This Adrian grins as his opponent hits the ground and doesn’t get up.
The video ends. A single line of text appears.His time is up. One fight. Or this goes public.
I watch it again, unable to look away. The way his muscles flex with each movement.
The blood on his knuckles. The wild look in his gray eyes that I’ve never seen before, not even in our most desperate moments together.
My chest tightens with something that isn’t quite fear but isn’t quite anything else either.
The message is clear. Adrian’s carefully constructed redemption, twenty years of penance and prayer, could be destroyed with a single click.
The underground boxer turned priest would become a scandal, a cautionary tale, proof that some men can’t escape their nature.
I should be horrified.
I should see him differently now, understand that the violence he keeps so carefully controlled is real and dangerous.
Instead, all I can think is that he’s still the same man who held me in his office, who whispered prayers against my skin, who looks at me like I’m both his salvation and his damnation.
The past doesn’t change that. It just makes him more real, more human, more mine.
I find him in the church basement gym hours later. The space smells like old sweat and decades of violence absorbed into concrete floors.
Adrian attacks the heavy bag with bleeding knuckles, his white undershirt soaked through, his movements precise and brutal.
Each impact sends the bag swinging on its chains, and I watch from the doorway as he loses himself in the rhythm.
Jab. Cross. Hook. The combinations flow like muscle memory, like prayer, like something he’s been suppressing for twenty years that’s finally breaking free.
He senses my presence and stops mid-punch, chest heaving. When he turns and sees me standing there, shame floods his face so completely it makes my chest ache.
His hands drop to his sides, blood dripping from split knuckles onto the concrete floor.
“You saw it.” His voice is rough, defeated. Not a question.
I move closer, my eyes tracking the way his chest rises and falls with each ragged breath.
The undershirt clings to every hard plane of muscle, and even now, even with blood on his hands and violence in his eyes, I want him. “Tommy sent it to me.”
Adrian’s jaw clenches. “I was going to tell you. Before you found out like this.” He looks down at his damaged hands. “I was twenty. Angry. Looking for any way to hurt the world before it could hurt me first. The underground fights paid well, and I was good at it. Too good.”
“What happened?” I’m close enough now to see the old scars on his knuckles, the ones I’ve traced with my fingers in the dark but never asked about.
“I nearly killed someone.” The confession comes out flat, emotionless. “Bar fight that got out of control. I couldn’t stop hitting him even after he went down. They pulled me off before I could finish it, but barely.” His gray eyes meet mine, and the shame in them is devastating. “That’s who I was, Charlie. A man who enjoyed violence. Who got off on the power of destroying someone with his bare hands.”
The words should scare me.
Should make me see him differently, help me understand that the control he maintains so carefully is the only thing standing between civilization and the monster he used to be.
Instead, I take his bloody hands in mine. His breath catches as my fingers trace the split knuckles, the swollen joints, the evidence of what he’s been fighting against. “You’re not that man anymore.”
“Aren’t I?” His voice drops to something dangerous. “You saw the video. You saw what I’m capable of. This man, Tommy, wants me to fight again, and part of me…” He stops, jaw clenching. “Part of me wants to. Wants to feel that power again, that release. What does that make me?”
“Human.” I press my palm against his chest, feeling his heart hammer beneath my touch. “It makes you human, Adrian. You’re not a monster for having violent thoughts. You’re a man for choosing not to act on them.”
His hands frame my face, thumbs stroking my cheekbones, and I watch him wage an internal battle. The priest who wants to push me away for my own good. The man who wants to pull me close and forget everything else exists. “I’m terrified you’ll see me differently now. That you’ll look at me and see that savage in the ring instead of...”
“Instead of what?” I lean into his touch, my body responding to his proximity despite everything. The heat radiating from him. The way his gray eyes track the curve of my neck, the swell of my breasts beneath my dress. “Instead of the man who quotes scripture between kisses? Who holds me like I’m something precious? Who’s spent twenty years trying to be better?”
