Chapter 6 The Hottest Iron

Olivia's POV

"You never told me what he was doing." Ethan looked at me, hurt raw in his eyes.

"There wasn't anything useful you could have done about it." I forced my voice to stay light.

"That's not—" He stopped. Started again. "That's not the point."

"Ethan."

"You've been dealing with that by yourself for how long?"

My older brother stood on a Brooklyn sidewalk with my work bag in his hand, hurt by the realization that he'd missed something he believed he should have caught.

"It's handled," I said. "I handled it."

He didn't say anything. He started walking again, slower than before, and I matched his pace. The apartment building came into view two blocks out — the brick exterior, the slightly uneven awning, the particular character of a building that had been standing long enough to develop personality.

At the subway entrance Ethan stopped and looked up at it. "Forty minutes, door to door," he said. "From here to the club."

"It's fine."

"And that building — " He frowned at the facade. "The front door—"

"The rent is what I can afford."

"How much is that?"

"Less than you could help me cover."

He went quiet, doing math he didn't like. When he spoke again, his voice was lower. "I haven't been paying attention."

It wasn't a question or an excuse. Just a statement, delivered with the flatness of someone saying a thing plainly because they've decided they owe it to the other person.

I reached over and pushed his shoulder, once, lightly. "You signed a contract today. You got the advance. That's paying attention."

"You got me the advance."

"I know. You owe me dinner."

He let out a breath that was almost a laugh, and ducked his head, and pushed my bag back into my hands with the slightly awkward energy of someone who doesn't know what to do with gratitude. We stood there for a moment in the November cold, and it was almost comfortable.

"The front door lock," he said abruptly. "How long has it been broken?"

I blinked. "How do you know about the lock?"

"Last time I dropped you off. You used your knee to get it open." He looked at me with the expression of someone who has been sitting on a detail and has decided the time has come to surface it. "Olivia."

"Go train," I said, and turned toward the subway stairs. "The lock is not your problem."

I heard him behind me: "I'm going to fix it."

I didn't tell him not to. That was probably answer enough.

I took the stairs down and didn't look back, but I could feel him standing at the top of the entrance for a few seconds longer than necessary before he turned and walked away. His footsteps, when they came, were heavier than usual.

The subway platform was loud and lit in the flat way of underground spaces, and I stood at the edge and looked at the dark mouth of the tunnel and thought about the check folded in my bag, and the consulting contract that wasn't signed yet but probably would be, and the thirty-seven days until my father's next medication installment.

One thing at a time.

The train came, and I got on it, and I let the motion of it carry me home.

In the morning, I got to the commercial floor of Titan Athletics at seven forty-five.

Fifteen minutes early. Deliberate. I'd ironed the suit the night before, a deep charcoal that I'd bought on sale eight months ago and saved for occasions that required me to look like I belonged somewhere before I'd earned the right to. The glasses were clean. The bag had everything: printed club overview, fighter profile summaries I'd assembled from public records and WBL database pulls, a legal pad, two pens.

The open-plan office behind the glass partition was empty when I pushed through the door.

Good.

I found the workstation assigned to me — corner, near the supply closet, the kind of placement that communicates exactly what someone thinks of you before you've opened your mouth. The desk surface was bare. Not just unoccupied. Bare, the way a space gets when no one has bothered to make it functional. No monitor stand, no cable organizer, not even a sticky note pad left behind by whoever had the desk before.

I sat down, unzipped the bag, and laid the printed materials across the surface in the order I'd use them.

The office filled over the next twenty minutes. I kept reading while registering the half-beat hesitations and the voices gathering near the coffee station.

"— heard Zach personally—"

"— Omega, though. You seen any of them last more than a season in this department?"

"Three months. She'll be out before Jace gives her a reason to—"

The last one got a muffled laugh.

My fingers pressed flat against the edge of the top sheet for exactly one second. Then I turned the page.

At nine o'clock, Fiona Marlowe appeared in the conference room doorway like she'd materialized there — no sound of footsteps, no warning. Dark gray suit, close-cropped hair, a posture that said she had been standing in doorways like this for long enough that it had stopped being a power move and started being just how she stood. I recognized her from yesterday's brief overlap in Zachary's office. She hadn't introduced herself then. She'd just looked at me.

She was still looking at me the same way now.

The meeting was efficient. Fiona ran through the club's structure — three weight divisions, the formal roster and developmental tier, the commercial team's operational scope — with the speed of someone reciting information they'd long since stopped needing to think about. No slides. No notes. Just precision.

I wrote fast and didn't ask questions I could answer myself later.

She moved to current fighter commercial status. The room had a different kind of quiet for this part — the attentive quiet of people who knew their livelihoods were being discussed.

When she reached the heavyweight division, she paused. One beat. Deliberate.

"Ryder Brooks. Reigning WBL light heavyweight world champion, now campaigning at heavyweight. Thirty-two and one, KO rate seventy-eight percent." She didn't look at the board. "He represents ninety percent of this club's commercial revenue. He's also the hottest piece of iron in the building right now, and I mean that in the way you don't want."

She moved on without elaborating.

I wrote hottest iron and drew a question mark beside it.

The fighter assignments came at the end of the meeting. I watched two of the senior agents shift in their seats when Fiona reached the allocation list — barely perceptible, but I'd been watching people's bodies tell the truth their faces refused to since I was about sixteen.

"Olivia Hayes." Fiona's eyes moved to mine. "Jace Foster. Middleweight, formal roster. Eight and one, six KOs."

The room paused for two seconds while everyone carefully avoided reacting.

Someone looked at their phone. Someone else straightened their papers. One person, at the far end of the table, pressed their lips together with an expression that was almost — not quite, but almost — a smile.

I wrote Jace Foster on my legal pad. Added his record. Capped the pen.

Fiona's gaze held on my face for two seconds before she moved on to the next name.

The meeting broke at nine forty. I was still gathering my notes when someone slowed beside my chair — a woman, maybe twenty-eight, the kind of face that defaults to cautious rather than hostile.

"Jace Foster." She said it quietly, not looking at me directly. "The last person on his file quit in three weeks."

She didn't wait for me to respond. She just moved on, folding back into the stream of people heading for the door.

In the hallway, a man I didn't know clocked me on his way past, the kind of side-eye that carries weight.

"Fiona put you on that one, you gotta ask yourself — is she doing you a favor, or is she doing herself one?" He kept walking. "Good luck figuring out which."

I didn't stop. I didn't look back. I pushed my glasses up with my thumb and kept walking.