Page 34 of Hard Bargain

He did. His body understood the lesson the second Cassian forced him into it, but actually applying it in motion was another matter.

They kept going. Long enough for Knox to lose track of time, long enough for his body to start protesting every movement. Cassian didn’t go easy on him, but he wasn’t trying to humiliate him either. He pushed, corrected, demonstrated, then expected Knox to absorb it fast enough to try again. More than once Knox found himself staring up at fluorescent lights, lungs burning while Cassian stood over him waiting to get up.

“Hands up unless you want to lose teeth.”

“Don’t reach.”

“Watch my shoulders, not my hands.”

“Don’t wait for permission.”

Slowly, it began to click. The hits still came, the mistakes still happened, but he improved. Cassian noticed. Knox could tell by the way the corrections got shorter.

“Again.”

They reset. Cassian stepped in, expecting that same reaction he’d been getting for the past ten minutes. Knox didn’t give it. He moved differently. It wasn’t elegant, but it was enough to break the pattern.

“There,” Cassian said. “That’s it.”

Knox didn’t stop to think. He moved again, his shoulder turned, his hand came up, and this time it landed. The crack of knuckles against bone seemed louder than it should have been.

Cassian’s head snapped sideways.

Everything stopped. Knox froze, breath catching, his own surprise nearly outweighing the adrenaline.

Cassian went very still, then slowly lifted a hand to his nose. When he pulled it away, bright blood streaked his knuckles.

“I—”

Cassian looked at the blood before grinning in a way that was frankly a little alarming. “There you go,” he said, sounding genuinely delighted. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

He wiped the blood away with complete indifference and looked back at Knox with a new kind of intensity.

“Again.”

Knox blinked. “You’re not serious—”

Cassian was already moving. This time he came in faster, harder, like the hit had flipped something instead of slowing him down. There was no rhythm to it now, no warning, just relentless pressure forcing him to move or get dropped.

Knox moved with it, took the hits he couldn’t avoid, and gave back whenever he spotted an opening. None of it was clean, but it was real.

Cassian let out a short laugh. “That’s it. Don’t stop now.”

Knox’s lungs burned, his muscles shaking with the effort, but he stayed on his feet. Because he understood what Cassian had been trying to teach him. This wasn’t about winning. It was about not breaking.

And somewhere beneath the exhaustion, Knox kept pushing back.

* * *

By evening, the ache had settled in properly. His shoulder throbbed where he’d taken the worst of the hits. His ribs weren’t much better. Every shift of his weight reminded him of it, like his body hadn’t quite decided whether to recover or just remain in a permanent state of protest.

Knox sat at the far end of the couch while the TV flickered in front of them. His mother controlled the remote, chain-smoking through some entertainment gossip show with the volume loud enough to make ignoring it impossible.

On-screen, a perfectly polished blonde host smiled beside footage from some red carpet event. “We have to talk about last night’s Hollywood gala, because yes, Jacob Wolfe and Liam Hart actually did it. They made their first official public appearance as a couple.”

The screen cut to a frenzy of camera flashes, reporters shouting over each other as a sleek black car pulled up outside some fancy event. The cameras exploded as the two men stepped out.

There he was.