The building had a plaque by the door listing Cruz’s company between a firm of accountants and Morales & Sons Legal Consulting. Mia checked the time on her phone. Nine minutes early. She preferred it that way. Better to be waiting for Cruz than have him waiting for her.
The elevator smelled like lemon cleaner failing to cover something older, cigarette smoke maybe, baked into the carpet years ago. She rode up alone and watched the numbers light one at a time.
The reception area on the second floor was empty with no one behind the pale gray desk. A screen mounted near the ceiling played fight highlights, someone’s knee finding someone else’s liver in complete silence.
Mia sat on the black leather bench across from the desk and looked around.
There was a camera above the water dispenser, angled down at the seating. To the left of the desk, a door with keypad and recessed hinges. It wasn’t the kind of door you wandered through by accident.
Behind the reception desk, the wall was covered in glossy posters and framed photographs. In one, Cruz shook hands with a fighter Mia recognized from a title card a couple of years back. In another, he stood next to a man in a suit with an official-looking lanyard around his neck. Commission, maybe. Someone important, anyway.
Nine minutes came and went. Then eleven. Then fourteen.
Mia didn’t check her phone or shift in her seat. If Cruz wanted to keep her waiting, she wasn’t going to let him see that it bothered her.
A loud click broke the silence, and the locked door swung open. Cruz stepped through, adjusting his cuff, unhurried, like a meeting had run long.
“Mia. Sorry to keep you.” He didn’t sound sorry. “Come on back.”
He held the door for her. “Appreciate the promptness.”
His office was cooler than reception. The dark wood desk was almost bare. Just a desk lamp and closed laptop. Photographs and plaques covered the wall to the side, with a low cabinet beneath them holding glasses and a jug of water. Nearby, an unmarked door sat slightly open onto a dark corridor, the green glow of an EXIT sign visible at the far end.
“Water?”
“No.”
“Suit yourself.” He poured one for himself, added ice from a small bucket, and carried it around to sit behind the desk.
“You know what I’ve done for you,” he said once he’d settled. “Legitimate cards. A real contract. Sponsorship talks starting soon if Saturday goes the way it should. I took you out of parking lots and cash envelopes, Mia. I want you to sit there and actually hold that for a second before we talk about anything else.”
“I remember how I got here.”
Cruz took a slow drink of water. “Good.” He set the glass down. “Then you’ll understand this isn’t a favor. Saturday needs to end in the second round.”
Mia frowned. “I can’t guarantee when I finish her.”
Cruz held her gaze for a moment. “You misunderstand.”
He leaned back slightly.
“Carla takes it in round two. Clean finish.”
“You mean I lose.”
“I mean you let her take it.”
“No.”
He tilted his head, unbothered, like she’d told him she preferred a different restaurant. “There’s a significant number attached to this. Enough to make one loss very easy to live with.”
“No.”
“I haven’t said the number yet.”
“You don’t need to.” She kept her hands loose on her knees, her voice flat. She’d dealt with men who tried intimidation before. “I’m not for sale.”
His face tightened, then relaxed. “There are some powerful people with positions on this fight that you don’t say no to, Mia.”
She was on her feet before he could finish, palms flat on the desk.
“I’ll pull out of the fight. I’ll tell the commission why.”
“That won’t help you.” Cruz hadn’t moved. “The bets are already in. You pull out now, people start asking why. And the people behind that money don’t like questions.”
“I’ll go to the police.”
Cruz glanced toward the wall behind him.
Mia followed his eyes. A framed photograph showed Cruz beside the city’s police chief, both smiling for the camera, Cruz’s hand resting easily on the man’s shoulder.
“You can,” Cruz said. “But I wouldn’t expect much help.”
Mia looked back at him. “I’m still not doing it.”
Cruz lifted his glass and drained what was left. When he set it down, something in his expression had hardened.
He opened the top drawer and took out a photograph, holding it up between two fingers.
Her building. The entrance she walked through most nights half-asleep from training. The third-floor window, curtain half drawn the way Luis always left it. And Luis himself, mid-stride on the sidewalk, wearing the jacket she’d watched him put on that morning, a timestamp burned into the corner in small white digits.
“Old building,” Cruz said, like he was discussing renovation costs. “Gas lines from the sixties, most likely. Nobody’s updated them because nobody’s made anybody update them. Smoke moves fast through shared hallways in a building like that. Faster than a fire department fighting traffic across town.”
Mia stared at the photograph.
He wasn’t just threatening her anymore.
Her hands tightened against the desk. Every instinct told her to reach across it and throttle him.
Cruz saw it. “Whatever you’re thinking of doing won’t change what happens after you leave this room.”
That stopped her.
Cruz clearly had friends in high places. If she accused him of blackmail, it would be her word against his, and no one was going to believe her. She needed proof.
Cruz stood and placed the photograph on the desk in front of her, then picked up his glass and started toward the cabinet.
“What’s it gonna be, Mia?”
Mia looked down at Luis in the photograph, then at the phone in her hand.
Cruz took his time topping up his water, his back to her, letting the silence work on her.
She took the opportunity and angled her phone toward the photograph, snapped a picture, and lowered it again before he turned back.
“Fight normally in the first round,” Cruz said. “Let Carla take the second. There’ll be a moment. You’ll know it when it comes, and you stay down. You don’t talk to anyone about this.”
He picked up the photograph and returned it to the drawer, closing it with a small, precise click.
“You lose one fight,” he said. “Everyone goes home.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then people who never asked for any of this pay for it.”
Mia put her phone in her pocket and straightened away from the desk.
“We’re done here,” Cruz said, reaching for his water.
***
Mia paused on the sidewalk and checked the street without making it obvious. She didn’t see anything, but she wasn’t taking chances.
She cut into a shop and browsed a rack of phone cases she had no interest in, then left through the rear exit onto a side street that doglegged back toward the main road.
She kept walking, working through her options.
Police. Cruz had that photograph and she had no way of knowing how far that relationship reached.
She had no reason to trust the commission either.
Then there was the media. It would be easy to talk to them, but the second Cruz saw the story, he could deny everything and still go after Luis.
The last option she could think of was fleeing with Luis. But there were just four days until the fight. Cruz was watching the apartment and leaving suddenly could bring his people down on them faster.
Every option put Luis in the path.
She stopped at the mouth of an alley to call him, the phone pressed hard against her ear.
Hey,” Luis said. A low mechanical hum ran under his voice, a bus maybe, or the hardware store fan that never worked right. “You done? How’d it go?”
“Where are you?”
“Leaving the shop now. Picking up that washer thing for the tap.” The line went quiet. “You okay?”
“Go straight home.”
“Mia.” His voice changed, the easy edge dropping away. “What happened?”
“We’ll talk when I get there.”
“You’re scaring me a little.”
“I know.” She unclenched her jaw before answering. “Just go home, Luis.”
She hung up.
***
She checked the hallway before unlocking the apartment door, then stepped inside and locked it behind her.
Luis was in the kitchen, a dish towel over one shoulder.
Mia crossed to the living room window before she’d even taken off her jacket. She pulled the curtain aside just enough to look down the street, then drew it fully closed.
“What is it, Mia,” Luis said.
“Nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.” He crossed the room and stopped a few feet from her, close enough that she could smell dish soap on his hands. “What did Cruz want?”
“The fight. Like I said.”
“You said that this morning too, but something’s changed.” He paused. “Mia. Look at me.”
She did.
“He knows where we live,” she said. The words came out level, almost bored. “He’s had someone watching the building. He’s made threats.”
Luis went still. “Threats how?”
She didn’t tell him about the photograph. Not yet. She knew what would happen. His hands in fists, keys in his palm, heading for Cruz’s office. She wasn’t managing that on top of this.
“He wants me to lose Saturday. Second round. There’s people with money on it, officials who’d rather it went a certain way.” She kept her voice level. “If I don’t, something happens to this building. To us.”
Luis’s jaw worked. “So we call the police.”
“Cruz knows the police chief. I don’t know how close they are, but I’m not betting your life on finding out.”
“Then we leave. Tonight. We don’t even pack. We just go.”
“If he’s watching, sudden movement is the worst thing we could do.”
“So you just agree?” Luis kept his voice low. “You let someone hit you until the ref stops it, and that solves the problem?”
“I can lose one fight, Luis. I’ve survived worse than that. I can’t let something happen to you.”
“And what happens after Saturday? You think Cruz just leaves us alone?”
He reached for her hand, and she let him take it even though some old instinct wanted to pull away from being touched right now.
“What choice do I have?”
Luis looked at her like he was deciding whether to keep pushing or let it go before it cost them both something tonight.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Okay. But we do this together from here.”
“Okay.”
She took out her phone and opened the photograph she had snapped in Cruz’s office. Luis leaned closer, his expression tightening when he saw himself outside the building.
“There’s something else,” Mia said. “A black SUV followed me home from the gym yesterday. Tinted windows. It kept its distance through several turns, then disappeared near the market.”
“You’re telling me now?”
“I wanted it to be nothing.”
Luis glanced toward the window.
“If it comes back, don’t stand there looking at it,” Mia said. “Stay inside. Tell me the second you see it.”
Luis nodded.
They stayed in the kitchen and worked through a plan. Luis would keep his phone charged and on him. If Mia couldn’t reach him, she’d call Mrs. Pardo two floors up. Her kitchen window looked straight down onto the entrance. They’d keep a small bag packed and ready in case they needed to get out quickly.
Later, with Luis quiet over the dishes and a television bleeding through from next door, Mia sat on the couch and opened the laptop. She pulled up every clip of Carla Reyes she could find.
She watched Carla shoot for the legs, low and fast, her weight already forward before her lead foot planted. From there, Carla favored a cross-body pin that could pass for real trouble to anyone who didn’t know better. Most of her early-round finishes came from exactly there.
She’d never studied tape like this before, and it turned her stomach in a way punches never had. With every other opponent, she’d watched for the gap, the tell, the half second when a hand dropped or a hip turned wrong. This time, she wasn’t looking for a way to win. She was looking for a way to disappear into the fight, to make it look like she couldn’t get out.
She thought about the old rooms. Concrete floors, no rules, a promoter counting a stack of bills in the corner while somebody got beaten bloody for a fraction of what the room was making. She’d told herself that she was never going back.
Luis sat beside her. “We’re leaving after. Doesn’t matter how it goes Saturday. We go somewhere small, maybe near water. You always loved the ocean.”
She let her head rest against his shoulder.
“Promise me something,” he said.
“Depends what it is.”
“Promise me you’ll stay down when it happens. In the cage. I know what humiliation does to you. I’ve watched you refuse to let something go for a week over an argument that didn’t matter.” His thumb moved once across the old pale scar on her knuckles.
“I’ll stay down.”
“Say it like you mean it.”
“I mean it, Luis.”