I’m Done Running

I’m Done Running
Lola

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 havoc 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 survived worse.
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.
Dom trained her to survive chaos. Rafael trained her to control it.
His facility was all clean lines and stainless discipline—old-school grit with a surgeon’s eye. He never raised his voice. He never had to. He ran a room like gravity; everything fell into orbit.
“Again,” he’d say, but softer than Dom. “This time slow enough you can name the muscles.”

She would. “Glute med. Hip flexor. Lats on the pull. Core for stabilization. Feet, always feet.”

“Good. Now fast.”

He corrected by inches. An angle. A breath. The difference between brute force and leverage, between clumsy shove and invisible theft.
“You want their balance, not their bones,” he’d murmur, palm light against her shoulder to show where she was lying to herself. “Bones break loud. Balance breaks quiet.”

“Bones make good music,” she’d mutter, and he’d smile like someone told him a secret.

He was curious about her—hungry for the architecture of her mind more than the spectacle of her violence. He asked questions between sets like puzzle pieces.
“What’s your favorite problem to solve?”
“The kind that thinks it’s unsolvable.”
“What makes you stop?”
“Tattooing. And Enzo.”
“Who taught you to be mean?”
“A woman with a cane and a kitchen that smelled like smoke and oranges.”
He watched the way she absorbed instruction and turned it into something slippery and personal. If Dom trained her like a street fight, Rafael trained her like a thesis.

By week five she was never not sore. Her joints sang when she sat. Her back complained when she stood. She started to understand why old men groaned getting out of chairs and why they smiled while doing it. Pain was proof of forward motion.

Forward’s good. Forward means don’t look back. Easy math.

Every time she faltered, there was either a barked “Again,” or the memory of Enzo’s ring sliding against her jaw grounding, reminding. He wasn’t always there, but his presence lingered like muscle memory; the feel of command and comfort in one touch.

At night, he stretched her out like a ritual; calves, hamstrings, hips. He kissed the hurts he hadn’t made, and sometimes his mouth drifted. Sometimes she laced her fingers through his hair to take him right where she wanted him. He’d make a sound that was all heat and gratitude, the kind that made her forget what silence used to mean.

She sent him sinful little texts from the gym bathroom mirror: space buns and bloodlust don’t miss me too much, or guess what I choked out today (hint: ego, twice).
He replied hours later, mid-meeting, with six words that made her grin at her reflection.
Don’t start fires you can’t finish

She was fine. She told herself that often enough that it started to stick.
Fine-ish. Functioning counts, right?

The afternoon the ground shifted started like any other: resistance bands anchored to a steel column older than the building, shoulders smoked from pad work, sweat slick at her spine, hair wound into two red knots that made half the gym lose their train of thought.
“Keep the band alive,” Rafael said, standing just behind her shoulder. “If it goes slack, you start over.”
“Cruel,” she panted, fighting the pull.
“Efficient.”

He adjusted her stance, thumb brushing the crest of her hip just long enough to make her tuck. Precise. Unintrusive. Professional. She appreciated that.
“Good,” he murmured. “Hold.” A beat. “Breathe in your back.”

She did. The band trembled, then steadied. Arms shook. Jaw clenched. She thought about the look on Enzo’s face when she told him in a bathtub she wanted forever and how he’d looked wrecked and relieved in the same heartbeat. The band got easier. Funny.
“Enough,” Rafael said finally. “Reset.”

She let the tension go, arms fizzing. He tossed her a towel without looking; she caught it one-handed and scrubbed her face, mouth dry, heart an even drum.
He capped his water, tone casual.
“Reset your hands—Lucian grip. More efficient for counterbalance.”

The towel froze midair.
Lucian.
The name struck like static—familiar but out of place.
He kept talking, unaware he’d just pulled a thread loose.
“Helps you anchor without losing leverage. Try it again.”

Lucian.
Her father’s voice rose from memory: You’ll meet Lucian Rinaldi. He’ll give you the tour himself.
At the time it had meant nothing—a name, a face, a day she’d spent trying not to cry.
Now the edges sharpened. The marble halls. The smell of polish and perfume. The way that man had looked at her like he could already see her future carved in obedience.
It wasn’t revelation, exactly. More like recognition surfacing through dust—a name buried under fear, finally free to breathe.
Breathe. It’s just a name. Just a—
Nope. Her brain blue-screened mid-sentence.

Lucian.

Her mind rifled through old rooms until a face emerged—young-twenty, clean jaw, eyes too calm for their age. Gold watch. White shirt. That polite kind of beauty that made monsters easy to miss.
He’d shaken her hand like a promise and said he’d be seeing her very soon.
She’d been nine.
She remembered the cologne before she remembered the fear—something citrus and iron, like blood scrubbed clean. The smell followed her out of that building and into every nightmare that came after.
Of course it would come back like this. Mid-rep. Mid-breath. No warning, no mercy.
She forced herself to move.
“Like this?”

“Better,” Rafael said absently, nodding. “Good.”

The moment passed. The world settled. But something cold had started to hum beneath her ribs.
Under the shower’s roar, she let her face do what it wanted for thirty seconds. Mouth tight. Eyes flat. Then she scrubbed herself back into the person the world understood—smirk + steel + lipstick in the gym bag next to the wraps, because balance.

Don’t fall apart, rebuild prettier.

She dressed slow because her hamstrings were auditing her life choices.
Texted Enzo a picture of her bruised shins: your art ♥.
Enzo: mine. come home.
Lola: soon. possessive much?

The three dots started, stopped, started.
Enzo: Exceptionally
Warmth spread through her chest like a pulse she didn’t ask for. Annoying man. Perfect man.

The SUV was waiting where it always was. Thing 1 at the wheel. Thing 2 pretending not to scroll her Instagram like a teenager with a crush.
“Boss lady,” Thing 1 said.
“Gentle giants,” she returned, sliding in.
The tinted glass turned the city into something quietly watchable. She replayed the gym moment, frame by frame—the word, the tone, the echo it had pulled from the dark.
Lucian.
The name rolled through her mind like a slow detonation.
She didn’t know if she was breathing shallow from memory or anticipation. Both felt the same.
Either way, the ghost had a name now. And that meant he could bleed.

And I’m done running.