The Fighter didn't respond to this. He couldn't.
He sat on the edge of the salon chair, his large frame looking wrong against it the way a piece of heavy machinery looks wrong in a living room — too much weight, too much history, designed for an entirely different kind of impact. His hands were in his lap. Calloused from years of hitting things that were solid and real and that hit back honestly. They were shaking almost imperceptibly, and he was focusing on keeping them still the way you focus on a small, manageable problem when the large ones have become unthinkable.
He wasn't thinking about Damon Albarn.
He was thinking about the phrase carefully managed fiction. He was thinking about how Delaney Schulz had taken a fact — a plain, unhidden, never-once-denied fact — and repackaged it as a confession. Elena was adopted. She had always been adopted. There was no version of their lives in which this had been a secret, no version in which they had sat down together and decided to deceive anyone. It was simply the shape of their family, the way some families are shaped by blood and some are shaped by circumstance and a caseworker and a diesel-smelling bus and a kid who didn't move his arm for forty minutes so his new sister wouldn't wake up.
Delaney had looked at all of that and called it a lie.
And the worst part — the part that was making his hands shake — was that it was working. He had seen the comments. He had seen the way the story was moving. People weren't reading it and thinking this is a family that was always open about their history. They were reading it and thinking what else haven't they told us. Delaney hadn't exposed a secret. She had created the impression of one, and that was somehow so much more sophisticated and so much harder to fight, because you couldn't disprove a feeling.
Beside him, Elena was a different world entirely.
She was leaning into the light from the tablet, her face glowing, her whole body animated with the particular delight she brought to discoveries — that quality she had of encountering something new and immediately making it hers. The Fighter watched her from a long distance. He was in the room. He was also somewhere unreachable.
Raul glanced over her shoulder, his expression easy, almost bored.
Elena zoomed in on the photograph. Heavy-lidded eyes. The beaded necklace. That particular quality of someone who had been extraordinarily beautiful and knew it without it having ruined him.
The Fighter looked at them. Their voices reached him the way voices reach you underwater — present, shaped correctly, stripped of something essential.
Elena didn't blink. She traced the line of the singer's jaw on the glass with one fingertip, unhurried, a mischievous warmth moving into her voice.
Raul laughed — short and genuine, shaking his head at her.
The Fighter looked down at his own hands.
Daddy. The word landed in the wrong place entirely. He thought about their actual father — not the biological question Delaney had dressed up as a scandal, but the man who had been their father in the ways that counted, the ordinary daily ways that didn't photograph well and didn't make for clean narrative hooks. He thought about the article sitting on his phone like something radioactive. The Bloodless King. Eight hundred words built on the scaffolding of a fact everyone already knew, engineered to make the knowing itself look suspicious.
Elena had been adopted. Elena knew she had been adopted. She had known since she was old enough to understand what the word meant, and the conversation had happened at a kitchen table with bad lighting and grocery store cookies, and it had not been dramatic, because it had not needed to be dramatic, because it was simply true.
Delaney Schulz had taken that kitchen table conversation and turned it into evidence.
He kept his mouth shut. Elena was still talking — something about cheekbones, about how Raul had no taste, about the fundamental injustice of the nineties being over — and her voice was the sound of someone who hadn't seen the article yet, or had seen it and decided it wasn't worth the interruption of a good photograph. He didn't know which. He didn't know how to ask. He didn't know how to say someone has decided that the realest thing about us is a lie without making it land in her chest the way it had landed in his.
He was becoming the Bloodless King.
Not because Delaney had written it. But because she had found the one thing he didn't know how to fight — not a secret, not a shame, not something he could disprove or confront or take apart with his hands. Just a reframe. Just eight hundred words that had taken the plainest truth of his life and made it look, to enough people, like the oldest trick in the book.
And he was sitting in a salon chair, shaking, while his sister laughed.
Elena looked up from the glowing screen, her face still flushed with the lighthearted buzz of her discovery. She noticed the Fighter's stillness; how he sat like a statue carved from grief, his eyes fixed on a spot on the floor that didn't exist.
To her, he was just her big brother being "The Grumpy King." She didn't see the structural collapse happening inside his mind; she only saw a mood she needed to lift, like she had a thousand times when they were kids.
She nudged his arm with her elbow, her smile wide and teasing.
The Fighter didn't move. Her touch felt like a hot iron against his skin. Every word she said; about them looking alike, about being family, felt like a mockery of the truth he'd just read in those intercepted files.
She reached out, playfully flicking the collar of his shirt, trying to spark a reaction; any reaction.
The silence that followed was deafening. Elena froze, her hand still hovering near his neck. She'd intended it as a joke — a play on his fighting moniker, a way to reclaim the name the media was using against him. But the word Bloodless hung in the air like a guillotine.
The Fighter finally looked at her. His eyes weren't angry; they were vacant. It was the look of a man who had already left the room, leaving only a shell behind.
It was the only word he could manage. His voice was so thin it barely carried the weight of the air. Elena's smile faltered, then vanished. She pulled her hand back as if she'd been burned. She looked at Raul, confused, seeking a cue on how to handle this, but Raul was already looking away, scrolling through his own phone with a practiced indifference that made the Fighter feel even more invisible.
The chair screeched against the floor, a harsh, jagged sound that shattered the salon's curated peace.
He walked away without looking at either of them, his shoulders hunched as if he were expecting a blow from behind. He didn't see the hurt in Elena's eyes, and he didn't see the way Raul finally looked up, his expression unreadable and cold.
Inside the Fighter's head, Delaney's voice from the "System Admin" email was on a loop:
He was forgetting. And the person he was becoming was someone he didn't recognize at all.