth.
He touches his mouth with the back of his glove, looks at the blood, and something in him changes.
Not smarter.
Meaner.
He comes back wild. A jab he doesn’t set up. A looping left hook. I slip outside and bury one in his ribs hard enough to fold him. Left upstairs. Right through the middle.
I line up the next shot—
And he dives forward, arms wrapping too low, trying to tie me up and drag the fight off its feet. When the boxing stops working, he reaches for something dirtier.
I turn inside it, break his grip, and shove him off before the referee gets there.
The ref steps between us. “Break.”
Drake backs off, chest heaving, expression tight with something uglier than anger.
Calculation.
He’s running the math, and he doesn’t like the answer.
He comes forward again, slower now, and I catch the tell immediately—the level drop, the weight shifting back, his eyes on my hips instead of my hands.
He goes for my legs, trying to take me down.
Illegal.
Instinct fires before thought does. I sprawl hard, hips dropping back and down, stuffing him before he gets under me. His shoulder slams into my thigh instead of my waist. I shove off and step clear.
The referee is there before either of us can move again.
“Warning. No takedowns. This is boxing. One more, and you’re out.”
Drake straightens, blood on his lip, breath coming wrong.
He knows he’s losing.
He swings anyway.
A wild, desperate hook.
I slip outside it and drive a short right hand into his body. The air leaves him. His balance goes with it. One compact left hook lands flush on the jaw.
That finishes it.
His legs give. He crashes sideways into the ropes and sags there, gloves coming up late, blood on his mouth.
Ray is between us before Drake can slide all the way down.
“That’s enough.”
Drake tries to push off the ropes, stubbornness still twitching where sense should be, and nearly goes over again.
The guy in his corner fumbles forward with the towel, too slow, too uncertain. I glance once at Mickey. “Go check him.”
Mickey is through the ropes before the sentence finishes.
Ray plants a hand against my chest. “Back off.”
I do.
Because it’s done.
Mickey drops to Drake’s side with a towel and gauze, already talking to him in the clipped, impersonal tone of a man who has seen worse and doesn’t care about pride.
“Look at me. Stay with me. Open.”
Drake shrugs him off. It lasts about half a second.
Then the pain catches up with him, and he folds over the towel, blood on his mouth, one glove braced uselessly against his thigh.
Good.
Not because I enjoy looking at him broken.
Because I need him to understand, in the only language he respects, that this is over.
Ray stays in front of me until he’s sure I’m not going back in. Then he lowers his arm and gives me one hard look. “You done?”
“Yes.”
He searches my face, making sure I mean it.
Across the ring, Jessica steps away from the tripod and checks her phone. Her voice is level, almost bored, which is exactly why it cuts.
“We’ve got everything. Admissions on camera. Threats. Refusal to leave her alone. Illegal takedown attempt in a boxing ring. More than enough.”
Drake lets out a wet laugh against the towel. “You think this is gonna—”
“Don’t.” She doesn’t even look at him. The single word lands with more contempt than yelling would have.
Drake tries to straighten. Fails. Blood smears across the back of his glove.
“This is bullshit,” he mutters.
“No,” Jessica says. “This is evidence.”
Silence follows that. The kind that closes.
Nate is gone. He must have followed them out. Lukas is still near the ropes, arms folded now, looking at Drake the way men look at things they’d rather drag into the East River. Ray says something low to Mickey, who keeps working on Drake’s lip and cheek like none of this is personal.
That’s the part that settles in.
It isn’t personal anymore.
Jessica looks at me. “We’ve got enough to support the order. If he contacts her again after this, he’s in violation.”
My throat feels lined with ground glass.
Ray reaches for the ropes and ducks partway in, eyes scanning me one more time. “Locker room,” he says.
“In a minute.”
He looks as if he might argue, then doesn’t. Because he knows. He knows exactly what just got said in this room. What just got put on camera. What I know now that I didn’t know ten minutes ago.
Not just that she lost a pregnancy.
That he put his hands on her while she was carrying his child and still stood here tonight calling her his wife.
Something uglier than rage moves through me. I lock it down.
Across the ring, Drake spits pink into the towel and tries to glare at me through one swelling eye.
I look back at him and feel nothing at all that he would understand.
Jessica puts her phone away. “We’re done here.”
And just like that, the room begins to empty with the cold efficiency of something finished.
Ray is the last one to leave me alone with the silence.
I sit on the edge of the bench in the locker room with my forearms braced on my thighs and stare at the concrete floor between my feet.
My gloves are off.
Tape still wrapped around my hands.
Knuckles red.
No blood on me except the little bit that caught under one thumbnail before I washed it off at the utility sink.
It should feel different from this. Cleaner. Finished.
Instead, it feels as if somebody reached into my chest, closed a fist around the center of me, and left it there.
Pregnant.
I shut my eyes.
That word keeps landing in different places and breaking something new every time.
My jaw locks so hard pain shoots up behind my ear. There are a hundred ways I could hurt him that wouldn’t help her at all. None of them would change what already happened. None of them would put that child back in her body. None of them would erase the fact that she carried all of that alone.
I drag a hand down my face.
There’s a knock on the half open door.
Jessica leans against the frame without stepping all the way in. “We’re good here,” she says.
I look at her. She understands the question without me asking it.
“She left with Eden. They took Nate’s car.”
Something in my shoulders shifts before I can stop it.
“She’s not alone,” she adds.
That should be enough.
It is enough.
Still, the questions burn anyway.
Is she crying or has she gone cold?
Is she shaking or perfectly still in that way she gets when the pain goes too deep?
Did she let Eden touch her?
Did she say my name?
Did she look back?
Did she—
I cut it off.
Jessica watches me long enough to make the point. “You want me to keep an eye on things?”
Meaning Liz.
Meaning through Eden, through Joy, through the network of women who can be there for her without making it feel like surveillance.
I think about it.
About saying yes.
About taking the offer and dressing it up as love.
About convincing myself that checking on her from a distance would somehow be different from every other time I tried to solve first and ask second.
Then I shake my head. “No.”
Jessica’s brows lift a fraction.
“If she needs something, she knows where to find me.”
The words scrape on the way out.
“Okay.” She pushes off the doorframe. “For what it’s worth, you handled that the right way.”
I almost laugh. “The right way would’ve been four years earlier.”
She doesn’t answer that. After she leaves, the silence comes back.
I stare at my knuckles.
Without the gloves, they look too ordinary. Tape. Swollen joints. Short nails. A faint crescent of red I missed near the cuticle of my thumb.
Men like me like to pretend hands are simple.
Wrap them. Use them. Break what needs breaking.
That’s a lie.
Hands hold things. Build things. Ruin things.
Hands shove a pregnant woman into a table.
I’m on my feet before I realize I moved.
The bench skids over the concrete.
I brace both palms on the locker and breathe through the first ugly wave that hits.
Not rage.
Worse.
Helplessness.
I can fight men. I can hurt them. I can stop them.
I cannot go back and put myself between her body and his hands on the night she needed it.
I drop my head. A bad part of me wants to go after her anyway.
Not to claim. Just to put eyes on her. Hear her voice. Make sure she got home. Make sure she isn’t folded in on herself somewhere, carrying all of this alone because that’s what she does when the pain gets too close to the bone.
My fingers tighten on the locker door.
No.
That’s for me.
Not for her.
She left that room furious with him.
And furious with me.
I knew what I was doing when I set this up. I knew why I did it. I would do it again.
None of that changes the fact that I made a decision about her life without her in the room.
Protected her by managing the risk.
Again.
The word lands exactly the way it should. I push away from the locker and sit back down slowly. My pulse evens out for the wrong reason—the part of me that would run after her is being strangled quiet by something harder.
Discipline.
No.
Respect.
She does not owe me softness because I handled him.
She does not owe me gratitude because we got what we needed on camera.
She does not owe me another chance because now I know the worst part.
She owes me nothing.
If she comes back, it has to be because she wants to.
Not because I was useful.
Not because I protected her.
Not because I bled for her or hit for her or stood between her and a bad man.
Because she wants me.
I look down at my hands again.
I don’t take what isn’t offered.
I say it once. Just to hear it.
Then I unwrap my left hand and start peeling the tape free, one slow turn at a time.
It still holds.