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If he recognizes the name, he doesn’t say it. Just unclips the rope and moves aside to let me through.

I lift my bag higher on my shoulder as I walk through to a wall of curtains behind him. If anyone wanted back here, they could easily hop the rope. But I guess it’s the man by the rope who actually keeps the riffraff out.

When someone walks by, I tap them on the arm and say I’m looking for Lou. They don’t talk but nod me toward a curtained room near the back.

I get close and part the curtain to see a man shorter than me untaping the hands of an ebony-skinned woman with braids tight to her head, white ribbon laced through them. She’s terrifying and beautiful, as her skin seemed unmarred except for the red on her knuckles and her busted eye socket and lip.

“You lost or something, Girl Scout?”

It takes me a second to realize the man is talking to me. There’s a hint of an accent, as if English isn’t his first language. I’m thinking Spanish just from the look on him, but what do I know. Could be Cuban for all the good I am at guessing a person’s background.

“Looking for Lou.”

The guy pauses his tape job, and both of them look at me, Ebony in annoyance and the guy with full interest as he looks me up and down. Not in a creepy way, just assessing me.

“Menace’s girl?”

I nod.

“You don’t look like much,” he comments before his focus goes back to the woman.

“Looks can be deceiving,” I quip before I can control myself.

I get a huff of a laugh from who I presume is Lou and a side smile from the woman, even if neither looks back at me.

“True,” Lou says. “Take the room across the hall and get ready. You’re up in thirty.”

I nod in gratitude and head across the “hall” to the other curtained-off area. The place is loud from all the people, but I feel a strange sense of being away from it all. There’s a table in front of me, big like the one the woman was sitting on in the other room. Another small table is off to the side with a few things on it I pay no mind to.

The place isn’t secure. Anyone can walk in, I suppose, but it’s what Viv told me to expect.

I set my bag down and start stripping off the clothes I wore for the engagement party. Jeans and a T-shirt. Nothing fancy, which fit me as well as covered up what I had on underneath: biker shorts and a sports bra.

I exchange my shoes for the ones Viv brought down for me. She said she got them when she did boxing, before she started in on MMA and went barefoot. But since this is my first fight, I’m not ready for the level she’s at. Boxing is for beginners in her eyes, which I am.

I lace up my shoes and then move to my hair.

I grab my comb out of my bag and hope I can do this without a mirror. Somehow, in my fit of rage after having another damn nightmare yesterday morning and deciding cutting my hair was a good idea, I failed to think long-term. Braiding is surprisingly more difficult now that I have only a fraction of the hair I once did.

I was planning on braiding it before I got here, but Atom showing up threw me a curve. I didn’t expect him to be there. I especially didn’t expect him to walk in on me seconds before I started my elaborate braid for the fight.

I want something like what the girl who had obviously just been in a fight had. Not the inlaid ribbon, but the tight coils on her head. Something that would make it hard to grab.

Because while this might be a boxing thing, it’s still an underground fight. Anything goes once I enter the ring. There are no boxing gloves, no headgear. That’s not what the people paid to see. They want blood. They want tears. They want to watch two women beat the shit out of each other.

Which I’m all for.

The first day with Viv in the gym, I learned something about myself I never knew: I like hitting someone. Not that I got in many shots with Viv when she did a small show-and-tell with me after an hour on the bag. But the one solid punch I landed, right before she hit me back and sent me rolling on the floor, had me feeling like I was sky-high.

And she knew it too the moment she saw me smiling with a bloody mouth as I sat on my ass and looked up at her in wonder.

From that day forward, she became my coach of sorts. When she was in town, we worked together. When she wasn’t, she made sure I got to the gym to work out to a plan she’d set up.

It was hard, but not impossible, to train for something without letting any of the Hounds know. As far as I let on, I was just taking out some aggression on the bag. What they didn’t see was the hours I spent in Atom’s room at the clubhouse doing push-ups and sit-ups. Any type of floor exercises I could do in the small space.

If anyone saw me go into the gym at the clubhouse early in the morning, all they saw was me on the treadmill. Nothing more. And as far as they knew, I’d somehow gained my appetite back with how much I was consuming. Viv wanted me at a certain weight, and with all the training, I was losing more than I could afford.

Still, not a single Hound noticed.