Arden adjusted her stance, muscles taut and burning, the next punch driving forward with pure intent.
“Again,” her instructor called, stepping back, raising the pad higher.
She exhaled, reset, and threw another punch.
The impact shuddered up her arm, grounding her in the sensation of movement, of action—of something she could control.
She’d been coming for weeks. She wasn’t new to self-defense, but Krav Maga was different.
No wasted motion. No excess.
Just efficiency.
Get in. Get out. Survive.
She needed that more than she liked it.
Because the more she thought about the club, about Gideon, about the tangled mess he was trying to unravel.
The more she felt something dangerous, deeper, stirring inside her. Quiet. Insistent. Impossible to outrun.
She threw another punch. Harder this time.
As if she could knock the thoughts from her head.
Gideon Blackwell.
The man was a contradiction wrapped in quiet intensity.
His family had built an empire on exploitation, on taking. Generations of Blackwells, bleeding others dry.
But Gideon wasn’t like them.
Not his father.
Not his brother.
Not any of the ghosts in his bloodline.
He was trying to undo what they’d done.
She could hear his voice, quiet but resolute, as he told her about the heirs’ properties, about the families his own had devastated.
Afterward, she’d gone home and looked it up herself. Read story after story of land stolen not by force, but by silence. Families stripped of everything they’d built because they hadn’t had the money, or the right last name, to protect it.
Some stories came out of the Deep South, where land promised after emancipation was gutted by courts and crooked deeds.
But others hit closer to home—old farms in the hollers and ridges of Appalachia, where poverty, pride, and bad luck left families clinging to land by little more than memory.
It wasn’t always the same history.
But it was the same grief.
It stayed with her, that quiet theft.
Because it wasn’t history. It was still happening.
And Gideon wasn’t talking about change. He was fighting for it.
