Chapter 17
Dominic
The bass from the DJ booth is rattling through my chest like a second heartbeat, and I’ve been pinned against this bar for the past twenty minutes listening to a supplement company rep explain the science behind their new protein powder.
I’m nodding in all the right places, but my eyes keep drifting across the warehouse to where Brooke is laughing with Roman’s mom.
She’s wearing red. Of course she’s wearing red.
It’s always been my favorite color on her, not that I’d ever admit that out loud. And I keep losing track of whatever this guy is saying about amino acid profiles because my brain won’t stop replaying the sound she made when I pinned her wrists to that mat two nights ago.
“So what do you think?” The rep is looking at me expectantly, and I have absolutely no idea what he just asked.
“Sounds promising,” I say, which seems safe enough. “Send the details and we’ll take a look.”
He pumps my hand enthusiastically and finally moves on to his next target. I down the rest of my whiskey and order another, scanning the room while the bartender pours.
Brooke catches my eye from across the warehouse.
She’s still standing with Roman’s mom, but she’s looking directly at me now, and for a second neither of us moves.
I raise my glass in her direction, a gesture I hope reads as something like thanks for the article, glad you could make it, without requiring me to actually walk over there and form sentences.
She nods back, a slight smile at the corner of her mouth, and then Roman’s mom says something that pulls her attention away.
Good. Fine. That’s enough interaction for now. I don’t know what I’d say to her if we actually talked, and a crowded party full of industry people and media isn’t the place to figure it out.
The next hour blurs into a carousel of handshakes and small talk.
A streaming network executive corners me near the photo booth to pitch documentary rights for Roman’s title fight camp.
Two sponsors want to discuss partnerships.
A reporter from ESPN asks if I have five minutes for a quick interview, which turns into fifteen minutes of the same questions I’ve already answered six times tonight.
I smile until my face hurts, say “thank you” and “we’re thrilled” and “Roman did all the work” approximately four hundred times, and watch the clock behind the bar tick steadily toward eleven.
Every now and then I catch a glimpse of red moving through the crowd.
I see her talking to a group of fighters near the entrance, then getting a drink at the bar on the opposite end of the warehouse, then laughing at something one of the UFC executives says with her head thrown back.
She’s completely in her element. I keep my distance and she seems to be doing the same, and I tell myself that’s exactly what I want.
Roman is still holding court near the center of the space with his parents flanking him like proud bookends, his mom dabbing at her eyes every time someone new comes over to congratulate him.
The kid has earned every second of this.
Tomorrow we’re back to work and back to the grind of preparing for a title shot in Mexico City that could change everything for both of us, but tonight belongs to him.
I catch his eye across the crowd and raise my glass in a final salute. He nods and I grab my jacket from the back of a chair and start weaving toward the door.
Through the windows I can see the street beyond, slick with earlier rain and reflecting the glow of streetlights.
I glance back once to scan the crowd for Brooke, but she’s disappeared somewhere in the sea of bodies.
I hesitate for half a second, then keep walking.
There’s somewhere I need to be tonight, something that’s been nagging at me ever since I got to New York.
The night air hits me as I step outside, warm and heavy with humidity. The bass from the party fades to a dull thump behind me as the door swings shut. I’m halfway down the steps when I spot her standing on the sidewalk with her phone out, the glow of the screen lighting up her face.
“Bennett,” I say, and she looks up, startled.
“Holy hell.” She presses a hand to her chest, her phone screen going dark as she lowers it. “Make some noise when you walk, Midnight. I almost had a heart attack.”
“You’re standing right outside the door,” I point out, coming down the last few steps to join her on the sidewalk. “It’s not exactly a surprise attack.”
“Still.” She slides her phone into her bag and crosses her arms. “Sneaking out early? The man-of-the-hour coach, abandoning his own party?”
“I’ve shaken enough hands for one night.
” I come down the last few steps to join her on the sidewalk, keeping a few feet of distance between us.
“If one more person tells me they always knew Roman had it in him, I’m going to start asking where they were six months ago when nobody would return my calls. ”
“The fair-weather fans come out of the woodwork after a win,” she says. “I’ve seen it a thousand times. Everyone wants to be part of the story once the story’s already written.”
“Spoken like a journalist,” I say.
“Spoken like someone who’s been paying attention.” She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, and the movement draws my attention to her neck, to the faint mark still visible just below her jaw from where I bit her.
“What about you?” I ask, dragging my gaze back to her face. “Heading home?”
“That was the plan.” She gestures vaguely toward the street. “I’ve hit my limit for champagne and small talk. I was just about to call an uber.”
We stand there for a moment, neither of us moving toward our respective escapes. Somewhere down the block music spills out of a bar, mixing with the distant wail of a siren.
“Do you want to go somewhere with me?” I turn to her, the words come out before I’ve fully decided to say them.
“What?” She blinks like I’ve just asked her to help me bury a body.
“There’s an old boxing gym on the Lower East Side I’ve been meaning to check out,” I say. “My dad’s first gym, from when he came to New York from Croatia. It’s about a fifteen-minute walk from here.”
She looks at me for a long moment. “You want me to go somewhere with you?”
I shove my hands in my jacket pockets, considering how to answer that.
I don’t know what possesses me to be honest, maybe being in this city, maybe coming off the high of the win, maybe it’s that despite how I’ve spent my entire adult life hating her, Brooke knows me in ways that most people don’t.
I’ve spent a long time trying to pretend that history doesn’t exist, and standing here on a Manhattan sidewalk at eleven o’clock at night, I’m too tired to keep up the act.
“Yeah,” I say. “I do.”
She looks at me for a long moment, long enough that I start to think I should just take it back and tell her to forget it, and then a smile slowly spreads across her face.
“What the hell, Midnight,” she says. “Let’s go.”
“Alright then.” I nod toward the street, and she falls into step beside me.
The streets are quieter now than they were a few hours ago, with closed storefronts and restaurants with their lights dimmed and the occasional taxi cruising by looking for a fare.
I navigate us downtown without thinking about it, turning left on Houston and cutting through toward the Bowery, and after a few blocks Brooke glances over at me with a curious expression.
“You seem to know where you’re going,” she says.
“My dad brought me here once,” I tell her, stepping around a pile of trash bags waiting for morning pickup. “When I was sixteen. Just the two of us and we spent a whole week in the city. It’s changed since then, but I remember this area really well. He wanted to show me where it all started.”
“Hank Midnight’s origin story,” she says.
I turn us onto a side street, the buildings getting older and more worn as we move further from the shiny, renovated blocks. “He came over at nineteen. Real name was Domi? Mihnev, but the promoters couldn’t pronounce it, so he became Hank Midnight for the American audience.”
“Hank Midnight,” she repeats. “That’s quite a stage name.”
“He picked it himself. He thought Midnight sounded like a fighter’s name, like someone who worked in the dark while everyone else was sleeping.
” I can hear my dad’s voice in my head, telling me this story while we walked these same streets so many years ago.
“He trained at a gym down here, and had his first fights on their Friday night cards. This was all before he met my mom and moved to Washington.” I glance over at her.
“I thought you knew all this? You did your research for the article.”
“I know some of the facts,” she says quietly. “But I never really heard it from you…”
We walk another block in silence, and then I see it up ahead: an old brick building wedged between a bodega and what looks like a closed-down dry cleaner, the kind of place that time forgot while the rest of the neighborhood gentrified around it.
The windows are dark and a faded sign hangs above the door, the letters barely legible these days. KOWALSKI’S GYM. The building looks abandoned, but the bones of it are exactly the way I remember.
“This is it,” I say, stopping in front of the entrance.
Brooke looks up at the building, taking in the cracked windows and the peeling paint and the general air of neglect. “What happened to it?”
“The owner died years ago. Heart attack, I think. Nobody took it over, so it’s just... sat here.” I try the door, but it doesn’t budge, the lock rusted shut. I step back and scan the facade, and that’s when I notice the window on the side, the glass broken out and the frame hanging loose.
I glance at Brooke, then back at the window.
“Oh no,” she says, following my gaze. “Absolutely not.”
“Come on.” I’m already moving toward the side of the building. “Don’t act like you’ve never broken into somewhere before.”