My body did not give a damn.
It registered heat. Strength. The quiet authority in his hands, the way his fingers pressed like he already knew what I could take. My pulse jumped under his grip and my skin lit up like he’d struck a match there.
I forced myself to breathe. Forced my stance to shift the way he told me. I tried to focus on mechanics instead of the fact that Daniel was close enough to smell like sweat and pine and something darker underneath. Something that always made my gut tighten.
“Better,” he murmured, and fuck if his voice did not make it worse. “Again. This time, come at me.”
I moved without overthinking it, threw a punch that Daniel blocked easily. He redirected my momentum like I weighed nothing, a twist of his wrist, a step into my space, and suddenly I was off-balance, stumbling.
He caught me before I hit the ground.
Hands gripping my arms, firm and sure, and for a second we were close enough that I could see gold flecks in his eyes, could feel his breath against my face. My mouth went dry. My instincts screamed to shove him away and also to stay right where I was.
“You’re thinking too much,” he said quietly. “Fighting’s not about thinking. It’s about instinct.”
He released me, stepped back, and I hated how much I missed his hands on me.
We ran drills for an hour. Basic combinations, defense patterns, the building blocks that separated trained fighters from desperate survivors. Daniel was patient, but he was not gentle. When I made mistakes, he corrected them like he expected me to live through the next thing coming for us. Like he refused to let me be weak because weakness got people killed.
And somewhere in that hour, my body stopped panicking and started learning. Started remembering. Muscle memory from fights I’d survived, instinct honed by terror, all of it snapping into place until my movements felt almost clean.
Daniel watched me like he was measuring every improvement.
“Good,” he said, breathing slightly harder. “Now let’s see how you handle real pressure.”
He moved faster this time, no warnings, no pause. One second we were drilling, the next he was on me with controlled violence, driving me back across the ring. I blocked, countered, tried to find openings that did not exist because he was too good, too experienced, too damn calm.
He struck and retreated, struck and retreated, herding me. Testing me.
The pack around the ring had gone quiet. Not the bored quiet of people watching sparring. A sharp quiet. A listening quiet. I could feel eyes on my skin, feel the weight of attention like a hand at the back of my neck.
Daniel feinted left, then slammed in close. His forearm met mine. Impact rang through my bones. I swallowed a hiss and kept my feet.
“Again,” he said, and it sounded like an order and an invitation at the same time.
I swung. He caught my wrist.
Not hard enough to hurt. Just enough to control.
He twisted my arm down and forward, stepping behind me, and my spine lit up with a jolt of awareness when his chest brushed my back. His breath hit my ear. Too close. Too intimate. My body reacted before my brain could catch up.
“Don’t fight me with your arms,” Daniel murmured. “Fight me with your weight.”
He shifted, hooking my leg with his, and I went down.
I didn’t hit the dirt alone.
I grabbed his shirt on instinct, dragged him with me, and we slammed into the ground in a tangle of limbs and heat. Dirt puffed up around us, the sharp scent of earth and sweat and old blood rising like a memory.
Daniel landed on top of me.
His weight pinned me. His thigh bracketed mine. One of his hands trapped my wrist beside my head while the other braced at my shoulder. I felt the strength in his grip like a brand. Like something claiming.
My breath punched out of me, and when I inhaled again, it was full of him.
His eyes were dark, not just exertion-dark. Something else. Something hungry that should have made him pull away.
Instead, he held my gaze like he wanted me to know exactly who had the upper hand.
