Eight Gyms vs. The Useless Heiress The Masked 10-0 Underground Queen Just Came Downstairs novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: The Kitchen Table

Cal's POV

Declan Kilbride was at the kitchen table at six in the morning, with a pot of coffee and a plate of toast he hadn't touched.

I came in holding Stahl's hood in one hand and his card in the other.

I had a speech ready. I'd written it on the stairs.

"Mr. Kilbride, I have to tell you something about your daughter, and about me, and I'd like you to hear all of it before you throw me out."

Declan looked at the hood.

He looked at the card.

He gave a sigh I had never heard.

It wasn't the Short Sigh, which belongs to Birdie, or the Bills Sigh, or the Long. It was lower than all three, and it came from the bottom of his chest.

"Sit down, Cal," he said. "Eat something. You'll need it for the part where you find out I'm not surprised."

I sat.

"She's Hush," I said.

"I know."

"She's been Hush for ten weeks."

"She's been hitting a bag in my coal cellar at night for a year." He poured me a coffee. "I found the wraps in the wash. Black cotton, and the left hand was wound twice as tight as the right. Nobody does that to a hand they're not hitting with."

"A year."

"I went down one night and stood on the stairs. She was throwing the left. The whole house shook." He pushed the toast across the table toward me. "I've trained three champions, Cal. I know what I was looking at."

"You never said a word to her."

"I said one sentence to that girl when she was seventeen, and she heard a different one for eight years." Declan looked into his mug. "What would the second sentence do?"

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