"You're not a fucking truck, MK." Steele's eyes hardened to granite, his jaw clenching in anger at my shitty analogy. I turned my back on him, not wanting to continue this conversation in public... or at all.
His motorcycle roared to life as I let the foyer door swing shut behind me, and I stalked over to the elevators without glancing back. As much as I hated to admit it, he'd dented my armor. I needed a solid bitch session with Bree to hammer the dents out and prepare for another onslaught the next day.
I wasn't stupid enough to think they'd give up so easily, and a small—okay, not so small—part of me was glad for that. As angry as I was, as hurt and heartbroken as they'd made me, I hadn't magically lost those feelings that had been developing before the truth bomb dropped. I wasn't fucking over them.
Any of them.
The elevator doors slid open on my floor, and I found my new neighbor on his way out of his apartment.
"Hey Cass," I greeted him, trying to wipe the torrent of emotions off my face. The Reapers weren't my friends, and I wasn't about to go giving them anything to use against me later. Well... anything more than they already knew.
The ink-covered man just scowled at me. Also known as his resting fuck-you face. It was like a resting bitch face but seven hundred times more threatening and intimidating.
"You look angry," he commented in a growl like breaking rock.
I hitched a brow, faintly amused. "Yeah, you could call it that."
Cass continued staring at me while I fished my keys out of my bag and unlocked my door. When he didn't say anything more, I paused with my hand on the door frame and cocked my head to the side.
"Is there something you need to say?"
His frown dipped a fraction deeper, if that was possible. "You got shit to do right now?" he asked, surprising the hell out of me. I’d thought he was just going to comment on... I dunno. The weather?
"Um," I replied, thinking about my bitch session with Bree, which could definitely wait. "No, not really. Why?"
The scary-ass gangster dude just nodded his head, like he'd made his mind up about something. "Grab a change of clothes," he instructed me. "You can vent some of that rage on a punching bag."
My brows shot up, and I quickly took in his work-out clothes and the duffel bag slung over his shoulder. Clearly, I'd caught him on his way to the gym.
"Hurry up," he added as I stood there gawking. "I don't have all day."
Curiosity—as always—won out in my brain, and I hurried into my new apartment to get changed. I barely had anything of my own, having walked out of my father's mansion—or Archer's mansion—with nothing but the clothes on my back. I'd been keeping a ledger of what I owed Bree, despite her insistence that I didn't need to pay her back, just the same as I was keeping a ledger of what I owed Zane for giving me a place to live.
When I regained what was rightfully mine, I'd be able to pay them both back. With interest. But until then, I was very much their charity case.
"Ready," I announced, leaving my apartment once more. I found Cass leaning on the wall beside the elevators looking decidedly bored.
His dark eyes gave me a brief once over, then he jerked a quick nod. "Let's go."
The gym he took me to was within easy walking distance and one of the Reaper's businesses, judging by the way the girl at the reception desk greeted Cass. He led the way across the busy gym to where heavy punching bags hung from the ceiling and dropped his duffel to the floor.
"You ever take a boxing class or something before?" he asked me. They were the first words he'd said since we left the apartment building, and I was sort of getting used to his silence.
"Uh, no," I replied, shaking my head. "Kody and Steele had just started giving me some self-defense training right before I left, but that's about it."
Cass grunted. "Self-defense, huh?"
I shifted my feet, thinking about the extra tricks Steele had been teaching me—how to break someone's fingers without a weapon or how to make a grown man pass out with just a pinched nerve in his neck. "Yeah, mostly."
The scary-ass dude just gave me a blank look, like he didn't believe me, then unzipped his bag to pull out a pair of boxing gloves. "You look like you work out. You'll be fine."
I glanced down at the huge gloves in his hands, then wrinkled my nose. He seemed to notice the same thing as me and frowned.
"Wait here," he ordered, dropping his gloves back into the bag and stalking in the direction of the reception once more.
More than a few of the guys working out in the gym gave me suspicious looks—some of them were even openly hostile—but I knew they wouldn't do shit when I was there under Cass's protection. I did, however, make a mental note to never come to the gym without him. Something told me more than a few Reapers begrudged my presence in their territory.
"Here," Cass grunted, returning with a pair of hot-pink boxing gloves in his hands, the tags still attached. He worked silently, taping my hands like I'd seen the guys do a hundred times, then helping me put the gloves on.
He showed me a couple of very basic moves, then pointed to a sandbag and instructed me to do my worst.
I was a bit sheepish at first, but when Cass rolled his eyes at me and suggested I picture Archer's face, things changed.
When Cass came back over to me some time later, I was sweaty and puffing and my arms were like jelly... but fucking hell, I felt better for it.
We didn't speak—shocker—as he helped me unwrap my hands and tucked the pink gloves into his duffel bag. He didn't offer to let me use the locker rooms at the gym, and I didn't ask. We just walked back to the apartment building as we were and silently made our way back up to our shared floor.
"Hey Cass," I said as I reached my door and he continued along to his, "can we do that again some time? I think I needed it."
He twitched a brow at me. "No shit." His mouth tightened, then he gave a short nod. "Sure. I'll train you. But don't ever go to that gym without me. Lots of Reapers would love to try and send a message to your boys through you."
I scowled. "Not my boys."
Cass made a noise that I thought might be a laugh. "Sure thing, kid."
Yeah. I wasn't buying my bullshit, either.
6
The next week passed fairly uneventfully. Of course, Kody wasn't joking about transferring to my sociological foundations class, so I had to deal with him again on Thursday, and Steele had taken to just being freaking everywhere, so I couldn't get him out of my head.
One small mercy: I hadn't seen Archer again. Not once.
That should have made me happy, but come Friday, I found myself hitting the boxing bag ten times harder than usual as I worked through all the complicated emotions his absence had caused me.
Cass hadn't been "training" me like Kody did with his clients. He mostly just gave me pointers or corrections, then let me vent all my frustration by belting the sandbag. The few instructions he did offer me, though, were incredibly helpful.
"You ever train anyone else?" I asked him on our way back to our apartment building after our session. "You're good at it."