“Okay.”
“Just listen. Let me run point. If they ask numbers, I’ll handle the numbers. You don’t have to say yes today. You probably shouldn’t.”
He looks at me for a long second. Something shifts in his expression telling me he understands.
“All right.”
We hear the gym doorbell from the office. Victor stands up. Pulls his jacket on.
For a second, in the way he sets his shoulders, I see the man I met at Purgatory a year ago—the king of his own corner of the world. The fighter. The one who walks into rooms knowing he doesn’t have to apologize.
The leak didn’t kill him. It just made him have to find that man again.
We walk out together.
Reese is in the lobby talking to Marco. Mid-forties, athletic in a way that suggests a serious past in some sport—probably basketball, by the height—wearing a charcoal blazer over a Guardian Athletic t-shirt that costs as much as the blazer. Dark hair, short, no makeup, two small studs in one ear. They turn when Victor walks in.
“Mr. Kaine.”
“Reese.” Victor extends his hand. “Good of you to come down.”
“My pleasure. Theo, hi.” A nod my way. Reese has the kind of warmth that doesn’t ask permission to be warm—confident, not perform. “Conference room?”
“Office is fine.”
We walk back. Reese’s eyes are taking in the gym as we go—the mats, the cage, the rack of speed bags, the kid in the corner working a heavy bag with the concentration of someone who’s twelve months from a serious career. Reese clocks all of it without slowing.
In the office, we sit. Reese sets a leather portfolio on the desk and doesn’t open it.
“I’ll save you the deck,” they say. “Guardian wants to put our entire incoming season behind your gym. Full equipment line—gloves, wraps, mats, apparel, the whole fit-out. A six-figure marketing campaign with you and your fighters at the center of it. National. We pay for everything; you wear it and train in it. We launch fall. The collection becomes your gym, and your gym becomes the public face of the line.”
Victor doesn’t react. I watch him not react. The man who walked into a conference room two days ago with a folder of cashflow projections and watched a banker not open it is sitting across a desk from the largest LGBTQ-owned sportswear company in the country, and they are pitching him.
Reese leans forward slightly.
“I want to say something off-script before we get to the numbers, Mr. Kaine. We’ve had our eye on you for years. Long before what happened this week. Our CEO watched your last professional fight on tape after his second knee surgery and talked about it to the whole executive team for a month. We’ve been waiting for someone like you to be in a position to behonest about who he is. We didn’t think we’d live to see it happen the way it happened. But here we are.”
Reese pauses, allowing that to sit.
“We’re not interested in saving you. You don’t need saving. We’re interested in being on the right side of the next ten years of this sport. That’s what we’re here for.”
Victor’s hand tightens on the arm of his chair. He doesn’t speak.
I do. “What’s the timeline?”
Reese turns smoothly to the numbers. They were never going to make Victor speak first; they read the room within ten seconds of walking in.
The negotiation goes for forty minutes. I run point on the clauses. Victor jumps in twice, both times on the fighter-protection language. Reese flexes on both points without flinching. Their lawyers already drafted the protections we’d been about to ask for.
When they leave, they shake Victor’s hand for a full five seconds. He keeps eye contact through it.
“Take a week,” Reese says. “Read the deck. Call our counsel. Don’t sign anything you don’t fully understand.”
“I’ll be in touch.”
The door closes behind them.
For a long moment, Victor doesn’t move. Then he turns to me, and his face does something I’ve never seen before.
