PROLOGUE: NOVEMBER - PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
Now playing: Centuries - Fall Out Boy
Thelightshitfirst.
Blinding, white hot-beams cut through the haze of the fog machines, scattering over the polished canvas of the ring like fractured stars.
The crowd was distant at first, a low hum that grew into a living, breathing thing. It started in the floorboards, vibrating up through the soles of my boots, rattling my ribs before I even stepped through the curtain. I’d been here before. I’d stood in this position a thousand times, listening to the roar of twenty thousand people screaming for blood and spectacle.
But never like this. Not really.
Not since the night I left. Not since everything fell apart.
I stood in the empty Gorilla position, the staging area just behind the curtain. Usually, this place was a hive of producers, cameramen, and talent. Tonight, it was a tomb.
The secrecy was absolute. The Chairman of the UWF himself had walked me into the building through a side maintenance entrance. He had security clear the hallways ahead of us, room by room. No producers. No talent. No leaks. I hadspent the entire day holed up in a blacked-out suite in downtown Philadelphia, my eyes glued to the clock as I waited for the signal.
Nobody knew I was here. Not the dirt sheets, not the locker room, and definitely not the man standing in the ring.
I wasn’t wrestling tonight. There were no match graphics, no contract signing, no promo package. I wasn’t here to compete. I was here to make a statement.
My hands were taped, the white athletic strips stark against my skin, my muscles primed and slick with a thin sheen of sweat. My heart raced, hammering against my sternum as if it was the first time I had ever stepped into a ring.
Callum Kincaid.
Deadlock.
He was out there, pacing the ropes. I didn’t need to see him to know what he looked like. He moved like a predator. Eyes sharp, scanning, measuring every angle of the ring like a general surveying a battlefield. He was fire. Violent, consuming, and I’d been chasing the memory of that heat for nearly a decade without ever admitting that I was just chasinghim.
The trainers had thrown us together on the first day like it was an experiment. Two kids, destined to collide, they said. Stars in motion. I didn’t believe in destiny then. I believed in discipline. I believed in control. I believed in keeping my heart locked tight in a cage I built myself to keep out the chaos of my father’s legacy.
And yet, Cal found the cracks in it.
Hotel rooms during long tours across the country. Furtive touches when the lights were low in rental cars. Confessions whispered in the dark that I never acknowledged in the daylight. Every single one of them, I buried under tape, sweat, and the roar of the crowd. I pretended none of it mattered. I pretendedhedidn’t.
I let the world watch him rise while I faded into the background.
Front Lines.The mistake.
The heartbreak that followed me through the curtain. The distraction that made me hesitate on a move I had done a thousand times. Then, the sickeningcrunch of my shoulder. The pain that blinded me. My career ending in a split second of grief, leaving Cal alone in the ring to fight a war without me.
Evan was the only one who knew what really happened. The only one who knew the man beneath the “Timeless” persona when I disappeared. And even with him, I never let on how much I still craved what I couldn’t have.
Then, the music hit.
Mymusic.
The sound that hadn’t been played in a UWF arena in exactly seven years.
The hum became a roar, but it wasn’t just noise. It was shock. For a split second, the confusion sucked the air out of the arena. They thought it was a mistake. A video package. A cruel joke.
I drew a breath. It burned down to my lungs, coiled in my chest, and then I let it out.
The first step was always the hardest.
I stepped through the curtain.
Because what was waiting on the other side was worth everything, even if it all went up in flames.
