"Better." High praise, from Declan. He set the pads down. "Grappling. Come at me."
I came at him. He redirected my momentum with a hip movement that put me on the mat in under two seconds. The impact wasn't hard—he'd controlled the throw, placing me on my back with a precision that demonstrated exactly how much force he was choosing not to use. The mat was warm under my shoulders. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Declan stood above me, extending a hand, his expression unchanged.
"Again."
I got up. Came at him again. Four seconds this time before the same hip throw put me down. He was teaching me through repetition—not just the techniques, but the feel of another body in close proximity, the way weight shifted during a grapple, where the leverage points lived.
The third time, he changed the drill. He moved in close—inside my guard, his hands on my hips, adjusting my stance from behind. His palms were warm through the gym shorts. His fingers pressed into the hollow above my hip bones, rotating my pelvis a fraction of a degree.
"Your base is here." He was so close. His breath on the back of my neck, carrying the warmth of exertion and a scent that was clean sweat and soap and the faint metallic note of gun oil that never quite left his hands. "Everything starts from the hips. If your base is wrong, nothing else matters."
My pulse climbed. I could feel it in my throat, in my wrists, a rapid thudding that had nothing to do with the physical effort and everything to do with the eight points of contact where his fingers met my body. Well above resting rate. The number didn't matter. What mattered was that my body had stopped listening to my mind entirely.
He moved to my shoulders. Hands on both deltoids, pressing down, the strength in his grip evident and carefully restrained."Drop your center of gravity. You're tall, which means your balance point is higher than most men you'll fight. Compensate by bending the knees."
I bent my knees. His hands stayed on my shoulders. I was acutely aware of every point of contact—the fingertips, the palms, the heat radiating through my T-shirt as if the fabric weren't there. The awareness had a weight to it. A density. Like standing in a gravitational field that had been turned up without warning.
"Good. Now—" He stepped around to face me, and we were in grappling range, and his face was eight inches from mine, and his eyes were dark and focused and held mine with a steadiness that felt like being read.
He shot in for the takedown. I sprawled—dropped my hips, pushed his shoulders—and for three seconds I had him. Three seconds where his body was braced against mine and every muscle in his back was taut under the sweat-damp shirt and the scent of him filled my lungs and my brain simply stopped producing useful output.
He reversed the position. Put me on my back. His forearm across my chest—not pressing, holding. His face above mine. Dark eyes, controlled breathing, a stillness so complete it was almost vibrating.
He held the position for one second longer than the drill required. Then he released me and stepped back.
"Good," his tone neutral. Professional.
My pulse took over a minute to return to baseline. I felt every second of it.
I couldn't sleep.
This was not unusual. Sleep had been inconsistent since the night I'd left my apartment with a bag of evidence and the DOJ's silence ringing in my ears. It had improved at the cabin—real meals, real exhaustion, the heavy-limbed collapse of a body worked to its limit. But tonight the improvement was on hold.
The common room was dark at 2:23 AM. Or I thought it was empty, until I rounded the corner and saw Irish on the couch.
He was sitting with one leg stretched on the cushion and both hands wrapped around his left thigh, working the muscle with a deep, slow pressure that spoke of practice and pain. The limp he hid during the day. The one that surfaced at night when the audience was gone and the performance could stop. The leather of the couch creaked softly under his shifting weight, and the only light came from the hallway behind me, casting him in a half-silhouette that made the lines of his face look sharper, older.
He looked up. The grin didn't appear.
"Can't sleep?" His voice was low, roughened by fatigue and the late hour.
"Rarely."
"Yeah." He shifted his grip on the leg. Pressed deeper. His jaw tightened and released. "Me neither."
I sat on the opposite end of the couch. The leather was worn and soft, shaped by years of men sitting exactly where I was sitting. The clubhouse was quiet around us—the distant hum of the generator, the occasional creak of the building settling, thesilence that filled a space occupied by thirty men when all thirty of them were asleep.
"How's the leg?"
"Fine."
The word arrived with the same automatic deflection he applied to everything that mattered.Fine.The all-purpose shield. I'd used it myself often enough to recognize it in someone else.
"You don't have to do that with me," I said.
His hands stilled on his thigh. He looked at me—a long, unguarded look, the kind he usually masked behind humor before it could fully form.
"The leg is a daily negotiation," the claim barely a whisper, the jokes stripped away, and what remained was a voice I hadn't heard from him before—lower, rawer, carrying the weight of something he didn't often set down. "It healed. The bone healed, the muscle healed, the scar tissue formed, and Rosa said I was recovered. But recovered isn't the same as before. And every morning I wake up and test it, and some mornings it holds and some mornings it doesn't, and the mornings it doesn't are the mornings I remember that I spent four months listening to my brothers fight through a radio while I sat in a chair and did nothing."
