Chương 4
"You broke her orbital bone," I said. My voice was very low, perfectly level, carrying cleanly through the sudden quiet of the gym. "You cracked two of her ribs. And then you dumped her on the side of a highway like a bag of wet garbage."
Colt chuckled, shaking his head. He looked back at the four young fighters who had gathered behind him, inviting them to share in the joke.
"Your daughter's clumsy, old woman," Colt said, leaning in until his face was eight inches from mine. "I told her to watch her step. She didn't listen. Just like she didn't listen when I told her who runs this county."
He took another half-step forward, his massive frame blotting out the overhead lights, trying to use the sheer mass of his physical presence to force my eyes down to the floor.
"She kept crying about her mom," Colt whispered, his voice dropping into a vicious, mocking purr. "Said her mom used to be some kind of tough-guy Marine. Said her mom would come down here and set me straight. So I figured I'd see what that was worth."
He smiled, showing white, expensive teeth.
"Turns out it's worth about fifty cents and an overdue library card. Now turn your dried-up ass around and get out of my gym before I call my uncle to have your truck impounded for scrap."
Behind him, Marcus Vance finally capped his pen, slid the legal pad under his arm, and turned to see what was holding up his prize middleweight.
"Colt, that’s enough," Vance began, his voice rough from decades of barking commands on wet parade decks. "Kick her out and let's get back to—"
Vance stopped.
The legal pad slid from under his arm. It hit the rubber floor with a sharp, flat slap that sounded like a gunshot in the silent room.
The older coach took three rapid steps forward, pushing one of the younger fighters aside with a violent shove of his elbow. His eyes were wide, fixed entirely on the left side of my jaw, on the faint, jagged two-inch scar that ran from my earlobe down toward my clavicle—a souvenir from a training demonstration with live bayonets at the Mountain Warfare Training Center in Bridgeport, twenty-two years ago.
"Colt," Vance said. The rough bark was completely gone from his voice. It had been replaced by a thin, dry wheeze that sounded like an old man stepping off a ledge in the dark. "Colt, shut your mouth. Back up."
Colt didn't back up. He didn't even look back at his coach. He was too drunk on his own size, too insulated by his family's name, too confident in the twenty extra pounds of muscle he held over any man in the room.
"What's the matter, Marcus?" Colt laughed, still staring down at me with contempt. "She gonna hit me with her purse?"
"Shut your damn mouth, boy," Vance said again, louder this time, his boots moving quickly across the mat. A sheen of cold sweat had suddenly broken out across the older man's forehead. "Step back from that woman right now."
Colt frowned, his smile slipping just a fraction as he sensed the sudden, bizarre panic in his trainer's voice. "What the hell are you talking about? It's just Lainey's crazy old—"
"That is Master Gunnery Sergeant Sloane Mercer," Marcus Vance said, his voice dropping into a dead, terrified whisper that echoed into the farthest corners of the metal rafters. "She ran the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program at Quantico for six years. She wrote the manual you've been reading since you were twelve years old."
The gym went completely, horrifyingly still.
I took one half-step forward. My shoulder dropped, my center of gravity lowered, and for the first time in fifteen years, I let the mask of the quiet cabinetmaker fall completely away.
"You had forty-five minutes with my daughter," I told Colt Lusk. "Now let's see how you do against the woman who built her."
May you like
Chapter 2: The Difference Between Sport and War
Colt’s eyes flicked to his coach, irritation burning away the initial shock. He looked back at me, his lip curling into a snarl that was half contempt, half wounded pride. There were six fighters watching him, their phones already out or their hands frozen on their wraps. In a gym like this, backed into a corner by a fifty-two-year-old woman in work boots, backing down was social death.
