“Nah, it’s not like that.” He smiles, a little crooked this time, a little more like the teenager I remember cutting class with and less like the man standing beside me now. “Let me buy you a coffee. I want to run something by you.”
Curiosity gets there before caution does. “Depends what you want to run by me.”
He laughs under his breath and fishes his phone out of his pocket, holding it out toward me. “Something I think you’ll be interested in hearing.”
I take it, type in my number, and hand it back just as Bishop drives his opponent into the fence hard enough that the cage shudders on its anchors and the woman beside me cheers.
Ryder glances at the screen, then back at me. “You ready to make some magic happen like we used to?”
It’s so corny it catches me by surprise. A laugh gets out before I can decide anything about it—loud enough that Lola turns to look at me.
“Does that line ever work?” I look back toward the cage just in time to see Bishop turn toward me.
His gaze finds mine with the force of a collision, sharp and immediate and stunned enough that for one impossible second it feels like something has struck the center of the room and knocked all the air out of it.
SEVENTEEN
BISHOP
The ring isone of the only places left where I don’t have to think.
Everything else drops away. The canvas is slick under my boots, blood and sweat worked into the grain of it, and the chain-link shudders every time someone gets driven into it hard enough to rattle the whole structure. The air is thick—heat and copper and the particular smell of a crowd that came here to watch something get hurt.
None of it touches me. Inside the cage, the noise doesn’t blur. It sharpens. Distance becomes a number. Timing becomes reflex. Force becomes something you own or something that owns you.
And nothing owns me inside the cage.
There’s no room for hesitation here. No room for distraction.
The guy across from me is already breathing too hard. He’s built thick through the shoulders—the kind of fighter who’s won enough on weight and momentum alone that he stopped learning anything else. It shows in everything. The way he plants his feet before he commits. The way his eyes drop half a second before his hands move.
His right hand arcs wide and I’m already inside it before it finishes. I feel the air shift past my cheek and put a tight shot into his ribs—not hard enough to end it, hard enough to fold him, break the rhythm, remind him that size is only useful if you can land it. I pivot out before he can answer.
The crowd reacts, loud and hungry, but it stays where it belongs—outside the cage.
He recovers fast, frustration bleeding into the set of his shoulders, and comes at me with less control than before.
Good. I let him come. A quick finish defeats the whole point of being here.
Then—beneath all of it—I hear it.
A fucking laugh.
It cuts through the noise the way nothing in this room should be able to, and for a half-second my body registers it before my mind does—as something older than sound, something that has no business being inside the cage with me.
My focus shifts before I decide to let it. And that’s all it takes.
Front edge of the crowd, close enough to the cage that she might as well have stepped inside it, her face tilted toward the ring, eyes already on me.
His fist catches me clean across the side of my face.
The impact snaps my head sideways, white and immediate, and the crowd surges like they’ve been waiting for it. My footing skids. I lock it back down before it costs me anything else, jaw clenched, the pain already compressing itself into something I can use.
Sloppy.
Blood wells at my brow and starts its slow track down the side of my face. I blink it back, reset my stance, roll my neck until the ringing in my ears settles into something manageable. This asshole in front of me thinks he did something. I can see it happening in real time—shoulders lifting, spine straightening,the particular stupidity of a man who got lucky and is already calling it skill.
Focus.
