The door closes behind me, and I stand in the hallway, breathing slowly, trying to remember who I was before she looked at me like that.
The gym is empty at midnight.
I prefer it this way. No soldiers watching, no subordinates pretending not to notice, no one to perform control for. me and the heavy bag and the demons I can’t seem to outrun.
I wrap my hands with practiced efficiency, the gauze tight across my knuckles. The first punch lands with a satisfying thud. The second. The third. I fall into rhythm, letting the impact travel upmy arms, into my shoulders, through my chest. Pain becomes white noise. Thought becomes unnecessary.
Dahlia used to hate when I did this.
“You’re punishing yourself,”she’d say, watching me from the doorway of whatever shitty apartment we were hiding her in that week. Away from whoever Aurelio had pissed off.“The bag can’t hit back. What’s the point?”
“The point is control.”
“No.”She’d cross her arms, that stubborn set to her jaw I learned to love and dread in equal measure.“The point is you don’t know how to feel things without bleeding.”
She was right. She usually was.
I hit the bag harder.
Dahlia came into my life like a storm—unexpected, overwhelming, impossible to ignore. Aurelio’s daughter. I was her bodyguard and I never noticed her until one day I did. I noticed her the way you notice a blade pointed at your throat: with respect and a healthy dose of fear.
She noticed me too.
We were never supposed to happen. She was his daughter. I was his weapon, his right hand, a man who’d forgotten how to want things that didn’t involve blood and obedience.
But she smiled at me once—really smiled, not the fake ones she gave the soldiers—and it blew me away.
We had eight months. Eight months of stolen hours and secret meetings and learning how to be human again. She taught me how to cook. How to laugh. How to sleep without a gun under my pillow. She made me believe that maybe, someday, I could be more than what Aurelio made me.
Then she left.
Not dramatically. Not with tears or screaming or accusations. She … slowly disappeared. A note on the pillow, a kiss still lingering on my lips, and an empty apartment where a life used to be.
I don’t love you the way you love me. I’m sorry.
I burned the note. I sealed the wound. I went back to being exactly what I was before: a weapon with no wants, no needs, no weaknesses.
Then she shacked up with that asshole from Westpoint. And I was assigned to watch her. Protect her.
Fat lot of good that did.
She chose him anyway.
The bag swings wild from a hook that lands wrong. I catch it, steady it, then hit it again.
Alexandra isn’t Dahlia. She’s nothing like Dahlia. Dahlia was soft where it counted, gentle even when she was fierce. Alexandra is all edges, all defiance, a woman who spits blood and calls men like me cowards to our faces.
But the way she looked at me tonight…
I hit the bag until my knuckles bleed through the wraps.
Three days pass.
I bring Alexandra documents: shipping manifests, route schedules, communication logs from the courier network we’ve been trying to crack. Nothing sensitive. Nothing that could hurt us if she decided to play games. enough to test her.
She sits cross-legged on the bed, papers spread around her like a nest and she just works.
I watch from the chair by the door, pretending to review my own files. In reality, I’m studying her. The way she chews her lip when she’s concentrating. The way she mutters under herbreath, arguing with the data. The way her eyes light up when she finds a puzzle piece that clicks.
