The Don's Deadly Obsession

Chapter 4: The Test

I told Reyes to run the orientation like he always did, then told him I'd be watching, which was not how I always did it, and he knew it too, from the look he gave me before he went to find her.

I stood against the far wall of the gym with my arms crossed, telling myself I had a dozen legitimate reasons to be there. A new hire close to my calendar, a knife nobody could explain, a background too clean to trust. All of it true. None of it the actual reason my chest had gone tight the moment Reyes told me he'd scheduled her for this morning.

Marco was setting out mats when I walked in, and made the mistake of grinning at me like we were sharing a joke.

"Didn't know you did orientations now," he said.

"I don't."

"Right. My mistake." He didn't sound like he believed it, and he wasn't wrong not to. Reyes shot him a look from the doorway that had Marco finding somewhere else to be within about four seconds, and I filed away, not for the first time, that my head of security tolerated exactly one person in this house talking to him like that, and it clearly wasn't me.

"New hires do a self-defense orientation," Reyes told her, tossing her a pair of thin sparring gloves. "House policy. Ten minutes, nothing dramatic."

She caught them one-handed and looked past him to where I stood, and I watched her clock me without letting it show on her face, a fast, practiced kind of not-reacting that I was starting to recognize as its own tell.

"He does orientations now?" she asked, light, a small nervous laugh built into it.

"He doesn't," Reyes said, and didn't elaborate.

She pulled the gloves on slow, flexed her fingers inside them, stepped onto the mat like a woman bracing for something she'd already decided to lose.

"Basics only," Reyes told her. "Someone grabs your wrist, you break the grip, you create space."

He reached for her at a pace that wouldn't have troubled a child, and she fumbled the break exactly the way an amateur would, twisting the wrong direction before she yanked free and stumbled into the wall. I watched the mistake and didn't buy it for a second. Not because it looked wrong. Because it looked exactly right, the specific, calibrated wrongness of someone who knew precisely how good an amateur's worst instinct actually was and had built hers to match it.

They ran it four more times. Each time she got a little clumsier. I'd seen real amateurs learn under pressure before. They got better, not worse, and never on a curve this smooth. I found myself doing the math on it without meaning to, counting the reps, counting how precisely each one degraded from the last, and none of it sat right in a way I could have explained to Reyes without sounding like I'd lost my mind over a party planner.

"You're a fast learner," Reyes told her, resetting for round five.

"I'm extremely motivated by the fear of being grabbed." She shook out her wrist, playing loose. "Also I watch a lot of true crime."

"Must have," Reyes said, and didn't smile.

"Let's try it live," Reyes said. "Meaning I stop telling you what's coming."

"Great. Love that for me." She rolled her eyes, buying herself half a second I doubted she needed.

He closed his hand around her wrist for real, faster than the rehearsals, and she went down clean, controlled, a small undignified sound escaping her on the way to the mat that I'd have believed completely if I hadn't already decided not to believe anything about her without proof.

"Ow. Shit." Soft, like it had slipped out. "Message received. I will never fight anyone, ever, for any reason."

"Again," I said.

Both of them turned toward me. It was the first thing I'd said since she'd walked in.

"She's got it," Reyes said. "No point running it into the ground."

"Again." I pushed off the wall and crossed the mat myself, and Reyes's jaw tightened in a way he didn't quite manage to hide.

"You don't usually sit in on these," he said, low.

"I don't usually have a reason to." I didn't look at him. My eyes were already on her, reading her the way I'd read the gate check that first morning, height, stance, the shoes she'd chosen for a job that didn't call for good ones. "I'll go this time."

"Sir." He tried once.

"Reyes." He stepped back without arguing further, and I understood, from the set of his shoulders, that he'd already worked out this had stopped being about house policy several minutes ago.

I reached for her wrist the way Reyes had, unhurried at first, and let my other hand come in fast from the side a half second later, testing whether she'd track the second threat or freeze on the first.

For one full, terrible half second, she didn't do either. Her hand found my wrist before I'd finished the motion. Her weight shifted like she meant to put me on the ground, and for that half second I understood, with total clarity, exactly how easily she could have broken something in my arm if she'd wanted to. I felt it happen, the exact instant a woman who'd spent two days convincing my entire household she couldn't throw a punch became something else entirely, something fast and certain and nothing at all like fear.

Then she let go like my skin had burned her, stumbled back two steps, hand flying to her own throat, and the moment was gone so completely that if I hadn't been holding her wrist myself I might have talked myself into believing I'd imagined it. My own pulse hadn't caught up yet. Hers, if the flush climbing her neck meant anything, had barely moved at all, and that was somehow the part I couldn't stop turning over.

"You caught my wrist," I said.

"I panicked. I think I grabbed you instead of running, which is apparently the opposite of what they teach in these classes." She laughed, short, embarrassed. "Is that bad? Did I fail the orientation?"

"There's no failing." I hadn't let go of my own wrist yet, thumb pressed to the spot where her fingers had been, like the skin might tell me something her face wasn't. "There's just data."

"God, that's a cold way to describe a woman who almost cried in a gym."

"You didn't almost cry."

"I was about to. Internally. It was a whole emotional journey you missed because you were too busy grabbing me." She said it fast, tipping the moment back toward a joke before it could settle into anything heavier, and I let her, because I didn't trust myself yet to say the next thing I was thinking out loud. Behind us, Reyes had gone very quiet, arms crossed, watching the two of us like a man doing math he didn't like the answer to.

"Can we be done? I have a caterer having a nervous breakdown about linens."

"Go," Reyes said, before I could answer, and she didn't wait to be told twice. She was peeling the gloves off before she'd even reached the door.

I stood there a long moment after the door swung shut behind her, still feeling the ghost of her grip on my wrist, that half second replaying itself whether I wanted it to or not.

I stood there a long moment after the door swung shut behind her, still feeling the ghost of her grip on my wrist, that half second replaying itself whether I wanted it to or not. Three attempts on my life had taught me to trust exactly two things: what I could verify, and what my own hands told me in the moment before my head caught up. My hands had just told me something my head badly wanted to argue with.

"She's careful," I said, mostly to myself.

"Careful people usually have a reason," Reyes said, still watching the door like she might walk back through it.

"Everyone in this house has a reason for something."

"Not everyone in this house nearly took my arm off in a sparring drill." He said it flat, no humor in it at all. "I don't like this, whatever it is you're doing."

"I'm not doing anything."

"You're doing something." Reyes finally looked at me instead of the door. "I've worked for you six years. I've never seen you sit in on staff orientation. Not once."

I didn't have an answer for that I was willing to give him, so I didn't give him one. I was still trying to decide, walking out of that gym, whether the reason I wanted to find for her was the one that would actually explain what I'd just felt, or just the one I'd prefer to be true.