22. Xander
The smell hits first. Sweat and blood and the stale air of a room that has hosted violence so many times the walls have absorbed it. The underground. Bridgeport. The cage I swore I’d never see again.
But the cage doesn’t care about promises. The cage only cares about bodies.
Reece shoved Penny and Cat into the van outside the mill.
Daisy behind the wheel, twitching, high, the gun in her lap like a pet she’d been trained to hold.
I watched them go—watched Penny’s face through the back window, her hands pressed against the glass, her mouth forming my name.
Then Reece’s men put a bag over my head and threw me into another car and drove for what felt like an hour but was probably twenty minutes and now I’m here. Back in hell.
Reece stands in front of me. His face is swollen from where I hit him in the parking lot. Good. I hope it hurts every time he blinks.
“Let’s go.” He grabs my collar. “I’m going to uncuff you. One wrong move and I put a bullet through your skull. Then I drive to wherever the girls are and do whatever I want before putting one through theirs too.”
I nod. The cuffs come off. My wrists are raw—the tape from the mill, the metal from the cuffs, the friendship bracelet digging into skin that’s already bleeding. But the bracelet is still there. Teal and yellow. Holding.
He walks me toward the noise. The crowd.
The roar of a hundred bodies pressed into a basement watching two people try to destroy each other.
The sound I used to crave. The sound that meant the pills would be paid for and the debt would shrink by a fraction.
Now it just sounds like what it is: people cheering for pain.
I step into the light. The cage is the same—chain-link, stained, the floor sticky with things I don’t want to identify. The crowd presses against the fence. Faces I half-recognize from the old circuit. Reece leans in.
“The girls are tied up. Daisy has orders to shoot if they run. Don’t make any rash decisions, pretty boy. I fucking own you.”
He shoves me through the cage door. Slams it shut.
The guy in front of me is enormous. Six-five, maybe six-six.
Two-sixty easy. The kind of body that was built for football and repurposed for underground fighting when the scholarships didn’t come.
He’s bouncing on his toes—nervous energy, unrefined, the movement of a man who relies on size rather than skill.
But I’m not the same fighter who stood in this cage four months ago.
Four months ago I was running on pills and rage and the desperate need to pay a debt.
Now I’m running on training. On Marco’s drills.
On the footwork and the discipline and the strategic patience that separates a street fighter from a professional.
I scan. Read him. The bruising around his left knee—they tried to tape it, cover it with the long shorts, but I can see the swelling. Weak spot. Marco trained me to find these: the body tells you where it’s failing if you know how to listen.
Through the crowd—through the crush of bodies and the smoke and the noise—I see them.
Hats low. Blending. But I know those postures, those shoulders, the way they hold themselves.
Kaiden near the east wall. Danny by the door.
Ryan in the back with his phone—recording, probably, because Ryan documents everything.
And Iz. Right at the cage. His eyes on me. His jaw set.
They’re here. The dads are here too—I can feel it even if I can’t see them. Gideon. Callum. Arthur. The adults who have been building the cage for Reece are now standing in the cage Reece built for me.
The ref—if you can call him that, a guy in a tank top with a whistle he never uses—steps between us. “You know the rules. There are no rules. Give ’em a show.”
The big man charges. No strategy. Just mass and momentum. I sidestep. Clean. The way Marco drilled into me a thousand times: don’t meet force with force. Redirect it. Let the big ones tire themselves against the air.
He swings. Wild. I duck. His fist whistles past my ear. The crowd roars.
I circle. Bouncing. Keeping my blood moving, my weight on the balls of my feet. He charges again. I kick—low, hard, catching the bad knee. The sound he makes is animal. He drops to one knee. The crowd goes silent for a beat, then erupts.
He gets up. Slower now. The knee buckling. Favoring the right side. His face has changed—the confidence replaced by something more dangerous: desperation. A desperate fighter is unpredictable. Marco taught me that too.
He comes again. Faster than expected for his size. Gets his hands on me—collar grab, pulling me into a clinch. His elbow catches my ribs. I taste blood. The crowd screams.
But I’m inside his reach now. And inside is where small fighters win. I drive my knee into his stomach. Once. Twice. He doubles. I get behind him—the choke. Marco’s choke. My arm around his throat, my legs wrapping his torso, my entire body becoming the mechanism that cuts off his air.
He thrashes. Throws himself backward. I absorb the impact—my back hitting the cage, the chain-link cutting into my spine. But I don’t let go. The hold tightens. His face going red. Then blue.
Through the fence I see Kaiden. He nods. Once. The signal: the cops are close. Minutes.
The big man stops moving. Not dead—unconscious. The difference between the old Xander and the new one: the old one wouldn’t have cared about the difference. The new one releases. Rolls off. Stands.
The ref grabs my hand. Raises it. The crowd erupts. Reece comes through the cage door, grabbing my other arm, pulling me toward the exit. His voice in my ear: “Good boy. Now let’s go get your prize.”
The parking lot. The night air hitting my face like cold water.
And the van—the black van with Penny and Cat inside.
Daisy in the driver’s seat, engine running, her eyes wild, the jittery energy of a girl who has been sitting alone with two hostages and a gun and enough drugs in her system to make every decision a coin flip.
Then—sirens. Everywhere. Blue and red lights from every direction. The cops flooding the parking lot like water through a broken dam. Cruisers blocking the exits. Officers pouring out with weapons drawn.
Reece’s face in the flashing lights—the mask falling, the controlled dealer dissolving into the cornered animal. He knows it’s over. And a man who knows it’s over is the most dangerous kind.
He runs for the van. Not to escape—to take the girls. One last piece of leverage. One last card to play.
I tackle him before he reaches the door. We hit the pavement together—hard, the asphalt tearing through my shirt, my already-split knuckles screaming as I swing. He swings back. We roll. Two bodies on a parking lot floor, fighting the way we’ve always fought: ugly, desperate, without rules.
But I’m better now. Faster. Stronger. I get on top. Pin him. My fists come down—once, twice, three times. His nose breaks under my knuckle. Blood splatters the asphalt.
He won’t stop. Even bleeding, even broken, even surrounded by cops—Reece Hall will not stop fighting. Because stopping means admitting it’s over, and admitting it’s over means admitting he lost, and Reece has never lost anything in his life that he didn’t choose to give away.
Hands on me. Pulling. Officers screaming: “STOP! GET ON THE GROUND! BOTH OF YOU!”
I don’t stop. The animal doesn’t have an off switch when the person underneath me is the person who drugged Penny and groomed her and held a gun to her head and took her from me in a van.
Pepper spray. The burn. My eyes on fire. My nose running. My lungs rejecting the air. And still I don’t stop. The taser. The jolt. Every muscle seizing. My body arching off Reece’s chest. The voltage running through me like lightning through a rod.
They tase Reece too. Both of us convulsing on the pavement. Both of us finally, forcibly, stopped.
Hands. Pulling me up. Not cop hands—bigger. Warmer. Gideon. “Xander. XANDER. It’s me. Stop fighting. It’s over. They got him. It’s over.”
I can’t see. The pepper spray has turned my vision into a smeared watercolor of blue and red lights. Gideon guides me—his hands on my shoulders, walking me away from the pavement where Reece is being cuffed by four officers.
Someone hands Gideon a jug of milk. He pours it over my face—the cold, the relief, the burn receding from nuclear to manageable. I blink. The world comes back in pieces: the flashing lights, the crowd being herded into vans, Reece face-down in cuffs, the van—
“The van.” I grab Gideon’s shirt. “The girls. Daisy drove off. She has them.”
“I know. The cops are—”
“I know where she’s going.” The certainty is bone-deep.
I know Reece’s playbook. I know his safe houses.
I know where Daisy would run when the main location falls apart because Reece drilled the contingency into everyone who worked for him.
“The warehouse on Pier Six. The one with the blue door. That’s his backup. ”
Gideon’s phone is already out. Calling it in. I hear him giving the address to someone—Arthur, maybe, or the detective who’s been building the federal case.
We’re in the car. Gideon driving. My face still burning, my vision still blurred. The bracelet on my wrist pressing into the raw skin underneath. Teal and yellow. Holding.
“We’re going to save them,” I say. To Gideon. To myself. To Penny, wherever she is, hoping the frequency we share can carry three words across the miles between us. “I promise.”
The warehouse on Pier Six smells like salt and diesel and fear.
We get there before the cops. Gideon pulls up and I’m out of the car before it stops moving. The boys are right behind—Kaiden’s car skidding into the lot, four doors opening simultaneously, four boys running toward the same door because the two people they love most are on the other side of it.
Screaming. From inside. Two voices—one I know better than my own heartbeat. Penny. And Cat.