The descent was faster than the climb. Each heavy footfall on the cracked stone steps echoed like a countdown. Raul didn't look at his phone. He didn't need to. He could feel the heat radiating off the man beside him—a cold, vibrating panic that smelled like sweat and adrenaline.
To the world, the man behind Raul was a champion, a titan, a million-dollar asset. But to Raul, watching him stumble slightly on the fourth-floor landing, he was just a kid from the same kind of wreckage Raul had grown up in.
How did I get here?
The question was a constant, low-frequency hum in Raul's mind. He wasn't supposed to be in penthouse suites or cageside in Vegas. He was a product of a two-room flat and the bitter scent of industrial brine. He was the son of a man who had been crushed by a machine because a line manager didn't want to lose twenty minutes of productivity.
He was a punk. Not because of a leather jacket or a playlist, but because he had looked at the system that killed his father and decided he would rather be the grit in the gears than the oil.
By the time they hit the third floor, the "Silent One" persona that people invented for him—the stoic bodyguard the fans loved to speculate about—was sloughing off. He didn't have a "persona" for the cameras; he didn't care enough about the lenses to put one on. The silence, the crossed arms, the refusal to perform—that wasn't a mask. It was a boundary. It was the same jagged defiance he'd carried since he was sixteen.
Raul's mother had worked herself to the bone in that conserverie, her hands stained by the labor that barely kept them fed. She had taught him that the world doesn't give you anything; it only takes until you have nothing left to trade.
When she finally told him about the "accident" at sixteen, Raul hadn't cried. He had walked out of the apartment and spent the night staring at the factory lights, realizing that for people like them, "safety" was a luxury and "justice" was a stupid myth.
He saw the same machinery at work now. The media wasn't reporting on Elena; they were harvesting her. They were turning a girl's trauma into a viral "incident" to drive clicks, and they were ready to discard the Fighter the moment his brand became "toxic." To Raul, this wasn't a tragedy to be mourned—it was a system to be defied. He didn't need a persona for the cameras because he didn't recognize their authority to judge him. His silence wasn't a mask; it was a refusal to participate in a game where the rules were rigged against his kind. He was a punk in the purest sense: he had accepted that the world was a predator, and he had decided to be the bone that stuck in its throat.
They reached the ground floor. The elevator was still dead, a "HORS SERVICE" sign taped to its rusted doors like a middle finger to the residents.
Raul pushed open the heavy front door and stepped out into the crisp Créteil air. The streetlights were flickering, casting long, jagged shadows across the pavement. The Fighter stopped beside him, his breath coming in ragged hitches, his eyes fixed on the screen of his phone as if the headlines were physical wounds.