Page 1 of Pulse
Chapter 1
Ren
Guard. Duck. Feign. Punch. Guard.
I ducked as Dean took a swing, holding my stomach taught, using my entire body to support my weight. Feigning right, I swung left, my gloved fist connecting with his forearm.
“You’re getting faster,” Dean said with a laugh as I put my guard back up.
“That’s the point,” I replied.
“You’re already quick, Speedy. Don’t go getting too big for your boots.”
“Don’t listen to him Ren,” Lincoln called out. “He’s full of it.”
“Full of what?” I asked with a grin.
“Shit, obviously.”
“Fuckers,” Dean exclaimed.
I took another swing while he was distracted and clipped him on the jaw. He stumbled back a step and shook his head as we started laughing at him.
“Fuck, Ren,” he cried out. “Watch it, hey?”
“Cry baby,” I replied. “It was soft-”
“Soft like you,” Lincoln finished.
“Gimme a break,” he moaned.
“You’re too easy Dean,” I said. “You cry like a baby every time.”
A lot of things had changed in six months.
If you wanted to get technical about it, a lot had changed in the previous six months too. Ash had left and taken my broken heart with him. Hammer could be alive or he could be dead. Six months of silence had left me empty and hollow, ready to crumble at the slightest provocation, but I had one thing left that was mine and had always been mine from the beginning. Fighting.
Dad had seen my inability to cope after Ash had left and without so much as a word, he brought me into his sessions with the Twins and everything had snowballed from there. We didn’t talk like father and daughter should, I was just another fighter and that was the thing that had finally brought us together.
He’d asked me if I wanted to start fighting in some competitions and my only answer had been a shrug. Then I found myself at my first professional bout with rules and regulations and it was a challenge I was determined to step up to. If I didn’t fight, then my dark soul would consume me. Soon one fight turned into twenty and here I was, somehow winning and accumulating points that had allowed me to almost qualify for the big time.
Like I said, a lot had changed in six months.
I was training full time with the Twins now, which meant that Monica oversaw my meals and wasn’t that a fucking party. Monica, the bitch who paraded around Beat like a princess, reminding me about how she’d almost broken my life. She had broken my life, but it could’ve been so much worse.
She’d utterly destroyed Ash’s, but I was beyond trying to formulate any kind of sympathy towards him. It had been his choice to overstep the line. I’d begged him not to, not to leave…and he ignored me.
Ash Fuller was a blip on my radar. Liar.
“Two weeks until your next bout Ren,” Dean said. “You better watch yourself until then.”
“Or what?” I retorted. “You’ll swat at me like a twenty pound weakling?”
“Empty threats,” Lincoln said with a wink. “He wouldn’t do anything to you even if he could. The wanker hasn’t got a bad bone in his body.”
