Page 89 of Main Event

I set the weight down on the bench.

Three licenses. Three fronts. Timed to land four days before the fight, on a Saturday morning when neither of us can immediately reach our licensing boards, leaving us with nothing to do but sit with it until Monday.

“She knows,” I say.

“She knows we’re close to moving,” Bill says. “This is the final pressure campaign. She’s trying to create enough institutional noise that you both spend the next four days managing compliance rather than doing what you’re actually doing.”

“Does Andi know yet?”

“I’m calling her after you.”

I look at the gym. At the equipment, the ring, and the space Reyes has turned into a place that produces winners. At everything I’ve built toward this fight.

“Bill,” I say.

“Yes.”

“Is there anything either of us needs to do in the next four days that can’t wait until after the fight?”

Bill pauses to check something. “No. The complaints require responses within thirty days. The preliminary inquiries don’t require immediate action. Everything can wait until Monday of next week.”

“Then we don’t tell Reyes,” I say. “And we don’t let it change anything.”

“Agreed,” Bill says. “Luke—you’re four days out. Whatever she’s trying to do, don’t let her do it in that gym.”

“She’s not in this gym,” I say.

I hang up.

I stand in the empty gym for a moment, listening to the familiar sounds—the low hum of the lights, the distant echo of traffic outside, the quiet that only exists when a space built for violence is temporarily at rest.

Four days out. Every pressure point is exposed. Lawyers, boards, headlines, anonymous complaints—all of it designed to drag me somewhere else, to make me fight on terms that aren’t mine.

I don’t let it.

I tape my hands. Slow. Precise. The same way I always do. The ritual is the point. The repetition narrows things back down to what matters.

Then I get back to work.

Reyes finds me at the end of the session.

Not to give me notes—he did that during the session, and he doesn’t repeat himself. He’s not there to add anything to the work. He’s there for something else, which I know because he pulls up a chair and sits, which Reyes does not do in the gym unless he’s watching film or saying something that requires him to be at the same level as the person he’s talking to.

I sit across from him with a towel around my neck and water in my hand and wait.

“You know what I haven’t told you,” he says. Not a question.

“Tell me,” I say.

He looks at the ring. Not at me—at the ring. The canvas, the ropes, the corner pads. He looks at it the way someone looks at something they’ve spent their life inside of and have never once made peace with the fact that it asks what it asks.

“I’ve trained forty-one fighters to a world title fight,” he says. “Forty-one. Twenty-two of them won the belt. Thirty-eight years in this sport, and twelve of those I was the one getting hit.” Reyes pauses, letting the numbers sit. “You’re the first one I’ve trained who I thought could have been something different. Not instead of this. Different as well. The license. The kids at the center.” He’s quiet for a moment. “That matters to me. I don’t say that to fighters. I’m saying it to you.”

The gym is empty around us. The Vegas afternoon light coming through the high windows, flat and gold.

“Tomorrow,” he says, “you’re going to be everything I trained you to be. But you’re also going to be everything you built on your own. The license. The woman who waited for you. Everything that exists outside this ring.” He looks at me now. “That’s not weakness. A lot of trainers will tell you to leave it outside the arena. I’m telling you the opposite. You carry all of it in with you. That’s your advantage. Vega is fighting for the belt. You’re fighting for everything.”

I look at him. At the man who told me I was fighting like I was protecting something instead of taking something. Who spent twelve weeks making me into a different kind of fighter without once telling me who I was becoming.