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I drop my hand. I didn’t know I was doing it.
Victor sits on an overturned bucket outside the sauna with a clipboard on his knee and a stopwatch around his neck. He reads me the number like a verdict. “One seventy-one point four. You’ve got sixty-six minutes before the scale.”
“I’ve made weight on less.”
“You’ve made weight on more sense, too.” He taps his pen against the board. “Drink nothing. Spit if you have to. Stay in your head.”
“Boss.”
“Your head, Micah. Not wherever it’s been wandering.”
I sit back in the heat and let the sweat come.
The arena hums like a hive.
Eleven thousand seats and a good third of them filled for a weigh-in, fans in team shirts, kids on shoulders, a woman near the rail holding a poster of my face with a mustache drawn on it. She waves it at me. I wave back. The bass from the PA thumps through the stage floor and up my shins.
Victor keeps one palm flat on my back as we move through the tunnel. Cruz and Jonah flank us. Theo walks ahead, mouthing something to a production assistant, hair perfect, phone already up.
The scale sits center stage. Black platform, digital readout, a backdrop with both our names in chrome letters, mine on the left, his on the right. A commission official in a gray polo waits beside it with a clipboard.
“Rivera.” He points to a curtained partition. “Strip to your shorts, please.”
I do it behind the curtain. Sweatpants, shirt, socks. Just the black compression shorts and the medal on my chain, cold on my sternum. I’ve done this dozens of times. Stood half naked in front of strangers, sucked in my gut for cameras, let a stranger with a clipboard read my body like a receipt.
It shouldn’t feel different.
I step onto the platform. The crowd roars. The number flashes green.
“One seventy, even.”
More noise. Victor pumps a fist off to the side, and I let myself grin for the lenses, flex once because Theo mouthed flex at me, and step off.
“Butler,” the official calls.
I turn.
Great. This is fine. Totally fine.
He walks out from behind the curtain, and the arena goes to static in my ears.
Gold. That’s the only word I’ve got. Skin the color of honey held up to a lamp, stretched over a body that looks like someone drew it and then got carried away. Shoulders that need their own zip code. A chest with hard, clean lines, abs stacked in neat rows down to a waistband riding low on hips that shouldn’t be legal. A thin white scar curves under his left pec. Dark hair pushed back. And those eyes, burning amber under the stage lights, already locked on me.
My mouth goes dry as the desert.
He steps onto the scale. The number flashes.
“One seventy, even.”
The crowd loses its mind. Zane doesn’t blink.
He steps down, and instead of turning to the cameras like a normal person, he looks at me.
His gaze drags down my chest. Slow. Every inch of the sleeve inked down my arm, the line of my stomach, the thin band of black fabric that covers almost nothing. He isn’t sneaky about it. He doesn’t glance away when the official coughs. He looks at me like he’s deciding where to start.
Heat follows his eyes down my body like a lit fuse.
I hold still. Somewhere behind me, a photographer whispers, “Holy hell,” into his camera.
