Ray brought the bag back. She spun around and kicked it again.
Thud!
Whooosh!
I gave her a polite, lukewarm golf clap. She turned around and glared at me while Ray went after the bag.
“You know, you’d get an even better workout if you ran after the bag and then kicked it back,” I pointed out.
“Don’t tell me how to work out,” she snapped.
A response. In words even. Clearly, I had hit a nerve. Good to know.
“Just trying to help.”
“Don’t. You know fuck-all about what I do.” She looked at my nails again.
“I bet you’ve never punched a bag in your life. Just fucking leave.”
“It’s my manicure, isn’t it?”
She spun a kick at the empty air. Then another.
Like chipping at an iceberg with a pick. Eventually I would find a crack.
“You know who never punched a bag in her life? Emelline Lily. And yet for some reason Phillip Dunwoody is still simping all over her Insta.”
THUD! Whoosh!
She sent the bag flying right back literally as soon as Ray retrieved it. Dude almost lost his hand.
Tia glared at me. I felt a tiny pinch of guilt, but I was doing it for her own good, because yesterday she left the house to meet Phillip Dunwoody, who until two days ago had been her boyfriend.
Tia returned home. Phillip did not.
Phillip was a lower-end Significant and the son of a Prime ice mage. Their family wasn’t a House, but they were well connected and had a solid reputation. They had been frantically looking for him, which was how MII got involved.
For all of her posturing, Tia didn’t resort to violence often. Oh, she slapped people here and there when they attacked her, but it took a lot to provoke her. Phillip must’ve done something.
House Madero was infamous. They were powerful and very hot-tempered. If you looked up “ferocious” on Wikipedia, you’d find their family portrait. In a fight, they altered their bodies, toughening their skin and boosting their strength, and they took the kinds of jobs that often ended with someone dying.
Their family tree was complicated. Their patriarch, Peter Madero, was seventy-six years old. He had one son, who died, leaving behind his own five sons: David, Frank, Roger, and the twins, Ethan and Evan. When David was seventeen, he’d had a situationship with a girl, and she became pregnant. Since they were both in high school, her parents had lost their shit, pulled her out of school, and sent her out of state to live with her grandparents before anybody had a chance to learn about the pregnancy. Dave had had no idea Tia existed until ten years later, when she was dropped on his doorstep because her powers had manifested and her family couldn’t control her. Suddenly she gained a great-grandfather, a grandmother, a father, and four very overprotective uncles.
The entire Madero clan thought Tia was a precious treasure. She was the first girl born into the family in four generations, and they weren’t quite sure how to deal with that. They were so paranoid that something could happen to her that they homeschooled her until high school. She hadn’t even been mentioned in their family registry until last year. If they got wind of this mess with Phillip, they would level half of Houston inretaliation. People would get hurt, House Madero would land in scalding-hot water, and the guilt would eat Tia alive.
I kept going. “I barely got any sleep last night, because I spent half of it stalking you and Phillip online. I don’t get it.”
Thud! Whoosh.
“I mean, I gethim, but I don’t understand why you were with him in the first place. You could do so much better.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“You would be surprised how much you can find out on socials. This selfie, for example.”
I pulled up one of her pics on my phone and showed it to her. She glanced at it and turned away.
“It’s a very pretty pic.”
