Everything Below the Ring

Marlowe Sinclair takes the assignment to document London’s underground fight circuit because her career needs a comeback and this story is the only one no one else can get access to. Getting that access means earning the trust of Kit Bellamy, the circuit’s reclusive organizer, a man everyone fears and no one will explain why. He agrees to let her film on exactly one condition: she stays only as long as he says, and she does not ask about anything below the ring.

Kit built the circuit out of the wreckage of a life he does not talk about, and it has kept dozens of men out of worse trouble than the fights themselves. Marlowe was supposed to be a camera he tolerated for six weeks, not the first person in years he wants to actually talk to. As her footage starts uncovering the darker business that funds the circuit, debts, threats, men who do not walk away from matches on their own terms, the story she is filming and the man she is falling for turn out to be the same impossible problem.