Chapter 38: *

Emery's POV

He scrolled down.

I was watching the screen because it was easier than watching him, and also because the profiles were genuinely interesting — women I recognized from the regional circuit, women I'd watched fight from the stands in the years before Easthaven, women whose records I'd memorized the way some people memorize song lyrics. I'd had a lot of time to follow the circuit from the outside. I'd gotten good at it.

Then he scrolled past the mid-tier rankings. Past the qualifier results. Past the regional standings.

The bottom of the screen.

One entry, listed separately from everything else. No fighter profile. No headshot. Just a venue photograph — the Ironridge main arena, shot from the back of the empty hall. Every light on. The ring lit up at the center like something waiting.

Ironridge Women's Championship — Main Card.

I stopped breathing for a second.

Not dramatically. Just — the air went somewhere else for a moment, and then came back.

I knew that venue. I'd watched footage of it on my phone at two in the morning in Easthaven when I couldn't sleep, when the pack house was quiet and Keaton was in the next room and I needed to remember that the world outside those walls still existed and still had things in it worth wanting. That arena. Those lights. The particular sound — I'd read descriptions of it, interviews with fighters who'd been on that main card — the particular sound the crowd made when the walkout music hit.

My grandfather had described something like it. Not Ironridge specifically — a different league, a different decade — but the same category of moment. He'd told me about it once, sitting on his porch, squinting into the afternoon sun: the moment you walk out and the lights hit you and you understand, for the first time, exactly how big the thing you've been working toward actually is.

He'd won that night. I'd made him tell me about it so many times I could recite it in order.

"Emery."

I pulled my eyes off the screen.

Logan was looking at me. Not at the screen — at me. He'd been watching whatever had just happened on my face, and he didn't look away when I caught him doing it.

"Sorry," I said. "What did you ask?"

"I didn't ask anything." A pause. "You know what that event is."

It wasn't a question.

"Yes," I said.

"And?"

I looked back at the screen. The empty arena. All those lights for nobody.

"It's the main card," I said. "Women's division."

"No omega has ever been on it."

"I know."

He let that sit between us for a moment. Then: "The next championship cycle runs sixteen months out. Main card slots for the women's division haven't been assigned yet." He leaned back in his chair. "If your numbers come in where I think they might, there's a conversation to be had about what comes after."

I turned to look at him.

He was watching the screen. Not me — the screen, now, like he was reading something. Casual. Like he hadn't just said what he'd said.

"That's not a promise," he added.

"I know."

"The field will have fighters with longer active records. More recent fight history. Established rankings."

"I know that too."

"So." He picked up his coffee. "Is that a problem?"

I looked at the arena photograph. The empty ring. The lights on for no one yet.

My grandfather had a photograph on his wall — the only one he'd ever framed from his fighting years. Not a victory shot. Not a trophy. Just him in the locker room before the walkout, sitting on a bench, wrapping his hands, looking at nothing in particular. He'd told me once that it was the last moment he'd felt genuinely afraid, and that he'd kept it because he wanted to remember that the fear had been worth walking through.

"No," I said. "It's not a problem."

Logan looked at me then. One of his assessments — brief, thorough, the kind that made you feel like your whole file was being cross-referenced in real time.

Whatever he found, he kept it to himself.

I didn't sleep.

Not because I couldn't — the bed was still good, the room was still quiet — but because there were things I needed to look at and I didn't want to wait. I pulled up everything I'd saved in the years before Easthaven: training footage, sparring analysis, the technical breakdowns my old coach had sent after every fight with his notes in the margins.

I went through it for three hours.

What I found was: I had been good. Not great yet — there were gaps, there had always been gaps, I knew exactly where they were — but good in a real and documentable way. There were things in those files that could be built on. Things that hadn't gone away just because I'd stopped using them.

My grandfather's voice, which I heard sometimes when I was very tired or very focused: ambition is fine. Wanting the big lights is fine. But whatever level you're fighting at — whatever the stakes, whatever the crowd — the first thing you owe every opponent and yourself is care. You don't get to be reckless with something that matters just because you want it badly enough.

I closed the laptop around three in the morning.

I lay back and looked at the ceiling and let myself, for the first time in a long time, want something without immediately finding a reason to scale it back.

The lights in that arena had been on for no one.

Not yet.