30. Brady
brADY
Iwake up and for three heartbeats I don’t know where I am. Then Dakota shifts against my chest, Cruz snores from somewhere near the foot of the bed, and it all floods back. Eli’s apartment. Thursday night. Five people making a declaration that can’t be taken back, not that any of us would.
I love you. All of you.
Fight day.
The thought should spike my pulse. It always does—that first conscious moment when my brain remembers there’s a cage waiting for me and a man inside it who wants to take my head off. Usually the anxiety arrives like a bill collector, pounding before I’ve even opened my eyes.
Today it knocks. Polite. Manageable.
I lie still and take inventory. Dakota’s cheek on my chest, her breath warm on my skin because none of us bothered with clothes.
Eli behind her, one arm thrown over both of us.
Dante on my other side, face peaceful in a way it never is when he’s awake.
Cruz sprawled diagonally across the bottom of the mattress, occupying forty percent of the bed with zero shame.
This is what I’m fighting for. Not a belt. Not a record. This.
I extract myself one limb at a time, a grappling exit slower and more careful than anything I’ll do tonight. Dakota makes a small sound of protest and burrows into the warm spot I leave behind. Eli’s arm tightens around her.
In the bathroom, I study myself in the mirror. Fed and rehydrated since yesterday’s official weigh-in, lean muscle and veins standing up along my forearms. The bags under my eyes from the weight cut have faded. My hands are steady.
My head is quiet.
That’s the part that gets me. Every fight camp ends the same way—last week a slow drowning in what-ifs, my brain running disaster footage on a loop until I couldn’t eat, sleep, think.
This week should have been worse—the hidden relationship that could end our careers, the build-up to the fight, Brady Williams’ lifelong talent for punishing himself for wanting things for himself.
Instead, I slept eight hours in a pile of people who love me, and the quiet in my skull feels like a superpower.
“You’re up early.” Eli leans in the doorway, sweatpants low on his hips, voice rough with sleep. He scans me head to toe. “How do you feel?”
“Honestly?” I turn from the mirror. “Dangerous.”
Something crosses his face—pride, heat, both. He crosses the small bathroom and puts his hand on the back of my neck, forehead to mine for one breath. Two.
“Good,” he says. “Keep it.”
The ceremonial weigh-ins at eleven are theater.
Cameras, a stage, a scale that doesn’t count for anything since we made weight yesterday, but the promoters love a show.
I step up in my shorts and the announcer calls out one fifty-four and a half, and the small crowd of media and hardcores makes their noise.
Marcus Henderson steps up after me. The Hammer.
Six fights, five knockouts, all of them ugly brawls where he ate three punches to land one bomb.
He’s thick through the shoulders, already carrying water weight back, and when we square up for the staredown he does the thing brawlers do—juts his chin, flexes, tries to make his eyes dead.
I just look at him.
He blinks first. Looks away, covers it by turning to the cameras, but I see it and he knows I see it. Cruz sees it too, from the edge of the stage, and his grin turns wolfish.
“He’s already beat,” Cruz says in the van afterward. “Did you see that? The man looked at you and his soul left his body.”
“One staredown doesn’t win a fight,” I argue.
“No, but it tells you where his head’s at.” Cruz drapes his arm over the seat back. “His head’s hiding under the blankets. Yours is right where it needs to be to succeed, here.”
The van drops us at the host hotel a little after noon.
The promotion books a room for every fighter on the card, even those of us who live fifteen minutes away—somewhere controlled to rest, close to the venue—and mine has sat empty all week.
The afternoon crawls. This has always been the hardest part.
Nothing to do but wait, and waiting is where my brain used to eat itself alive.
Dakota stays.
The others clear out with murmured excuses—Eli to review tape one last time, Cruz and Dante to get food and check the venue.
She doesn’t talk much, sitting cross-legged on the second bed while I lie on the first, and at some point her hand finds mine across the gap between mattresses and just stays there.
Her fingers laced through my fingers, her thumb moving in slow circles over my knuckles.
The tattooed letters across her fingers press against my skin.
“Are you nervous?” she asks around two o’clock, when the light through the curtains has gone flat.
“Is that a bad thing?”
“It doesn’t feel like me.” I watch the ceiling. “Every other fight, by now I can’t eat. Can’t lie still. This feels like I’ve forgotten to do something important.”
She rolls onto her side to look at me, blonde hair spilling across the pillow. “Or you finally stopped doing something you never needed to do.”
“Which is?”
“Fighting yourself first.” Her hazel eyes hold mine, her thumb still moving over my knuckles. “It’s all still in there, Brady. I can feel it in your hand. It’s just waiting for the cage door now instead of eating you alive in a hotel room.”
I turn that over while the clock crawls. She’s right. It hums under my skin like a struck tuning fork, every volt. It just doesn’t have anywhere bad to go anymore.
At four thirty she squeezes my hand once and lets go. “Time to go to work, baby.”
The venue takes us in through the loading dock forty minutes later.
The place holds three thousand and sounds like it.
Even backstage, the crowd is palpable—a bass rumble in the concrete that rises and falls with every fight on the undercard.
The hallway smells like liniment and canvas and the specific coppery, adrenaline-soaked stink of nervous fighters, and my body responds like it’s been trained to. Heart rate up. Senses sharp.
Eli is in coach mode now. The man who pressed his forehead to mine this morning is packed away somewhere, and what’s left here now is the professional.
“Shadow. Five minutes. Loose, don’t burn anything.”
I shadow-box in the corner of the warm-up room while other fighters and other corners flow around us.
Cruz wraps my hands himself, those huge fingers laying each strip of gauze with the care of a man wrapping a gift.
He doesn’t joke while he does it. This part is sacred to him.
He learned it from Victor and he passes it down like scripture.
“There,” he says, taping the last wrap. “Weapons are hot.”
Mitt work next. Cruz holds and calls combinations, and my fists find the pads on rails—one-two, one-two-three, slip the counter, pivot out. The smack of leather on leather settles the last of my nerves the way nothing else can. This is ten thousand hours of muscle memory taking the wheel.
“Jab’s crisp,” Eli says, circling us. “Henderson carries his right hand low when he gets tired. Round two, that door opens. Don’t kick it down in round one. Let him open it himself.”
“Yes, Coach,” I reply.
“He’ll swing wide when he’s hurt. Every time. It’s on all six fights of tape. When you hurt him, don’t admire your work. Angle out or change levels. He’s dangerous exactly as long as he’s conscious and not one second longer.”
“Yes, Coach.”
Cruz lowers the mitts and grins at me. “And if he shoots on you—”
“Sprawl, hips back, look for the neck.” The choke we’ve drilled a hundred times. His choke, really, the one he broke down for me angle by angle until it lived in my body instead of my brain.
“My boy.” He says it quietly, just for me, and then the moment’s gone and he’s loud Cruz again, hollering at a passing official about the temperature in the room.
Out there in the arena, Dakota is ringside, second row next to Dante, sitting with Jonah and Micah and the rest of the Oath crowd who turned out.
Then the runner is at the door saying ten minutes, and the world narrows.
The fights before mine happened. I know they happened because I heard the crowd shouting through the walls, but I couldn’t tell you who won. I’m in the tunnel now, hood up, Eli on my left and Cruz on my right, and my walkout music kicks in—drums like a heartbeat at war—and we’re moving.
The arena cracks wide open at the doorway like a thunderstorm. Three thousand voices, heat and light and noise crashing down all at once, and my vision tunnels to the cage glowing under the rig at the center of it all.
I find her without meaning to. Second row, blonde hair catching the light, and for a second our eyes connect, and everything else falls silent.
Then I force myself to look away.
Vaseline on my brows. Mouthguard in. The cage door swings open and I climb the steps and the fence closes behind me and everything—the crowd, the cameras, the secret sleeping in my chest—falls away.
Just me and Henderson and eight sides of chain link.
The ref checks us both, gives his instructions, brings us to the center. Henderson tries the dead eyes again. Up close I can see the sweat already on his upper lip.
We touch knuckles.
The bell rings.
My jab finds him in the first ten seconds. Just a range-finder, but it snaps his head back. He comes forward the way Coach said he would, heavy on his lead leg, right hand cocked like he’s carrying an axe. I slip outside, touch his body, angle away before the counter arrives.
Again. Jab, jab, pivot.
The rhythm builds and it’s mine, all mine, and there’s a purity to this that I could never explain to anyone who hasn’t lived it.
No shame in the cage. No confusion. No thirteen-year-old boy learning that wanting things gets you beaten.
Just distance and timing and a target in front of me that my body knows how to solve.