He had thrown his best combinations, championship-level strikes, and a truck driver in a grease-stained jacket had blocked every single one. “You think you’re better than me?” Brett’s voice cracked. “You think because you can block a few hits, you’re something?” He swung wild.

A haymaker with everything behind it. Curtis sidestepped. The fist hit air. Brett stumbled forward. When he turned around, Curtis was standing in the same spot.

Same posture. Same breathing. Same expression. The students looked at each other. Something was wrong. They could feel it. Their undefeated champion was throwing everything he had at a truck driver, and the truck driver wasn’t even sweating.

Brett charged. He grabbed Curtis and drove him backward into the side of a parked truck. The metal boomed. Curtis’s back hit the door panel hard. Brett pinned him there, forearm across his throat. “Fight me,” Brett hissed through clenched teeth. “Stop standing there like a coward and fight me.”

Curtis looked down at the forearm on his throat, then up at Brett’s face. His eyes were different now. Not angry, not scared. Something older.

Something trained into him in places Brett couldn’t imagine.

“You sure?” Curtis asked. His voice hadn’t changed. Still low, still steady. Brett pressed harder. “I said, fight.” Curtis’s lip was swollen.

A thin line of blood sat at the corner of his mouth. He wiped it with the back of his hand, looked at the blood, then looked at Brett one more time. “As you wish,” he said quietly. And for the first time all night, he moved his hands into position. Not fists, not a boxer’s guard. Something else entirely.

Fingers open, palms angled. Weight shifted to the balls of his feet. A stance that no karate dojo in America would recognize. But any special forces operator in the world would.

The parking lot went quiet. Not the kind of quiet that comes from boredom.

The kind that comes when every person watching suddenly understands they are about to see something they have never seen before. Brett noticed the stance. He didn’t recognize it. But something deep in his body did. Some animal instinct that lived below training and trophies and ego.

A signal that said this man is not what you think he is. Curtis stood perfectly balanced. His feet were shoulder width apart.