Page 1 of Split Decision

CHAPTER ONE

LUKE

Something’s wrong. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s there, lying just below the surface and waiting to emerge from its cocoon. I feel defeated before the ring of the bell even matters.

I stand in the center of the ring, my gloves hanging loose, sweat cooling too quickly on my skin. Something’s off. It’s not my strength—that has been tested in every imaginable way. It’s not my conditioning. I don’t even need an alarm clock anymore. I wake at exactly the same time every morning to run sprints and build my endurance.

It’s my timing. It’s been slipping for weeks now. The problem is this isn’t the kind of off I can fix by goingmore rounds or sharpening my timing. There’s nothing for me to train out or push through. This issue runs deeper than that. It’s similar to the calm before the storm. The kind of obstacle you don’t see until it’s already in front of you and you can’t swerve to miss it.

It’s not just in the ring.

It’s everything. Conversations half a beat off. Reactions that come too late or too fast.

Even with Andi… I’m not where I should be when it matters.

“Earth to Luke.” Mack’s voice breaks through my inner thoughts as easily as it cuts across the gym. My training has taught me to filter out every noise that isn’t his voice. “You planning to move today, or you just here sightseeing?”

I roll my shoulders once and step in, forcing my feet to find the rhythm they’ve known for years. Jab. Cross. Reset. It’s close. Well, closer. But it’s still not right, and I can’t even pretend otherwise.

Mack doesn’t correct me. He doesn’t shout. He just watches, arms folded, eyes concentrated on the details most people miss.

That’s worse.

“Again,” he says.

I go again, but with the same result. My timing’s half a beat off, like I’m reacting instead of reading. I drop my hands and drag my glove across my mouth, more out of habit than anything else.

“You’re reading late,” Mack says.

Late means losing. Late means taking hits you never should’ve seen coming.

Late means you stop trusting yourself.

And once that’s gone… everything else follows.

There’s no anger in his tone. No volume in his pitch. He doesn’t even add his signature bass gruff that conveys exactly what he’s thinking without him needing to spell it out. He’s simply asserting a cold, hard fact. The problem is he’s right, and that irritates me more than it should. Because I don’t have an answer for it. There’s no excuse for my regression.

For the last seven weeks, everything’s been… quiet. Jackson and Delia are officially presumed dead. There have been no sightings, no unexpected statements, and no bodies pulled from the water. They haven’t shown up like some poorly written horror movie where the evil villain refuses to die.

At first, I told myself that it was a good thing. That meant our ordeal was over. Now it just feels like space. The kindof something that can move through without being seen. Now I’d rather face Rhoades like a man and finish this the old-fashioned way. I never realized how intrusive a lack of closure feels in everyday life.

“You hear me?” Mack asks.

“Yeah.”

“Then stop waiting for permission and get ahead of it.”

I nod, but my attention’s already slipping. Not to anything in the ring. Not to him. Something out there, looming on the horizon. Like when you can feel a storm brewing, you can smell the rain in the air, but can’t see a single storm cloud in the sky.

Across the gym, my phone sits on the bench where I left it. I checked it three times in the ten minutes before climbing into the ring without realizing I was doing it. Here I am, waiting. For what, I don’t know. To put a finer point on it, that’s exactly what’s wrong… what’s off. Just the next move—and that’s the problem. I don’t know where the next hit is coming from. Only that it is coming. There’s no way to guard against something like that.

Mack tosses me a towel. It lands against my chest harder than it needs to.

“Take five,” he says. “Before you make this a habit.”

I catch it and step out of the ring, wiping the sweat from my face as I head toward the bench. There’s a dark sedan parked at the curb across the street. The car is probably nothing, but I’m hyper-vigilant now, and I can’t turn it off. Is someone watching me train? The second my feet hit the floor, my phone lights up.

It’s a news notification.