Page 85 of Dublin Brute

The girls hustle off, and I study the dynamics of the group. The cliques split away from the whole and there’s one odd man out.

The little tiger cat.

“What’s with the kid with the collar?” I ask Mr. O’Toole.

“Ah, Ruby. She’s going through a rough patch. Her mom left and her dad is a dismal man who got put away for trading his kids for drugs.”

Fucking hell.“Who does she live with?”

“She and her two brothers were placed with an uncle, but he turned out to be as reliable as his sister. The super of her building set them up with some cots in an old storage room.”

Bryan’s gaze narrows. “In exchange for what?”

Mr. O’Toole shakes his head. “I couldn’t say.”

“So what was the trouble today?” I scan the back hallway, ensuring this conversation is still private. “What happened?”

“Her older brother got picked up for stealing and a city worker came by to investigate. Ruby took the younger brother and hid him until the worker left. She’ll be back, though, and they’ll get split up and sent into foster care.”

Shit.Kids like this do everything they can to stay out of the system. “What did the older brother steal?”

“He pocketed a couple of cans of soup at the local grocery store and got picked up in the parking lot.”

Food?The boy was only fighting to feed his siblings.I’m about to comment on that when the change room door opens and girls start coming back.

I agree the boy stealing is criminal—but not the way society sees it.

It’s criminal that society has failed these three so badly that it came to this.

The girls arrive back to the mats, their nervous energy practically buzzing in the air. Most of them can’t even muster the courage to look Bryan and me in the eye, their glances darting around as if searching for an escape route.

That’s not an uncommon reaction, but it is one that tugs at something deep inside me. Women shouldn’t need to be afraid of men—even big, brawny men—and certainly shouldn’t need to learn self-defense. Women also shouldn’t need men to protect them.

Women need men to stop making protection necessary.

In a perfect world, they’d be safe simply because they have the right to live their life unharmed.

Bryan catches my gaze from across the group and gives me a subtle nod. We both know the score—too many girls like these have fallen through the cracks, becoming statistics in a world that doesn’t care.

The weight of that sits like a fucking boulder in my gut.

“Welcome, ladies. I’m Bryan Quinn and this is my brother Brendan. You might know us as the Quinn twins or as the Dublin Beast and the Dublin Brute. Those are names given to us, not names we chose. In truth, the two of us are just teddy bears in giant Kodiak bodies.”

I snort. “Hilarious as that sounds, what Bryan is saying is that you have nothing to fear from us—ever.”

“Ever,” Bryan repeats. “And over the next few hours and the next classes, you’ll learn to trust us, and more importantly, trust yourselves.”

The girls look skeptical, but that’s fine. This ain’t our first outreach session. We’ll win them over soon enough.

I clap my hands together and their attention snaps to me. “All right, the first and most important rule we’re going to teachyou today is to always trust your gut. If something feels wrong, it usually is. The human survival instinct is primitive. It goes back to caveman days when dangers meant death. Your body will set off the alarm before your brain even knows what’s up.”

I give them a moment to think about that and then Bryan continues. “What are some sensations you feel when your survival instinct kicks in?”

The girls cast sideways glances at one another and the room falls quiet. The silence is broken when the tiger cat with the ebony spikes speaks up in the back. “The hair on the back of my neck and arms tingles.”

“Absolutely. That’s your senses heightening. What else?”

Nora

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