He flexed his fingers.

His knuckles were already bruising. He knew better than to use his hands. A head like hers, he was lucky if he didn’t fracture something.

She groaned, rolled to her back, and opened her eyes.

He stood over her, scanned her over to be sure she was okay, and said, “You’ve forgotten who the fuck you’re dealing with.”

She pulled herself up and stayed motionless for a woozy minute.

He kept a cautious distance, dug a bandage out of his bag and, wrapping his hand, said, “Just because I like you, just because I get you, doesn’t mean I’m your doormat. You want to hurt me, you’re going to have to find a better way to do it.”

She moved to the chair and sat, sizing him up, and he could see her brain plotting, scheming, unable or unwilling to quit, because all she knew was how to brawl dirty and she had no concept of tapping out.

“Don’t make me fight you,” he said. “The last thing I want is to hurt you—it’s the whole fucking opposite of what I want—but I will if I have to, and that’s not how you want this to end.”

He wrapped a final twist and tucked the bandage tail under.

“You had a shitty childhood,” he said. “You were treated horribly, unfairly, abusively, but you know? At least you had a family. Your mother, brother, they might be crap at showing it, but they actually do love you.”

“I don’t have to listen to this,” she said.

“No,” he said. “You don’t.” He reached for his bag, tossed it on the bed, dumped in the shirts he’d left hanging over the floor lamp. “If you’re happy with your life the way it is, you don’t need me in it.”

“You’re right,” she said. “I don’t need you.”

He zipped the bag shut. Strode to the bathroom, flipped on the light, checked for anything he might have missed, flipped it off, headed for the door, and stopped there, facing it. He said, “You think I don’t know what it’s like to fear abandonment? I never knew my father, and the only memory I have of my mother is her bullet-riddled body. I was handed over as a trophy to the guy who ordered her dead, and he left me to wander his villa like a dog. I would have starved if not for the maids who snuck me food, or died from exposure if they hadn’t brought the little they could spare from their own homes until I was old enough to learn how to steal for myself.