9. Chapter 9
Colt
The warehouse smelled like sweat and blood and regret.
I knew I shouldn't be here. Had known it the moment I'd pulled up outside the converted industrial space where the underground matches happened.
Had known it when I'd signed in under a fake name and paid my entry fee in cash.
Had known it when I'd wrapped my hands and stepped into the ring despite the fact that Caroline had specifically asked me not to.
Despite the fact that I'd promised myself I wouldn't.
The guilt work in therapy had opened something inside me that I couldn't close back up.
Memories of the prospects I hadn't been able to protect.
Images of the young woman caught in crossfire.
The weight of the arrests that came from my capture.
All of it was sitting in my chest like a stone, and the only way I knew to quiet it was through pain.
My opponent tonight was new. Younger. Faster. He moved like someone who still believed he had something to prove. I recognized that hunger because I'd had it once. Before everything got complicated. Before survival became the only goal.
I let him come at me. Let his punches land. Took damage I could have avoided because the pain was the point. The pain was the only thing that made the guilt stop screaming.
Three rounds. By the end of it, my ribs were screaming. My vision was blurred in my left eye. My hands were bleeding through the wraps. And still, it wasn't enough. Still, the guilt was there, just quieter. Manageable for a few hours.
Until it wasn't.
I was in the locker room wiping blood off my face when the door slammed open.
Caroline stood in the entrance with her hair down, her expression absolutely furious, and absolutely no intention of leaving. She was wearing jeans and a leather jacket, and she looked like she'd driven straight here from wherever she'd been, which meant someone had told her where to find me.
"Out," I said flatly to the other fighters in the room. "All of you."
Nobody argued. They could sense the storm coming and they had the good sense to get out of its path.
When we were alone, Caroline stepped inside and she closed the door behind her. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Training."
"You're self-harming," she said, and her voice was sharp enough to cut. "You're systematically destroying your body as a way to manage emotional pain, and you're calling it training. That's not training. That's self-destruction."
I turned back to the mirror, and I continued wiping blood from my face. "I'm managing."
"You're regressing. We had a breakthrough in therapy. You started processing your guilt. You started feeling instead of just surviving. And the moment it got hard, you came back here."
"You don't know what you're talking about."
"I know exactly what I'm talking about," Caroline said, and she was moving closer now, her voice getting louder. "You're using physical pain as an anesthetic for emotional pain. It worked for a while. It gave you a few hours of quiet. But it's not treatment. It's avoidance."
I spun around and I got in her face. "You want to know what it feels like to live inside my head? To wake up convinced you're still being tortured? To not be able to sit through a normal meeting without your nervous system attacking you? To carry the weight of people you couldn't save?"
"Yes," she said, and her voice didn't waver. "I do. And I also know that punching things until you bleed isn't the answer."
"It's the only answer I have."
"It's not. You know it's not. You've been doing the work. Real work. Therapy that's actually helping. And you're throwing it away because feeling is harder than hurting."
"You don't get to judge me," I said, my voice low and dangerous. "You don't get to sit in your neat little office with your neat little life and tell me how to manage trauma you've never experienced."
The moment the words left my mouth, I knew they were wrong. Knew I'd struck at exactly the nerve I'd intended to strike because I was angry and desperate and terrified that she was right.
Caroline's expression shifted. The anger didn't disappear, but something else moved through it. Pain. Recognition.
"You think I haven't experienced trauma?" she asked quietly. "You think my neatly organized life is because I haven't been broken?"
I didn't answer. Didn't need to. We were both breathing hard and we were standing too close and the moment had shifted into something dangerous in an entirely different way.
"I've spent my entire life building walls," Caroline continued. "Organizing everything into boxes because chaos is what destroyed my childhood. My father's associates. The violence. The unpredictability. And I built a life where nothing could touch me because touching meant getting hurt."
"Caroline—"
"And then you walked into my office," she said, and her voice was shaking now. "Angry and hostile and so clearly self-destructing, and you broke through every single wall I'd built. You made me care. You made me risk my professional career because you mattered more than the rules."
I reached up and I touched her face. Just my palm against her cheek, and it felt like the most honest thing I'd done since coming home.
"I shouldn't be here," she whispered. "This is so inappropriate."
"I know."
"You're my patient."
"I know."
"If anyone found out—"
"I know," I said again, and I was already leaning in because I couldn't not. Couldn't stand this close to her and not feel the need to close the gap between us.
She lifted her face toward mine, and I realized she was going to let me. That despite everything—the professional boundaries, the ethics, the fact that this would destroy both of our lives if anyone discovered it—she wanted this as badly as I did.
My lips were almost touching hers when reality crashed down like a physical weight.
Patient. Therapist. The line we couldn't cross.
I pulled back. Dropped my hand. Stepped away from her before I did something we couldn't undo.
"I can't," I said, and the words cost me.
"I know," she said, and her voice was broken.
"This is because of the therapy. This isn't real. It's transference. You're vulnerable because I'm vulnerable and we're mistaking that for—" I couldn't finish the sentence. Couldn't name what this actually was because naming it would make it harder to walk away from.
"It's not transference," Caroline said quietly. "And you know it's not."
But she didn't try to close the distance again. Didn't try to pull me back. Just stood there with her arms wrapped around herself and her expression devastated.
"I'm going to refer you to another therapist," she said. "Effective immediately. I can't treat you anymore. This has become too complicated."
"Caroline—"
"I'm serious, Colt. I crossed every line I'm trained never to cross.
I let my personal feelings interfere with your treatment.
I encouraged you to trust me when I should have maintained professional distance.
And now I'm physically attracted to you and I'm making decisions based on what I want instead of what you need. "
"What I need is you," I said.
"No. What you need is actual treatment. From someone who can be objective. Someone who won't compromise your recovery by wanting to protect you from pain that's actually necessary for healing."
She moved toward the door, and I wanted to stop her. Wanted to argue. Wanted to find the words that would make her understand that she wasn't a complication in my healing. She was the entire reason I was trying to heal at all.
But she was right. She was absolutely right, and I hated it.
"Don't go back to the boxing," she said without turning around. "Call Ditch. Tell him you need higher level care. Tell him you need a psychiatrist. Tell him you're in crisis because you are. And lying to yourself about it isn't going to help."
"Caroline—"
"I'll refer you to Dr. Williamson. She's excellent with PTSD. She'll take good care of you."
She left without waiting for my response.
I stood in that warehouse locker room with my bleeding hands and my destroyed knuckles and the memory of almost kissing the only woman who'd ever actually seen me, and I understood that I'd just lost one of the only things keeping me tethered to recovery.
The drive home felt surreal. I kept replaying the moment. Her face inches from mine. The way she'd lifted her head. The way she'd wanted me. The moment where we could have crossed that line and both chosen to step back.
Except I hadn't stepped back. She had.
And she was right. Everything she'd said was right. The boxing was self-harm. The guilt was driving my destructive patterns. The feelings between us were real but they were also a problem. A complication. A liability to her professional license and to my actual recovery.
I got home and I sat on my apartment floor, and I thought about calling her. Thought about showing up at her office and arguing. Thought about convincing her that what we felt was stronger than the boundaries between us.
But that would be using her the same way I'd been using the boxing. Taking what I needed without considering the cost to her.
So instead, I called Ditch.
"I need help," I said when he answered. No preamble. No explanation. Just the admission that I couldn't do this alone anymore. "And I need it now."
There was a long pause. Then: "I'm sending someone to pick you up. Don't go anywhere."
I hung up and sat in the dark of my apartment, and I replayed the moment when I'd almost kissed her. Replayed the way she'd wanted me to. Replayed the moment where we'd both chosen to step back because it was the right thing to do.
And I understood that this was what loving someone actually felt like. Not the boxing. Not the pain. Not the self-destruction.
It felt like walking away from someone you wanted with every fiber of your being because keeping them safe mattered more than having them.
It felt like choosing their wellbeing over your own desperation.
It felt like heartbreak.
I didn't know if I could survive this. Didn't know if choosing the hard path was going to be enough. Didn't know if recovery was even possible when the only thing that had made recovery worth trying was now completely off-limits.
But I'd called Ditch. Had asked for help. Had taken the first step toward actually getting better instead of just managing the destruction.
The knock on my door came thirty minutes later. Ditch stood in the hallway with concern etched across his face.
"What happened?" he asked.
"I went back to the boxing. Despite promises. Despite therapy. And Caroline found out."
Ditch's expression shifted. "Caroline confronted you?"
"Yeah. And she was right. About all of it. About the self-harm. About the guilt. About everything." I looked at my VP, and I made a decision that terrified me. "I need inpatient care. Real treatment. Not just weekly therapy sessions. I need actual help."
"Okay," Ditch said, and he pulled out his phone. "We can do that. There's a place in Austin. Doc already has contacts there. If we call tonight, they might have a bed available."
"What about the club?"
"The club will manage. That's what families do. We handle the logistics while you handle your recovery. You don't need to worry about anything except getting better."
As Ditch made the calls, I thought about Caroline. About the moment when she'd walked away because it was the right thing to do. About the fact that she'd cared enough about my recovery to sacrifice what she wanted.
And I understood that if I was going to deserve that kind of sacrifice, I had to actually commit to getting better.
Not for the club. Not for Ditch or Sweet or any of the brothers.
But for myself. And maybe, eventually, for her.
The paperwork for inpatient admission took three hours. By two in the morning, I had a bed reserved at a private psychiatric facility that specialized in complex trauma. By four, I was packed and ready to leave.
Ditch drove me to Austin personally.
Neither of us said much. The silence was heavy with everything unsaid—the months of watching me self-destruct, the relief that I was finally accepting real help, the uncertainty about whether help would actually be enough.
When we pulled up to the facility, I turned to him.
"Thank you," I said. "For not giving up on me."
"Never," Ditch said simply. "That's not what brothers do."
I got out of the truck, and I walked into the facility and I didn't look back. Because looking back meant thinking about Caroline, and thinking about Caroline meant remembering what I was walking away from in order to survive.
And I had to survive. Had to prove that I was worth the sacrifice she'd made by walking away.
That was the only thing that made any of this bearable.