Instead, Wanda Moore looked him dead in the eye, her gaze as sharp as a razor.
"You sure about that, baby?"
Four words. No tremor. No hesitation.
Brock’s face flushed a dark, violent crimson. Enraged by her unshakable composure, he lost all control. He lashed out and slammed the thick stack of hundred-dollar bills directly across her cheek.
Smack.
The force of the stack cracked against her face, and the paper band broke. Individual hundred-dollar bills exploded into the air, fluttering down like dead leaves scattered by an autumn gale, blanketing the mat around their feet.
"Hit me!" Brock screamed, veins bulging in his thick neck, spittle flying from his lips. "Pick up that money and hit me if you've got any dignity left!"
Wanda did not look down at the scattered bills. She did not touch her stinging cheek.
Slowly, deliberately, she slipped her leather purse off her shoulder and set it down on the clean edge of the mat. The movement was so serene, so ritualistic, that the ambient noise in the gym completely vanished.
She reached up with both hands. With a single practiced motion, she unpinned the silver chain holding her reading glasses, folded them neatly, and slid them into the front pocket of her cardigan.
Then, she rolled up her left sleeve.
And then, she stepped forward onto the mat.
In the far corner of the gym, sitting quietly on a folding stool behind the training desk, was Marcus Vance.
Marcus was fifty-four years old, balding, with bad knees and a chronic posture problem. He wasn’t a flashy fighter. He was Brock’s co-trainer and pad-holder—the man who cleaned up the sweat, taped the ankles, and kept the gym running while Brock chased social media fame. Marcus rarely spoke, and he almost never interfered with Brock’s outbursts.
As Wanda Moore stepped onto the center mat and assumed her fighting stance—left foot back, hips squared, hands open in a relaxed, deceptive guard—Marcus Vance froze.
The towel slipped from his hands and hit the floor.
His eyes widened until the whites showed all around. The color drained from his face so fast he looked like a corpse. His breathing hitched, turning into a dry, panicked rattle in his throat.
No, Marcus thought, his mind racing back decades through old VHS tapes, dusty gym basements, and forgotten tournament finals in Atlanta and Tokyo. No... it can’t be. It’s impossible. She retired twenty years ago. She’s... she’s...
Wanda shifted her weight. Her posture altered by a fraction of a millimeter—a subtle, microscopic drop of her center of gravity, the signature posture taught only in elite traditional Shotokan academies of the late 1980s.
It was the stance of The Phantom.
Marcus remembered watching her at the 1991 Pan American trials. He remembered watching her dismantle a two-hundred-pound heavyweight kickboxer in sparring with a single lightning-fast counter-strike that left the man unconscious before he hit the canvas. The martial arts world had whispered rumors for years about Wanda Moore—rumors that she could strike with the speed of a striking cobra and disappear before the human eye could process the motion.
And Brock Anderson—arrogant, ignorant, bloated on his own mediocre local titles—was standing right in front of her, chin exposed, hands lowered in total contempt.
Panic seized Marcus’s chest with icy claws.