(2021 – Three Months After the Indictment)
The electronic monitor was a jealous god. It beeped a soft, reproachful alarm if he ventured beyond the 100-foot radius of the loft's Wi-Fi extender they'd allowed him to install. Its presence was a constant, low-grade humiliation, a 24/7 reminder that the world saw him not as an artist or an athlete, but as a flight risk. It chafed against his ankle, a physical echo of the legal shackle that had replaced his championship belts.
The loft, once a symbol of ascension, had become a gilded cage. The view, which Thorne had scorned, was now a taunting panorama of a life moving on without him. He watched the seasons change over the Detroit River—the ice breaking up, the tentative green of spring appearing on the distant Canadian shore. Life flowed just beyond the electronic tether. He was a static exhibit.
His days developed a grim, prison-yard rhythm, minus the yard.
He woke at 5 AM, not to the alarm he set, but from a habit deeper than conscious thought. The first hour was for the body. The building's gym was his new Crucible. He couldn't spar. He couldn't hit pads with any real force—the risk of a parole violation for "aggressive behavior" was too high. So he remade his training. He ran in place on the treadmill, the monotonous thud of his feet a poor substitute for the feel of pavement. He lifted weights, methodically, building not explosive power but a dense, enduring strength. He shadowboxed in front of the mirrors, his movements slow, deliberate, analytical. He was no longer preparing for a fight; he was conducting an autopsy on his own style, searching for flaws he'd been too busy winning to see.
After the workout, the real sentence began: the monotony.
Vance and Priya had secured permission for him to use a laptop with monitored internet access for legal purposes. It became his portal to the dying embers of his old life. He'd watch boxing news, a form of masochism. Viktor Drozd had fought for and won the vacant WBA title, mauling a game but outmatched contender. The narrative was that Kyon had ducked him. Terence "Trigger" Monroe, his voice still slightly raspy from the damaged trachea, was on a media tour, claiming Kyon's "illegal funds" had bought an unfair advantage. The world was erasing him, rewriting his history as a prelude to a fraud conviction.
Hayes called every other day, his voice a manic mix of panic and dwindling hope. "We're working on a documentary angle! Your side of the story! It could sway public opinion before the trial!" Kyon would let him talk, then hang up. Hayes was a ghost from a buried past, clinging to a ship that had already sunk.
Lena was different. Her calls were short, factual, fierce. "Solano just bought a minority stake in the network that's broadcasting the Drozd-Ortiz fight. He's embedding himself in the narrative. We're counter-suing him for tortious interference and defamation. It's a long shot, but we need to hit back on every front." She never offered empty comfort. She was a general planning a siege from a doomed fortress. Kyon appreciated her clarity.
Alana. That was the hardest space to navigate. She hadn't left for New York. She'd dug in. She came over three times a week, a steadfast routine. She'd bring groceries, cook a meal, and they would sit in a silence that was no longer comfortable, but fraught with everything unsaid. She tried to pull him into her world, showing him sketches for a new series inspired by "confinement and reflected light." He'd nod, say they were good, but he couldn't connect. Her world was one of creation, of pushing boundaries. His was about surviving within them.
One evening, she found him standing at the window, not seeing the sunset, but tracking a cargo ship's slow progress down the river, a freedom he could chart but not touch.
"You're leaving," he said, not turning around.
She was silent for a moment. "My residency in Berlin came through. The one I applied for over a year ago. It's six months. They're giving me a studio, a stipend."
He nodded. It was the right thing. The necessary thing. "You should go."
"I don't want to leave you like this."
"This is what I am now, Alana. A man waiting for a trial. A problem to be managed. You can't paint over that."
"I'm not trying to paint over it! I'm trying to be here with it!"
He finally turned. The anguish on her face mirrored his own, but it was cleaner, less poisoned by guilt. "Don't you get it? Your being here… it's a spotlight on everything I've lost. On everything I can't give you. Every time you walk out that door to go to your studio, to your life, it's a fresh sentence. I need you to go so I can… learn the dimensions of this cell. Alone."
Tears spilled down her cheeks, but she didn't argue. She was an artist. She understood the need for a blank, if brutal, canvas. She came to him, put her hands on his stubbled cheeks, and kissed him, a kiss that tasted of salt and goodbye.
"I'll write," she whispered.
"Don't make promises you can't keep."
She left the next day. The loft was quieter than ever.
The only connection that didn't feel like a weight was Eleanor. She called every Sunday evening, a ritual. She never talked about the case. She talked about her diner regulars, about a movie she'd seen, about the stubborn rosebush she was trying to grow on her tiny patio. She asked him what he'd cooked, what he'd read. She treated him not as a fallen champion or a defendant, but as her son in a difficult season. Her love was a quiet, persistent pressure, like water shaping stone. It didn't try to break down his walls; it just seeped into the cracks, keeping something alive inside.
One Sunday, she said, "I saw him. On the news. Thorne."
Kyon's grip tightened on the phone. He hadn't heard that name spoken aloud in weeks.
"He looks terrible," she continued, her voice neutral. "They did a segment. He's living in some rented room. Won't talk to anyone. They call him the 'phantom's ghost.'"
Kyon said nothing. The image of Thorne, broken and alone, should have brought satisfaction. It brought only a colder, emptier void.
"Hate is a heavy thing to carry, Kyon," she said softly. "Especially when you're already carrying so much."
"I don't hate him," Kyon said, and was surprised to find it was true. "I just don't know what he is to me anymore."
"Maybe he's just a man who failed you. Maybe that's all he ever gets to be."
After he hung up, Kyon went to the small desk he'd set up in the corner of the living room, away from the view. He opened a notebook. Not the one he used for fight plans. A new one. He began to write, not in fragments, but in a steady, relentless stream.
Day 87 of the wait. The monitor beeped today because I stood on the balcony too long. The signal is weaker out there. It thinks I was trying to escape. I was just trying to feel the rain.
Trained for two hours. Footwork drills. I am slower. Not physically. Mentally. The urgency is gone. What is the point of being fast when there's nowhere to run?
Hayes called. Wants to do a podcast. Said I need to "control the narrative." I don't want to control a narrative. I want to control the space around me again. Even if it's just six feet by six feet.
Alana is in Berlin. She sent a picture of her studio. The light is incredible. It looks like freedom. I'm glad she's there.
I dreamt of the ring last night. But it had no ropes. Just endless black space on all sides. I kept waiting for the bell, but it never rang.
The writing was a release valve for a pressure with no other outlet. It was also a map. A map of his internal prison.
Vance visited every two weeks, a somber progress report. The discovery process was a swamp. Solano's tendrils were everywhere. The turncoat accountant was officially a missing person. The prosecution's case was circumstantial but neatly packaged. Their strategy, Vance explained, was to portray Kyon as the brilliant, manipulative mastermind and Thorne as the loyal, dumb muscle.
"They'll say your entire 'Phantom' persona, the orphan-artist schtick, was a long con to build a sympathetic brand you could eventually cash out on through fraud. The bonds were the perfect vehicle."
"And Thorne's confession? That he acted alone?"
"They'll paint it as a loyal soldier falling on his sword for his general. It actually hurts us. Makes the conspiracy look more real."
Kyon saw the logic. It was elegant. It fit the public's hunger for a fall-from-grace story. The truth—a messy tale of a desperate old man and a vindictive promoter—was too complicated. The lie was clean, satisfying.
"What's our move?" Kyon asked.
"We chip away," Vance said. "We attack the credibility of every witness. We highlight the lack of direct evidence tying you to the offshore transfers. We present you as a young man tragically naive about business, betrayed by the father figure he trusted with his life. We try to create reasonable doubt. And we pray one juror sees a victim, not a criminal."
It was a defensive, hope-for-a-mistake strategy. It felt like trying to win a fight by only covering up.
As summer bled into fall, a new, grim reality set in: the trial might not be his salvation, but the prelude to a longer, darker confinement. The fight was no longer to prove his innocence, but to mitigate his punishment. The artist in him revolted at the compromise. The survivor started to calculate.
He requested, through Vance, permission to leave his confinement for one purpose: to volunteer. A youth center in the old neighborhood, a place for kids who were versions of his former self. The request was denied by the prosecutor's office. "Too great a risk of flight, and an attempt to influence potential jury pools with philanthropy." The rejection was another brick in the wall.
The one thing they couldn't control was his mind. He began to study. Not boxing. Law. He read the federal rules of evidence. He read case histories of similar fraud trials. He requested the full discovery file from Vance and spent days cross-referencing financial documents, building a timeline of the money's movement, looking for the seam, the inconsistency, the tiny crack that Solano's puppet master might have missed. He wasn't a lawyer, but he was a strategist. He was looking for the flaw in the blueprint of his own destruction.
It was during this deep, obsessive dive, on a rainy October afternoon, that he found it.
It was a single line in a bank statement from the Latvian intermediary account. A transaction code he didn't recognize. He searched it online, through legal databases Priya had given him access to. It was a code used for a specific type of fee—a "rapid settlement fee" for transactions flagged for potential money laundering review. According to the date stamp, the fee was levied three days before the money was officially received in the account from the Cayman Islands.
His heart began to hammer, a dull, hopeful thud he hadn't felt in months. It was an anomaly. A chronological impossibility. The bank's system had flagged the transaction as suspicious before it happened. That only made sense if the transaction was pre-ordained, if the path of the money was programmed into the bank's monitoring system in advance.
Someone had not just moved the money. They had scripted its entire journey, including the red flags, to create a perfect, damning paper trail. And they'd been in such a hurry, they'd made the script glitch.
He called Vance, his voice trembling with a tense excitement. "The Latvian transaction. The fee code. Look at the date."
An hour later, Vance called back, his professional detachment shattered. "Jesus Christ. It's a backdoor. It's a fucking backdoor. If the fee was pre-logged, it means the bank's compliance software was manually manipulated. We can subpoena the bank's internal audit logs. If we can prove someone with access altered the transaction flags to make it look more suspicious after the fact…"
"It points to a setup," Kyon finished. "It points away from me and Thorne just moving money, and towards someone else building a narrative."
"It's thin," Vance cautioned, but the excitement was in his voice too. "It's a single thread. But if we can pull it… it could unravel everything. This is our first offensive move."
That night, Kyon didn't write in his journal. He stood at the window, the city lights blurred by the rain on the glass. For the first time since the monitor was clamped to his leg, he didn't feel like a passive inmate serving time. He felt like a fighter, down on the scorecards, bleeding, but who had just seen a tiny, telltale flicker in his opponent's guard.
The monotony of the walls was still there. The electronic god still beeped at him. But inside the cage, the Phantom had finally found something to hunt.
The trial was no longer just something to endure. It was the next ring. And he had just spotted a potential opening. The wait was over. The long, silent round of preparation was done. The bell for the real fight was about to ring.