1
Kai
THE AIR SMELLS of blood. Santos’s mostly. He’s been leaking since the first round and hasn’t stopped. I’m starting to contribute, too. The split above my eyebrow has been running down my temple ever since he caught me, mixing with the rest of what my body is putting out. Rubber and industrial cleaner are underneath that, but those scents never really win down here.
The gym takes up the whole basement of the headquarters. Non-slip flooring, no windows, multiple rings running the length of the room, heavy bags along the far wall, and a rack of equipment in the corner that most civilians wouldn’t know what to do with.
It isn’t a pretty space.
Santos throws a jab. I slip left and drive my shin into his ribs before he can reset. The sound his body makes when it folds—that wet exhale, the grunt that gets punched out of his chest—I feel it in my teeth.
Most of us on the protection team are ex-military, which means we don’t flinch when we take a hit. We welcome it. A good beating in the ring is worth more than any drill, because pain in real time is the only currency that matters when you’re standing between a client and a bullet.
He stumbles back two steps. We don’t go down easy. Getting cracked in the ribs is a Tuesday for us.
Santos resets his guard and grins around his mouthpiece. “The hell are you running on, Romero?”
I don’t answer. I circle.
I moved to Halo City two weeks ago when I took the assignment I’d spent months engineering my way toward. Bodyguard detail for Diana Jensen, one of the most prominent lawyers in the country, a name that keeps showing up in the same photographs as Jack Rutherford.
The chance I’ve waited my entire life for.
Santos feints low and comes high with a hook. I read it before his shoulder turns, catch his forearm on my guard, and answer with a cross that snaps his head sideways. He spits his mouthpiece into his glove and laughs.
“Alright. Alright.” He rolls his neck. “Your focus is disgusting.”
He means it as a compliment. These men are wired wrong in the best way. They don’t resent a beating; they study it. Santos pops his mouthpiece back in and raises his hands, asking for more.
I give him more.
A switch kick across the thigh that buckles his stance. He absorbs it, but I’m already inside his guard with a knee to the body that empties his lungs.
Revenge is not a feeling. It’s a substance. It replaced my blood years ago, and it runs thick and hot through every vein I have. It powers every twitch of muscle in this body. Focus isn’t the word for what I have. Santos calls it focus because he doesn’t know what else to name the thing that makes a man fight without hesitation, without the self-doubt that slows normal people down.
I spent five years in the military. Five years learning how to dismantle a human being with my hands, with a weapon, with a piece of wire. Five years with my life balanced on a razor’s edge every single day. Convoys that could detonate. Patrols that couldgo sideways. Nights where sleep was a luxury I couldn’t afford. And every day of those five years, the same thought looped in my skull: I cannot die. I cannot die in a country I don’t care about, for a war I didn’t start, because Jack Rutherford would never know. Jack Rutherford would never lose a single night of sleep while my mother buried her only son.
So I got out with a body honed into a weapon.
I’ve read an article about Jack Rutherford every single day since I was a child. A ritual. Every day, another article. Another photo. Another mention. Jack Rutherford wins a landmark case. Jack Rutherford donates to the children’s hospital. Meanwhile my mother served eggs and coffee for fourteen hours a day.
His children get the spotlight too. All six of them. Blue-gray eyes, dark hair, the same chassis I see in the mirror every morning. But their eyes have never once asked the question mine have been asking since I was old enough to open a refrigerator and find it empty.
Same blood. Same father. But I was the result of a one-night stand he never called back. Not a letter. Not even a lawyer’s letter with a check attached. He knew I existed, and he decided I was someone else’s problem.
That’s where the hatred was born. It grew teeth and a spine and a voice that never shut up. My hatred is the only compass I’ve ever owned. The single fixed point in the sky that tells me which direction to walk when everything else goes dark. North is Jack Rutherford. South, east, west—Jack Rutherford. He is the reason I exist. He’s what gets me out of bed, and the reason I’m still breathing.
Santos catches me with a body shot while I’m inside my own head, a clean hook to the side that sends a white flash behind my eyes. I needed that.
A whistle cuts through the fight, and I freeze mid-combination. Santos drops his hands immediately. I don’t. Mybody takes an extra second to come down from the place it goes during a fight.
When I lower my guard and turn toward my corner, I see Vance Landon, the owner of this company, standing on the other side of the ropes with his arms crossed. He’s watching me. I’ve only met him once during the final interview.
Then his eyes shift to the woman next to him. Tallish, slender. Baseball cap pulled low over her forehead. Oversized dark sunglasses that cover half her face. A loose sweatshirt, looser sweatpants, white sneakers. Everything about her screams anonymity. We’re indoors, underground specifically. There’s no sun to hide from down here.
I duck through the ropes and drop off the ring. My shirt is soaked through, so I pull it over my head and use it to wipe down my face, my neck, the back of my head where my hair is cropped close enough that the moisture beads and runs.
Tomorrow the assignment starts. I wonder what Vance Landon wants with me today.
