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“Shut up.”

“You know exactly who he is.”

I dropped my hand. It hung at my side, swollen and shaking, and I stared at it as if it belonged to someone else.

This was the man. This was the thing my father had put his black card on the table to warn a stranger about. This was what I looked like when I was alone, with no one to stop me: a boy standing over a kneeling man in a cage, who’d let himself be hit because he’d looked at me and felt sorry.

I felt sick.

“I’m sorry,” I said. My voice was rough. “Ozzy, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not.”

“It’s ten grand. It’s fine.” He got up, groaning, with a hand on the rope, and put a heavy glove on my shoulder. “But listen, Lex. I’ve known you seven years. I’ve watched you come in here angry, and I’ve watched you go out angrier. It never helped. It’s never gonna. You want to stop hurting? Stop hurting somebody else. “

I laughed. It cracked in the middle.

“That’s the worst advice I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s not advice. It’s a fact.” He shrugged. “Go home. Call whoever it is. Yell at ‘em. Cry. Do the thing with words.”

“I don’t know how to do the thing with words.”

“Then learn.” He gave me a nudge. “Go on. I’ll get my money from Vic.”

I climbed out of the ring. I put on my shirt and my hoodie with hands that would not stop shaking. The crowd parted as I passed, muttering, disappointed. I went up the stairs two at a time. I needed air. I needed it more than I’d ever needed anything.

The night outside was cold and clean.

I stood in the gravel lot behind the warehouse with my back against the wall and my head tipped up, and let the cold hit my face. There were a million stars and a thin new moon, and somewhere a train. I breathed in and out, in and out, the way he’d taught me.

Call him, said a voice in my head.

He said don’t.

Call him anyway.

He said trust me. Wait.

And how long are you going to wait, Lex? Until you’re thirty, or forty? Until you’re a man standing over another kneeling man in another ring?

I took out my phone. I turned it on.

The screen flared. It took a moment to find a signal, and then, all at once, it lit up with notifications, text after text stacked one on top of another, from Jason and from my mother and from an unknown number and from a name I’d stopped believing I’d see again.

ICE PRINCE: Lex.

ICE PRINCE: Lex, where are you?

ICE PRINCE: Please.

ICE PRINCE: Please answer.

The last one had been sent nineteen minutes ago.

I stood there for a long moment, staring at it.