CHAPTER 31
Sneaky Fucker
~MABELINE~
Ipunch the bag.
Hard. Knuckles connecting with worn leather in a flat, satisfying crack that reverberates up my forearm and settles into my shoulder with a heat that feels like combustion. The impact swings the heavy bag on its chain, the metal links groaning against the ceiling mount, and before it finishes its arc I am already pulling back for the next one.
Again.
My fist drives forward. Right cross. Rotation from the hip, weight transferring through my core, the strike landing center-mass on the bag with a thud that echoes through the empty Omega training room. Sweat slides down my temples. My hair is plastered to the back of my neck. My chest heaves with each breath, the air dragging in and out of my lungs like it is being filtered through sandpaper, but I do not stop.
Again.
Left hook. The bag lurches sideways, chain rattling, the sound sharp and metallic in the quiet room. My knuckles sting inside the borrowed gloves, the wraps beneath them already damp, the leather exterior carrying the faint musk of whoever used them last. The training room smells like rubber mats andstale ventilation and the antiseptic cleaner that the university uses on every surface, a sterile fragrance that provides no comfort and no distraction.
Again. Again. Again.
I lose count of the rounds. Each one blurs into the next, distinguished only by the increasing heaviness of my arms and the decreasing precision of my form. My jab starts to drop. My guard loosens. My footwork, which started with the disciplined bounce of someone who remembers the basics, degrades into a flat-footed stance that any trainer would lecture me about.
I do not care.
The bag absorbs what I cannot hold inside. Every punch carries a word I said in that locker room, a truth I hurled at Rafe and the team and the universe with a fury that I did not know was still living inside me, coiled beneath the composure like a snake beneath a rock. It absorbs the anger. The frustration. The trembling aftermath of standing in a room full of Alphas and refusing to be small, refusing to be quiet, refusing to accept the role that every person in that room expected me to play.
The whore. The packless Omega. The girl who should be grateful for proximity rather than demanding respect.
I punch harder.
My lungs are screaming. Black spots flutter at the edges of my vision like dark confetti, and my legs are shaking beneath me with the fine tremor of muscles that have been pushed past their fuel supply. I need to stop. I know I need to stop. The rational part of my brain, the part that sounds like my father explaining the importance of regulated training intervals, is sending urgent memos that I am ignoring with the deliberate recklessness of a woman who is not finished being angry.
But my body overrules my stubbornness.
I stagger back from the bag, my gloves dropping to my sides, my chest heaving with breaths so ragged they sound more likegasps. Sweat drips from my chin onto the rubber mat beneath my feet. The room tilts gently, a subtle rotation of the walls that tells me my blood sugar has opinions about this workout that it would like me to acknowledge.
I bend forward, bracing my gloves on my knees, and wait for the dizziness to pass.
It has been a long time since I boxed.
Years. The communal housing facility had a training room with a single heavy bag in the corner that nobody used because the gloves were cracked and the chain squeaked loud enough to wake the entire floor. I found it during my first month, after a night where the anger inside me had nowhere to go and the walls of my room were too thin to absorb a scream. I taught myself the basics from a library book with illustrations that were probably outdated by two decades. Jab. Cross. Hook. Uppercut. The mechanics simple enough to learn alone, complex enough to demand focus, physical enough to drain the rage that had no other outlet.
Boxing was never about fitness for me. It was about survival. A controlled demolition of the fury that built up between the hours of pretending to be fine and the minutes of admitting I was not. My mother's anger, channeled through my fists instead of her words, because the alternative was letting it poison me the way it poisoned her.
My mother's anger.
The recognition lands with a weight that makes me straighten slowly, my breath still ragged, my body still trembling. That temper in the locker room. That eruption of righteous, incandescent fury that made me throw papers at an Alpha twice my size and call him a shit leader in front of his entire team. That was not just me.
That was her.
The one quality I inherited from the woman who decided that her daughter's Omega designation was a defect rather than a designation. The sharp tongue. The volcanic escalation. The ability to weaponize words with a precision that leaves marks invisible to everyone except the person they were aimed at. My father gave me strategy and patience and the love of ice beneath my blades. My mother gave me fire, and I have spent my entire adult life trying to decide whether the fire is a gift or a curse.
I have not been angry like that in a very long time.
Not publicly. Not with witnesses. The anger has always been there, simmering beneath the surface like a pilot light that never fully extinguishes, but I learned to contain it. Redirect it. Channel it into productivity and sarcasm and the quiet, internal conversations I have with myself at three in the morning when the world is asleep and no one can hear me argue with my own emotions.
Maybe that is one of the reasons I never went into hockey.
The thought surfaces with the clarity of a realization that has been forming for weeks and has only now found the language to express itself. Figure skating rewarded control. Discipline. The suppression of raw emotion in favor of grace, the transformation of feeling into choreography that looked effortless precisely because it cost everything. Hockey required the opposite. Hockey demanded emotion. Aggression. The willingness to collide with another body at full speed because the puck mattered more than the bruise. Hockey required the anger I inherited from my mother, and I was too afraid of what would happen if I let it off its leash.
