Acts of Violence
Every tragedy needs an audience.
Across circuses and cabarets, jousting lists and revival tents, ballet companies and touring bands, the traveling entertainment world runs on the same old bargain: give the crowd what they came for, and don't let them see what it costs you.
Because underneath every spotlight is the same question: what do we owe the people who watch us, and what do we owe ourselves — and how much is either side willing to bleed to find out.
Some people only ever learn the price of their entertainment the hard way.
The show, as they say, must go on.
Ariana Rossi didn't plan to become a personal trainer. She planned a lot of things that didn't work out — a marriage, a career, a life that looked good on paper. What she found instead was a gym, a calling, and five years of being quietly, persistently underestimated by the one person in the building whose opinion she'd never admit to wanting.
Killian McMahon has been wrong about Ari since the day she walked in. He knows it somewhere underneath all the reasons he's told himself otherwise. He just isn't ready to look at her long enough to admit it.
When their gym's new Elite Transformation Bootcamp forces them into twelve weeks of co-leading clients, close quarters, and a training philosophy war neither is willing to lose, the friction they've carefully maintained for five years stops being so careful. What starts as a disaster — professionally, personally, and in every way two people can manage in a supply closet — becomes something neither of them has a name for yet. Something that keeps happening. Something that's getting harder to call a mistake.
Resistance Training is a rivals-to-lovers contemporary romance about two trainers too stubborn to fall in love gracefully, and too far gone to stop themselves from falling anway.