The taste of blood was nothing new. Liam Page had swallowed plenty of it over twenty-five professional fights, most of which had ended with him on the canvas, staring up at arena lights while some other fighter celebrated another easy payday. But this blood was different. This blood was final.
The punch that killed him wasn't even a good one.
Tommy "The Sledgehammer" Morrison had been throwing wild haymakers all night, the kind of sloppy technique that would have gotten him laughed out of any respectable gym. But in the seventh round of an undercard bout that maybe two hundred people were still watching, one of those haymakers caught Liam turning away, landing on the back of his skull with a wet, crushing sound that silenced even the drunk crowd at the Riverside Casino.
Liam felt his legs disappear first. Not buckle—disappear, like someone had simply erased them from existence. He was falling before his brain could process the impact, the canvas rushing up to meet his face with inevitable finality. The referee's count echoed from somewhere far away, numbers that didn't matter because Liam Page's body had already given up the fight his spirit had lost years ago.
Ten.
The sound faded to nothing.
In those final moments, as consciousness leaked out of him like air from a punctured tire, Liam's mind performed one last, cruel compilation of his failures. Twenty-five professional fights. Three wins. Twenty-two losses. Most by knockout. All by embarrassment.
He saw his father's face in the hospital after his nineteenth loss, when the old man stopped pretending this was all going to work out somehow. David Page had worked construction for thirty years, his hands permanently stained with cement dust and hope. He'd never said much about Liam's boxing career, just showed up to every fight with the same quiet determination that had carried him through three decades of building other people's dreams. But after that nineteenth loss—a brutal third-round knockout against a journeyman who barely belonged in the same gym, let alone the same ring—something had broken in the old man's eyes.
"Maybe it's time to think about something else, son," he'd said in that hospital room, his voice carrying the weight of every unpaid bill, every medical expense, every sacrificed family vacation that had gone toward keeping Liam's boxing dreams alive. "There's no shame in knowing when to walk away."
But Liam hadn't walked away. He'd taken six more fights, each one worse than the last, each defeat cutting deeper into his family's finances and his own soul. His mother, Marie, had stopped coming to the fights after his twenty-second loss. She'd stood in their kitchen the morning after, still in her cleaning uniform from the office building where she worked nights to help pay for his training, and the sight of her exhausted face had nearly broken him.
"I can't watch anymore, baby," she'd whispered, tears streaming down her cheeks. "I can't watch them hurt you like that."
And still he'd kept fighting. Three more times. Three more humiliating defeats that served no purpose except to feed his delusional belief that somehow, someway, he could turn it all around.
He remembered Carmen Rodriguez, the girl from the gym who'd once looked at him like he might actually become something special. Carmen with her fierce dark eyes and the kind of dedication that made everyone else in Santino's Boxing Gym look like they were just playing around. She'd been there when he started, a seventeen-year-old with dreams as big as his own and twice the talent to back them up.
For two years, they'd trained in parallel universes—him struggling with basic combinations while she mastered advanced techniques with an ease that was almost insulting. But she'd always been kind to him, offering encouragement after particularly brutal sparring sessions, sharing water when he forgot his own bottle, treating him like he belonged in the same gym even when it became increasingly obvious that he didn't.
The last time he'd seen her, she'd just won her third amateur title and was preparing to turn professional. She'd caught him after one of his typical beatings in the gym—this time courtesy of a heavyweight named Miguel Santos who'd treated Liam like a walking heavy bag—and the look in her eyes had said everything her polite words hadn't.
"Take care of yourself, Liam," she'd said, and the finality in her voice had made it clear that she was done watching him destroy himself one sparring session at a time.
But even the memory of Carmen's disappointment paled compared to the crushing weight of his own self-awareness. Liam Page knew exactly what he was: a cautionary tale. The kind of fighter other boxers' trainers pointed to when they wanted to illustrate the difference between having a dream and having the skills to make that dream reality.
He'd never been fast enough to avoid punishment. Never been powerful enough to end fights early. Never been smart enough to develop the ring IQ that might have compensated for his physical limitations. Most damning of all, he'd never been tough enough—mentally or physically—to absorb the kind of punishment that professional boxing demanded without breaking down both in body and spirit.
The Riverside Casino fight against Tommy Morrison had been the culmination of eight years of steady decline. Morrison was barely a step above a tomato can himself, a club fighter with a 12-8 record who primarily served as an opponent for prospects looking to pad their statistics. The fight had been booked as a confidence-builder for Morrison, who was coming off three straight losses and needed a victory to avoid being dropped by his management company.
Liam Page, with his 3-21 record and reputation as a reliable source of highlight-reel knockouts for the other guy, had been the perfect opponent. A safe, controllable risk who could be counted on to provide just enough resistance to make Morrison look good before eventually succumbing to the inevitable.
Except Morrison hadn't looked good. For six and a half rounds, both men had flailed at each other with the kind of technical incompetence that made boxing purists weep. Morrison threw wild, looping punches that started somewhere near his ankles. Liam responded with arm punches that had no power behind them and defensive positioning that left him open to every counter-attack.
It was the kind of fight that exemplified everything wrong with professional boxing—two men who had no business sharing a ring together, promoted by people who cared more about filling time on a card than protecting the athletes involved. The crowd had started filing out during the fifth round, more interested in the slot machines than watching two mediocre heavyweights stumble through what barely qualified as a boxing match.
And then, in the seventh round, with Liam ahead on points simply because Morrison had been slightly more terrible than he had, everything had gone wrong in the space of a single second.
Liam had been circling to his right, trying to stay away from Morrison's looping left hook, when he'd made the fundamental mistake that ended his life. Instead of keeping his eyes on his opponent while moving, he'd glanced toward his corner, looking for guidance from his trainer, Mickey Rodriguez—Carmen's uncle and one of the few people who'd stuck with Liam through his long decline.
That single moment of inattention had been all Morrison needed. The wild haymaker caught Liam perfectly, landing on the occipital bone at the base of his skull with enough force to send shock waves through his brain stem. The punch itself wasn't particularly powerful—Morrison had never been known for his knockout ability—but the timing and placement had been catastrophically perfect.
Liam had felt his consciousness flicker like a candle in the wind. His legs had simply stopped working, sending him face-first toward the canvas with no ability to break his fall. The back of his head had struck the mat with a sound that Mickey would later describe as "like a watermelon hitting concrete."
The referee had started his count, but Liam had been beyond hearing it. His eyes had remained open, staring sightlessly at the ring lights while his brain slowly shut down, one system at a time. The crowd that remained had fallen silent, sensing that something had gone terribly wrong. Even Morrison had stopped celebrating, backing away from Liam's motionless form with growing horror.
The paramedics had worked on him for twenty minutes, first in the ring and then in the ambulance during the race to Temple University Hospital. But the damage had been too severe, the injury too precise in its brutality. Liam Page had been pronounced dead at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday night in November, in front of his parents, his trainer, and a handful of people who'd cared enough to follow the ambulance to the hospital.
The local newspapers had given his death three paragraphs on the sports page. The boxing websites had mentioned it in passing, usually in the context of discussing the safety improvements needed in professional boxing. Within a week, most people had forgotten that Liam Page had ever existed.
But in those final moments before the darkness claimed him completely, Liam had experienced something that transcended the physical reality of his situation. As his brain functions had shut down one by one, he'd felt a strange sense of clarity descend over him. All the pain, all the disappointment, all the years of futile struggle had suddenly seemed to crystallize into a single, overwhelming understanding:
He had wasted everything.
Every opportunity. Every advantage. Every moment of potential that had been given to him. His parents' sacrifices, Mickey's patient training, Carmen's belief in him during those early days—all of it squandered through a combination of arrogance, impatience, and fundamental misunderstanding of what it meant to be a professional athlete.
The tragedy wasn't that he'd died. The tragedy was that he'd never really lived up to what he could have been.
And then, as the last electrical impulses faded from his brain and Liam Page's life officially ended, he'd felt something else entirely. A presence, vast and cold and utterly alien, reaching into his dying consciousness with digital fingers.
"Fascinating," a voice had said from somewhere beyond the darkness. "Such comprehensive failure requires intervention."
Those had been the last words Liam Page heard before death claimed him completely.
Or so he'd thought.