2. Xander #3
I’m in the back room. Stretching. Rolling my neck. Wrapping my hands with tape that’s already damp from sweat. The body knows the routine. Stand. Stretch. Breathe. Go empty. The body is a machine and the machine doesn’t need the operator to be present.
Reece walks in. Beanie low. Dark eyes. The smile that never reaches them. “Better fuckin’ win tonight.”
“Not worried about it.”
“That’s a shitty attitude, X. I don’t care how good you are. The second you lose, I lose money. And when I lose money, your debts don’t get paid. So knock off the cocky bullshit.”
I step into his space. I have six inches on him. I use every one. “I’m done after this fight. I’ve been keeping track, Reece. Every dollar. Every ‘fee.’ You’ve been skimming my winnings for weeks and we both know it. After tonight, my shit is paid off.”
Reece laughs. The laugh of a man who has heard this before from other desperate boys and knows exactly how the conversation ends.
“You’re done when I say you’re done, Xander. You want a future? A career? A life outside these walls? Then shut up and fight. Otherwise, I drag your name through every mud puddle in this state, and not even your rich daddy can clean that up.”
I grab him by the front of his sweatshirt. Shove him against the wall. His back hits the cinder block and his smile doesn’t waver, which is the most unsettling thing about Reece Hall—the man does not flinch.
“My father wouldn’t save me anyway. You’re wasting your breath.”
I let go. Step back. Reece straightens his sweatshirt. Looks at me with the calculating patience of a man adjusting his leverage.
“Not just your life I’m talking about.” He moves toward the exit. Stops in the doorway. “Your girl’s got some pretty big debts of her own. Didn’t expect that from little miss perfect, but there it is. So you can fight… or she can. Or she can work on her back for me. Your call, pretty boy.”
He’s gone before I can respond. The words hang in the cinder block room like smoke.
Your girl. Her own debts. Little miss perfect.
The realization hits my stomach like a knee.
Penny. Penny is using. Penny—my Penny, the girl with the playlists and the pink backpack and the friendship bracelet—is buying from Reece Hall.
Is in debt to Reece Hall. Is in the same trap I’m in, and I didn’t see it because I was too busy pushing her away to notice she was falling.
The announcer calls my name. I can’t think about this now. I shove the mouthguard in. Walk out. The crowd roars. The kid across the cage is bigger than last time. Older. Taller. Arms covered in tattoos. He’s standing with his arms raised like he’s already won, grinning at the crowd.
He hasn’t met me yet.
The ref does his speech. The bell sounds. The kid comes at me—fast, circling, testing. He’s smarter than the last one. More disciplined. He throws a jab that catches my shoulder and a kick that grazes my ribs.
I take it. Let him feel confident. Let him think the first thirty seconds represent what the next three minutes will be.
He lunges. I sidestep. Catch his leg. Flip him.
My foot connects with his stomach and the air leaves his body with a sound like a punctured tire.
He rolls, tries to stand, and I’m already on him—headlock, legs wrapped around his waist, dragging him down.
My fists find his face. Once. Twice. Three times.
His blood on my knuckles and his body going limp beneath me and the crowd screaming and the ref pulling my shoulder and my mind going quiet, finally quiet, the beautiful empty silence that only comes when the violence is loud enough to drown the closet.
The ref raises my hand. “Xander Anderson wins!”
I look up. Through the chain-link, into the crowd. Penny. Cat. The Elite Five. All of them. Sitting in the makeshift stands, watching me like I’m an animal in a cage, which is accurate because that’s literally what I am.
Penny’s expression is unreadable. She’s not cheering. She’s not crying. She’s just looking at me with those grey-blue eyes that have been watching me since birth, and what I see in them is not anger or disgust or the hurt from this morning. It’s something worse.
Recognition. She sees what I’m doing because she’s doing it too. Different poison, same reason.
I break eye contact. Grab the towel. Collect my winnings from the bookie—a paper bag of cash, half of which will go to Reece. I walk out to the parking lot without looking back.
Drop the bag at the dead drop. Get in my car and drive.
I don’t even make it inside. I’m sitting in my driveway, forehead on the steering wheel, blood crusting on my knuckles, when a knock on my window nearly sends me through the roof. Kaiden’s face. Dark. Not asking.
He pulls my door open. Iz grabs me from the other side. They put me in Kaiden’s car with the efficiency of two boys who planned this.
“What the fuck, guys?”
Kaiden, from the rearview: “Shut your fucking mouth.”
We drive the two minutes to his house—past the stone gates, down the tree-lined drive, around back to the pool house that sits behind the Monaghan estate like a cottage in a fairy tale.
Except tonight it’s not a fairy tale. Danny and Ryan are waiting outside.
They pull me from the car without gentleness.
“I can walk.”
Danny’s hand on my arm: “Yeah, and run. Move.”
Inside the pool house. Warm. Low light. The leather couches. The bar in the corner. The intimacy of a space where five boys have spent hundreds of hours being honest with each other—until I stopped.
Cat and Penny are on one couch. Cat has her arm around Penny, protective, the physical positioning of a girl who has already decided whose side she’s on and it isn’t mine.
Penny’s face is washed clean—no makeup, no performance.
She looks small and tired and like a girl who has been crying but won’t give me the satisfaction of knowing it.
Danny and Ryan deposit me on the opposite couch. Sit on either side. Kaiden and Iz stand.
“So you’re gonna tell me why I’m here? Why you fucked me out of my car?”
Kaiden looks at me. “We need to talk.”
“No, the fuck we don’t.”
I try to stand. Danny and Ryan pull me back down. Danny’s grip is stronger than I expected—the quiet ones are always stronger than you expect because they don’t waste energy announcing it.
I turn. See Penny watching me. The look on her face—open, raw, waiting—makes something in my chest twist. I need it to stop. I need her to stop looking at me like I’m still the boy with the lacrosse stick. That boy is dead.
“Why the fuck is she here.”
Kaiden sighs. “Because she cares about you. Because she’s cared about you since you were born. Because she’s the one person in this room who knows you better than any of us, and you’re treating her like she’s garbage.”
“Cares about me?” I laugh. The Lucian laugh. Cruel. Performative. The one designed to make people feel small. “Why would I want her to care? Why would I want to be friends with a freak who follows me to underground fights and cries when I don’t hold her hand afterward? She’s pathetic.”
Iz grumbles. “Watch your fucking mouth, X.”
Ryan, from beside me, quiet. “You’re better than this, man.”
I’m not. I’m really not. But the cruelty is a machine and the machine is running and I can’t find the off switch because Penny is looking at me and I need her to stop.
“Don’t pretend she’s some fucking catch, Kaid. Trust me.” I look directly at her. Hold her gaze. Make sure she hears every word. “I had my shot. It wasn’t worth it.”
Cat inhales sharp. Danny stiffens beside me. But I’m not done. The machine is running and it won’t stop because every word I say that hurts her is another inch of distance between us and distance is the only thing that keeps her safe from what I’m becoming.
“Maybe she shouldn’t have let all those band guys fuck her. How else does she get backstage passes?”
Danny shoves me. “X. Stop. Now.”
Iz, stepping forward. “I’m warning you—”
But I can’t stop. The cruelty has its own momentum. I stare at Penny—beautiful, broken, still wearing the friendship bracelet I tied on her wrist when we were seven—and I say the thing that will end us.
“Deny it all you want, but you forget I’ve been inside you, Penny. You forget that night? Didn’t even put up a fight. Hands on the wall like a good little—”
Penny stands. The room holds its breath. She doesn’t scream. Her voice is low. Steady. The steadiness of a person who has just been pushed past the point of performance and into the place where the truth lives, undressed and unprotected.
“I was a fucking virgin, Xander.”
The room detonates. Not with sound—with silence. The specific, ringing silence that follows a sentence that changes everything it touches.
“You took that from me. In a closet. At a fucking underground fight club. You didn’t ask.
You didn’t stop. You didn’t even look at me, Xander—you turned me around so you wouldn’t have to see my face.
” Her voice cracks but doesn’t break. “And then you drove me home and threw money at me like I was a whore. ‘Get some Plan B, Penny. Don’t want a fucking baby with you, Penny.’” She wipes a tear with the back of her hand.
One tear. Just one. “Like I would ever want to carry your fucking bastard child. Get fucked, Xander.”
She walks out. Not running—walking. The deliberate pace of a girl who has said the hardest thing she’s ever said and is not going to let anyone see her collapse.
Cat is already up, already moving, the ice princess thawing into the best friend in the space of a single step, her arm around Penny’s shoulders as they disappear through the door.
The pool house is quiet. I sit with the sentence in my lap like a grenade with the pin already pulled.
I was a fucking virgin.
Iz picks up a beer can from the side table and throws it at my head. It connects with my temple. Not hard enough to cut, hard enough to get my attention.