CHAPTER 3
1009 Words
Seraphina
I didn't remember walking to the training ground. I only remembered arriving there still in the black dress, heels discarded somewhere on the gravel path, and driving my fist into the heavy bag hard enough that pain shot clean up to my shoulder.
Arrogant, I'd called him.
"You aren't worth it either," he'd said back, like I was something beneath his notice.
I hit the bag again.
Kieran Frost will never bow to any woman.
Again, harder, until the chain above it groaned against its bracket and sand hissed inside the leather with every strike. I didn't bother wrapping my hands. I didn't bother with the form. I just hit, chasing the bag across the arc of its swing as it owed me something, like if I hit it hard enough, I could put Kieran Frost's smug, ice-cold face on the leather and finally, finally land a punch that actually connected.
I didn't hear Damon come in. I only registered him when his hand closed around my wrist mid-swing.
"Enough. Seraphina, enough."
"Let go."
"Look at your hands."
"I don't care about my hands." My chest heaved, blood sliding warm between my knuckles. "I don't care about anything right now except how badly I want to hit something that actually deserves it."
"I heard about dinner." Damon didn't let go, his grip steady, immovable, the same grip that had pulled me out of sparring matches since I was sixteen. "Marose said you came storming out before dessert was even served."
"He looked at me like I was a business acquisition, Damon. Like I was a merger he'd already decided was beneath him." My voice cracked, and I hated it, hated that Kieran Frost had gotten under my skin in the space of a single dinner when men twice his size hadn't managed it in the ring. "And the worst part is I don't even get a say. Not in this. Not in anything. Not since I was ten years old and Father decided which parts of me were allowed to survive."
"Sit down."
"I don't want to sit down. I want to hit something until I stop thinking about his face."
"That's exactly why you're going to sit down." He guided me to the bench and crouched to unwrap the damage I'd done to myself, careful and precise, the way he'd taped my hands before every title fight I'd ever won. "Three championship belts, and I've never once seen you come off the canvas looking like this. Not even against Delgado, and he broke your rib."
"This is different."
"I know." He pressed a cloth to my split knuckles. "A man in the ring, you can see coming. This one, you can't. That's what's actually eating at you, isn't it? Not just that he was cruel. That he was cruel and you didn't see it coming, and now you're stuck with him regardless."
I didn't answer because he was right, and I didn't trust my voice not to break further if I tried.
He finished wrapping the last knuckle, then sat back on his heels, studying me the way he did in the corner between rounds when a fight wasn't going my way, and I needed something honest instead of comforting.
"Can I say something you're not going to like?"
"When has that ever stopped you?"
"I've watched you bleed in that ring more times than I can count, just to prove a point to your Alpha." He didn't soften it, didn't dress it up the way Caroline might have, and somehow that made it land harder. "I've watched you break yourself trying to get that man to finally look at you like you're more than a legacy he's polishing for his own name." He shook his head slowly, folding the leftover gauze back into its tin. "And he never has, Seraphina. Not once. Not after your first title. Not after your third. This marriage isn't any different. It's just one more ring he's throwing you into."
Something in the way he said it made me look at him a little longer than I meant to, the particular care a man takes with his words around the edges of something he wasn't saying outright. Damon had trained fighters under my father for twenty years. He knew things about this house I'd never thought to ask him.
I said nothing.
The words sat in my chest like a hit I hadn't seen coming, the kind that doesn't hurt right away but leaves you standing there waiting for the pain to catch up to the impact. I stared down at my bandaged knuckles, at the blood already seeping faintly through clean gauze, and let myself feel the full, quiet weight of a truth I'd spent thirteen years refusing to look at directly. He was right. He'd always been right. And somehow hearing it out loud, from someone who'd actually been in the room every time it happened, hurt worse than any of the times I'd almost admitted it to myself in the dark.
Damon didn't rush me. He let the silence sit exactly as long as it needed to, the same patience he'd shown me since I was too small to reach the bag without a stool.
"So here's my advice, for whatever it's worth." He met my eyes, steady, unflinching, once he was certain I'd actually heard him. "Live a little. Move into this the way you've always moved into everything else. I've watched you defeat the strongest fighters this territory has ever produced. Do the same thing here. Stop waiting for your Alpha to hand you a victory that means something. Go take one."
I let his words settle into something colder, something steadier than the rage that had brought me to that bag in the first place.
Kieran Frost will never bow to any woman.
Let him believe that. Let him walk into this marriage thinking the war was already won before the first round.
He doesn't bow to anyone. Neither do I.
Let the war begin.
- Writer
