“You asked for it, bitch,” he hissed.

He lunged. But he didn’t reach for a grapple. Driven by pure humiliated ego, Greg closed his fist and threw a looping overhand right directly at my face.

A street brawl punch. A punch meant to break bone.

My mother screamed. Chloe covered her mouth.

But as the fist hurtled toward my jaw, the world didn’t speed up. It slowed to a dead crawl.

To the untrained eye it must have looked like magic. To me it was muscle memory, drilled into my bones over twenty-two years of surviving things Greg couldn’t watch on a movie screen without flinching.