Page 96 of Main Event

Round twelve.

There is a moment in round eleven I don’t tell Andi about afterward.

Vega lands a right hand flush in the forty-fifth second. The kind that arrives before you’ve decided whether to slip it. Not the hardest shot I’ve ever taken—not close—but the timing is wrong, and the angle is worse, and for one full second I’m somewhere between this ring and the gas station parking lot. Not confusion. The body’s memory of impact. The same instinct that put two men on the ground that night fires immediately: close the distance, load the right hand, end this now.

I don’t.

I move. I reset. I breathe through it and make myself wait, which is the single hardest thing I have ever done in a boxing ring, because every cell in my body wants to go forward. Reyes has spent twelve weeks building a different answer into my muscle memory, and for one long second, I don’t know which one will win.

Patience wins.

Vega follows up, throwing two more, expecting me to come forward the way brawlers come forward when they’re hurt—wide, committed, giving away the chin. I don’t give him that. I give him nothing. And in the space of Vega realizing I’m not coming, he overcommits to a third shot that isn’t there, and I cut the angle, and I find the left hook to the body that Reyes spent six weeks building into me, and Vega covers and steps back for the second time in the fight.

I don’t celebrate. I don’t feel it yet. I just move to the next position and wait for whatever comes next.

That’s the moment. That’s what Reyes has been building. Not the win. The choice, made in real time, under actual pressure, against every instinct I was born with.

Bell.

Mack is in my corner before I’ve fully turned. He puts both hands on the sides of my face, tilts my head, and checks my eye. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. He was watching from the corner when Vega landed that right hand, and he was watching when I chose not to brawl my way out of it, and he saw what that choice cost me, and he knows what it means that I made it anyway.

He hands me water. He steps back. He looks at me.

“One more,” he says.

I know the story is filed because Andi is in the second row, and I know her face. Something shifted in it between rounds eleven and twelve—a settling, a weight releasing, the expression of someone who just received confirmation of something they’ve been working toward for months.

The story is filed.

I look at Vega across the ring.

Make him take the fight he doesn’t want to have.

The bell will ring any second now, but Reyes stands like a statue in front of me. I meet his gaze as he gives me his final instruction.

“Finish it.”

I nod, certainty locked in my core. Reyes steps out of the ring at the exact moment the bell rings.

Vega comes forward for the last time. He’s giving me everything—he has to. I let him work for thirty seconds, take his measure, and understand the desperation in his combinations. Then I cut the angle and find the right hand.

It lands.

Vega doesn’t go down—he’s not built to go down; he’s built to survive—but the crowd knows. I know. The last two minutes of the round are the clearest I’ve ever been in the ring. Every shot I throw has a reason. Every move has a purpose. Reyes’s voice in my head: sharp.

This is what sharp feels like.

Finish it.

Bell.

The arena is on its feet.

ANDI

The decision takes four minutes.

Four minutes that don’t move.