Page 22

“No, you don’t understand? Or no, you refuse to answer?”

“Both.” Zane’s voice sounds raw. Scraped hollow. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.” A dry laugh. I hear a chair scrape. “I watched your camp. Eight weeks of work, and the man who walked into that cage looked like he was sleepwalking. You dropped your right hand every time he stepped in. You held the clinch when you should have broken it. You gave him position on the ground and lay there.”

“I was tired.”

“You were distracted.” The voice drops, gets colder. “Your head was somewhere else. I want to know where.”

The silence stretches. My fingernails dig crescents into my palms. I don’t breathe.

Come on, Butler. Say something. Say anything.

“Nowhere,” Zane says finally.

“Bullshit.”

“I’ll fix it.”

“You will.” A shoe taps once on the floor, hard as a gavel. “Get your shit together. We’re filing for a rematch tonight, and this time, you finish him. Clean. Ugly. Early. I don’t care what it takes. Do we understand each other?”

A long pause.

“Yes, sir.”

The door swings wide.

I jam myself backward into the cage, hip against a rack of folded towels. Jason strides out in a charcoal suit that hasn’t wrinkled, phone in his hand, jaw clenched. He turns down the hall toward the locker rooms. He stops.

His head swings slowly toward the supply cage.

Toward me.

Dark eyes, unhurried, sliding over my split lip and swollen hand and everything I’m trying not to wear on my face. Something knowing settles at the corner of his mouth, the shape of a smirk with no humor in it.

“Rivera,” he says.

“Mr. Ortega.”

“Lost, are we?”

“Bathroom.”

“It’s the other way.” He tilts his head toward the far end. “Wouldn’t want you to get confused. Showers can be so disorienting.”

My blood goes hot, then cold.

He holds my gaze another second, then straightens his cuff and walks on. His footsteps echo away down the corridor, steady and unbothered.

I stand there until my pulse quiets. Then I push off the cage and cross the hall in three long strides.

Nobody comes out to stop me.

The medical area is a low room with a cot, a steel counter, and a wall of cabinets. Antiseptic and latex. One cold overhead panel, buzzing.

Zane sits on the examination table, elbows on his knees.

He hasn’t heard me. His hands hang between his legs, the tape around his knuckles stained rust at the seams. An ice pack rests against his ribs. His hair is damp, and he stares at the wall.