Page 23 of A Brother At My Back

9

Tiffany…

“Make a fist,” he ordered and I did. He shook his head slightly and stepped forward, taking my hand in his gently and untucking my thumb from inside my fingers.

“That’s how you get a broken thumb, always keep it on the outside, okay?”

“Okay.”

He put up a hand, flat and said, “Punch it and I mean really punch it.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” I said and kind of cringed at the thought of full-out hitting his hand.

He smiled at me, a broad grin, and said, “That’s the whole point. If you throw a punch, you have to mean it, eh.”

He took a stance and held up his hand and I took a deep breath and swung. My fist slapped into the center of his palm and I swear I squeaked. He laughed, shook it out and a female voice called across the empty gym, “Not bad, first things first, though. We need to work on her stance.”

I took a step back from Nik and turned my head, looking down. He’d managed to convince me to pull my long hair into a ponytail and keep it out of my face for this but he hadn’t said anything about anyone else being here. Just when I was warming up to him, too, despite Lia’s worried nagging the whole way here.

“Ah, yeah, Tiff I’d like y’t’ meet Mali, she’s my bro’s woman and knows a thing or two about a good street fight.”

“Yeah, I think the reason he called me down here has more to do with the fact that I’m a woman and most of the fighting I’ve done my whole life has been against dudes that are usually easily twice my size when it comes to muscle mass.” She held out her hand to me and her arms were covered in flower tattoos. I blinked and shook it, still unwilling to meet her eyes, feeling awfully exposed. I recognized her tattoos, though.

“Weren’t you serving drinks a few of nights ago at the MC?” I asked.

“Yeah, that would be me. Full-time ink-slinger and part-time drink-slinger. The bartending is a hobby while my man Data is balls deep in his computer systems rather than me.” Her voice held the edge of a smile and I glanced up. She leaned around and nodded.

“Zeb.”

“Ah, yeah?”

“Please tell me I’m teaching her how to whoop ass so that if whatever douchebag did that to her decides to come around, she has the potential to cave his nuts in.”

“Ah, yeah, that would be why, Mali. Just in case whatever reason I’m not there.”

“Excellent. Okay, first thing’s first, you need to widen your stance; we need to work on your balance and center of gravity.” She redirected her attention back to Nik and asked, “You teaching her to shoot?”

“Thought Trigger would be better suited to do that, eh?”

“You’re not wrong and good deal. Should get Reaver involved with his knives, later down the line, but a knife is going to be pretty useless if you don’t have the basics down.”

Finally, she decided to address me, just as I was starting to get irritated about being talked around. Still, annoyance aside, I was rapt on her every word. I shifted and took a deep breath and let it out in a rush. “This is a lot,” I said with a nervous laugh. It was a lot, and I wasn’t exactly sure I could do what she was expecting of me. I mean, I’d never really been good at the whole hitting another person even if it was in self-defense. My personal superpower had always sort of been that I could take a beating until help arrived. Which, sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t. At least not always on time.

I swallowed hard, mouth suddenly dry and watched the other woman move. Mali pulled her messenger bag off over her head and dropped it over by the wrestling ring. She pulled down the sleeves of her leather jacket from where they were rucked up around her elbows and shrugged out of it completely, hanging it off the corner post.

“It isa lot, but honey, you want to be a victim forever?”

“No,” I said quickly. No, I did not. I wanted to have a life. I’d worked too hard to give myself one after Silas, and I didn’t want to let him have what I’d managed to build without a fight. I wanted out of this town and I wanted to help people. That was the goal, by any means necessary. Never give up, never surrender…

“Cool,” she said. “Now that’s out of the way, watch me…”

She and Nik went through the proper way to stand, the proper way to punch and then the real work began. She would have Nik go at her, would evade with expert moves and twists and would use his own weight against him. It was fascinating watching Mali, who wasn’t built much differently than me, actually throw Nik around.

They would then break apart and run me through exercises and drills of the same thing over and over until we were all panting and sweating. My body was not going to like me, and I worried about it possibly affecting my work, but the sensations wrought by the workout and drills weren’t unfamiliar ones. I’d felt the same sort of aches, pains, and fatigue to get where I was when it came to pole dancing.

“Okay, I think that’s enough for today,” Mali said after what felt like three or four hours of the torturous exercises. I looked across to Nik who was sweating and panting right along with me.

“I don’t feel like I am going to make it in time…” I said.

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