Accidentally Yours (Merffy Kizzmet) novel Chapter 222

Lola

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Weeks blurred into a rhythm that felt like penance and progress in equal measure.

Eat. Train. Ice bath. Steam. Enzo. Sleep.

Repeat.

It was a pattern that scraped her raw in all the right ways. Something inside her liked the ache, the order, the quiet violence of it. Maybe that was the penance part the way she could feel the old chaos bleeding out one bruise at a time.

The shop stayed dark her choice. No needles until the ghost was handled. Every morning she passed the CLOSED sign and felt the itch in her fingers to work, to draw bloodless lines that meant something. Then she remembered the marble urn, the smell of roses that weren’t supposed to be black, and kept walking.

Mornings belonged to Dom. Afternoons to Rafael. Evenings to bruises, Enzo, and the kind of distraction that left her either loose–limbed and boneless or so wired she had to pace the glass wall until he reeled her back in with a hand on her hip and a word in her ear. Breathe, gattina, She’d breathe. Then stop. Then start again.

By the end of week three, her body had become a ledger of small pains and quiet victories.

A constellation of bruises mapped the weeks across her skin–tiny proofs that she was building something new out of herself. She was tired in a way that made her honest. She liked that.

Okay, pain with purpose. That’s progress. Or masochism. Hard to tell anymore.

Dom’s mornings were chaos disguised as drills.

“Again,” he’d say, holding the focus pads high.

She’d jab. Cross. Slip. Elbow, Knee.

“Better,” he’d grunt. “Again.”

Sweat ran into her collarbone, her shoulders screamed, and somewhere under the ache was the smallest flicker of pride.

Typical. My body’s on strike and Dom’s grading me on form.

He taught like an older brother who’d learned everything the hardest way and wanted her to have the cheat codes. Sloppy, fast, practical. No pretty. Get home alive.

“Guy grabs your ponytail?” he’d mutter, catching her braid on purpose so she had to pivot out fast. “Don’t spin cute. Break a finger. Yours or his. Preferably his.”

“Charming,” she’d deadpan–and do it anyway.

He made her fight from corners, from the floor, against a wall. He made her laugh when she didn’t want to. He called her shrimp and have interchangeably, and the one time she warned, “Call me shrimp again, he’d just grinned and said, Yes, ma’am, like a man who’d

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10:48 Thu, Oct 16

Chapter 222

survived worse.

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They operated like siblings trapped in the back seat too long. He’d nudge; she’d smack. He’d talk shit; she’d drown him out with whatever song she hijacked on the gym speakers that day. (He pretended to hate her playlists. She pretended not to see him tapping the beat against his thigh.)

“Hands up.”

“Eyes open.”

“Feet steady.”

“Brain on.”

He smirked. “Finally found it?”

She grinned around the mouthguard. “Want to borrow it?”

If I keep trash–talking, maybe he won’t notice my lungs are about to explode like dying star.

He sparred her like she was a problem to be solved, not a girl to be protected. That was the love in it. Dom never pulled a shot that should have landed; he just made sure that when it did, she learned the why.

The only time the sibling energy cracked was the day she stumbled into a clinch too hard and he tightened without thinking–old instinct, big hands locking for control. Something inside her flashed white, a shard of memory that tasted like metal. Her elbow snapped up before her brain could veto it. She caught him clean on the cheekbone. The thud echoed off concrete.

Silence. The gym held its breath.

Dom blinked, then barked a laugh, staggering back with a hand to his face. “Jesus, Lola!”

Gino–who’d been leaning on the rail heckling like a proud aunt–wheeled around and whistled low. “She drop you?”

“She tried to kill me,” Dom declared, delighted.

Lola, heart thudding, mouth dry, bumped his glove. “You were hogging the air.”

Not panic. Not fear. Just lightning. And maybe relief that she still struck first.

The moment passed, but it left a small, sharp mark in the day.

Afternoons at Rafael’s were a different kind of punishment.

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