❝It's not blood that runs through my veins, but vengeance.❞
Tatum Braddock wants to beat her sister at a decades-long search for fortune.
Nathan Drake wants to find his long-lost brother and complete the mission they've dreamed of since childhood...
A DULL BURST OF PAIN travels across Tatum's knuckles as her gloved fist strikes the punching bag, sending it rearing back a few inches before it swings forward in retaliation and she punches it again. She doesn't waste any time spinning toward the wall and bending her knees. Her foot sends a powerful kick to the bag, pushing it even more off-balance, but a hand catches it before she can hit it once more.
"Slow down there, Black Widow," her trainer and friend, Ronan Hughes, says.
Tate glares at him, panting hard. "I wasn't done." She raises her boxing gloves and resumes a ready position. "Get out of my way."
"You're going to split the seams on this thing. What's with all the aggression?"
"I had a bad day at work."
Ronan switches his grip on the punching bag so his elbow is perched on top of it, leaning his weight onto the bag. One of his brows arches in disbelief. "You have Wednesdays off."
Damn him. Tate mentally curses Ronan for doing the bare minimum as a friend and listening to her when she rants about her job. Of course he knows that she doesn't work on Wednesdays— it's why she schedules their gym appointments then. She has to climb over the mid-week hurdle somehow, and beating something or someone up in kickboxing is the perfect way to do that.
Sometimes, they spar with each other, but this evening, Tate had wanted to use the punching bag instead. It's easier to picture her target that way. The side is where her foot connects to a rib cage. Her fist flies into a face near the top. Each satisfying smack! of her limbs into the bag had spurred her on, sending her into a frenzy, half-wild with adrenaline before Ronan had stopped her.
Because he's been doing nothing but observing and calling out tips for the past thirty minutes, Ronan looks impeccable. Tate isn't short, but he towers over her and the top of his head nearly clears the bag. His white tank top shows off his biceps (which are literally the size of Tate's face), and since he's built like some god, he gets a fair share of looks from both men and women during their sessions.
In contrast, Tate is dripping with sweat. Her hair, which had once been neatly secured with an elastic behind her head, is half falling out. Static-filled flyaways frame her gleaming face and stick to any bit of damp skin they can reach. If Ronan could easily make the cover of Men's Health, Tate would only make the front page of a newspaper for being mistaken for a corpse who'd recently been discovered in the Hudson River.
