The second fight paid two hundred.The third paid two hundred and fifty, because the man Riker put down was apparently someone people had been paying to watch win for the better part of a year, and Hector understood instinctively that an upset had its own market value.By the end of the second week Riker had six hundred and eighty dollars, a bruised rib that didn't affect his breathing, and a small but unmistakable reputation in the three-block radius around Hector's.He filed the court paperwork on a Tuesday morning, standing at a laminate counter in the family services building while a woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain processed his forms with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had processed ten thousand identical forms and expected to process ten thousand more."Address?" she asked without looking up.He gave her the halfway house.She typed it. "Employment?"A pause that lasted exactly one second."Self-employed," Riker said.She typed that too without comment, whi

He saw the man for the first time in daylight.Riker was three blocks from the halfway house on a Saturday morning, coming back from the corner store with coffee and a bandage roll for his eyebrow, when he noticed him — standing at the far end of the block with his hands in the pockets of a charcoal coat, watching the street with the particular stillness Riker had catalogued in Hector's left corner two nights before.Same quality of motionlessness. Same sense of a man who had chosen his position deliberately and would remain in it until he decided otherwise.Riker didn't break stride.He walked the length of the block, turned into the halfway house entrance, took the stairs to the third floor, set the coffee on the windowsill, and looked down at the street below.The man was still there.Not hiding. Not pretending to check a phone or study a storefront. Simply present — in the open, in daylight, making no effort whatsoever to be invisible.Which meant he didn't need to be.Riker drank

Riker moved first.Not because he was impatient — because he understood instinctively that against a man like Creed, waiting was a form of surrender. Creed would read hesitation the way Riker read rooms, and anything Creed read in the first ten seconds would be used for the rest of whatever this was.So he moved.Straight line. Controlled aggression. The same forward pressure that had ended eleven fights in three weeks.Creed wasn't there.Not a step back — sideways, fractionally, with a shoulder rotation so minimal it barely registered as movement, and Riker's lead hand found nothing but air. The momentum he'd committed to — which had always been an asset, which opponents had always absorbed badly — passed through empty space and left him a half-beat exposed on his right.Creed didn't take it.He reset. Stood at the same distance as before. Waited.Riker recalibrated.Okay.The second exchange lasted longer.Riker slowed his approach — not hesitation, adjustment — and tested Creed's

The court date landed on a Thursday.Riker wore the best clothes he owned — dark trousers, a collared shirt he'd pressed the night before using the iron he'd borrowed from Torres without explanation, a jacket that fit correctly across the shoulders which was the only measurement that mattered to him. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror above the Harwick facility and made the assessment a fighter made before walking into any room — not vanity, preparation. Understanding how he would be read before he opened his mouth.He looked like a man trying hard.That was accurate. He hoped it was enough.The family court building was downtown — gray stone, high ceilings, the particular institutional weight of a place designed to remind everyone inside it that the proceedings here had consequences. Riker arrived forty minutes early and sat in the corridor outside the courtroom on a wooden bench that matched the one in the Harwick facility and thought about that briefly.His lawyer's name w

The Sanctioned League facility occupied what had once been a freight depot in the north district — three stories of brick and steel repurposed so thoroughly that only the bones remained recognizable. Riker stepped out of the car Creed had arranged and stood for a moment taking in the scale of it.Nothing marked the building from the street. But the parking area behind it held forty vehicles, several of them the kind of quiet, expensive machinery that didn't announce its price so much as assume everyone already knew it."Hector's could fit in the lobby," Riker said."Hector's could fit in the coat check," Creed said, and walked toward the entrance without waiting to see if the joke landed.Inside, the transformation was complete.A proper arena occupied the depot's central floor — a sunken combat circle ringed by tiered seating that could hold perhaps three hundred people, filling now with a crowd that carried itself with an entirely different register than Hector's Thursday regulars.