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“Until you have to leave,” Scarlett supplies, reading my hesitation with uncanny perception. “Can we—I mean…do you have time to train some more before that?”
Her wide, hopeful eyes are my undoing. I should leave now, before things get...complicated. Should cut our time short. Keep my distance. Treat her like the walking dead woman she is.
But instead, I hear myself saying, “Yeah. I got time. Get up.”
Scarlett scrambles to comply, fists raised eagerly as I launch into a series of close-quarters defensive drills. The steady cadence of grunts and fist-on-flesh impacts fills the still air as I walk her through shielding techniques and grappling counters. And when I feel like she’s getting lazy about it, I immobilize her against the wooden pillar again, face to face this time, her wrists in my hands, held tight behind her back.
She twists in my grasp, muscles straining, tendons standing out in vivid relief along her elegant neck, sweat glistening on her skin. Her hips grind shamelessly against mine, teeth gritted as she fights my restraint.
That same rush from before floods through me again, my thighs clenching convulsively.
God, this woman is going to be the death of me.
I let her go and point at her. “You need to be better than that. You’d be cooling already if I really wanted you dead.”
“You do, though,” she says. “Want me dead. Don’t you?”
Why’d she have to go and bring that up? And it’s not that I want her dead, I just have my orders. But there’s no point playing semantics.
“Yeah, I want you dead,” I tell her. “But not yet. So in the meantime, be better.”
By the time I call a halt, we’re both covered in dust and sweat, and her bangs are matted to her forehead. Scarlett accepts a fresh bottle of water gratefully, gulping it down while I lean against a splintered beam to catch my breath.
She takes a step closer, running the back of her wrist across her brow to get the damp hair out of her eyes. “Seems weird, is all,” she says.
“What?” I ask blankly.
“That you did all that to get away from Grandmother, only to join up with someone else who expects you to follow orders, no questions asked. I thought you wanted to be free?”
“That’s not—” I start to snap, and then catch myself. She’s just looking for a rise. “I gotta go.” I grab the canteen, leave another six bottles of water, gather up the empties and the garbage, which I’ll trash at a rest stop on the highway back into the city.
“When will you come back?”
There’s that damned vulnerability in her voice again, that longing that stirs things in me I can’t allow. I need to get gone before she chips away at my resolve any further.
“Tomorrow,” I mutter. I have to look away from the naked hope shining in her eyes.
“And will we go after Grandmother soon?”
I push off the beam. “Finish your water. I gotta roll.”
She just re-caps it and hands it to me. I spin around to head for the door, suddenly desperate to escape. But Scarlett’s voice freezes me.
“Lyssa, wait.”
I turn back, only halfway, because I know what’s coming. She asks every time.
“Can’t you stay a little longer? It’s…it’s lonely out here.”
No point pondering what ifs and could-have-beens. My path is set. And I have my orders. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I repeat, already shrugging into the battered leather of my bike jacket. “Keep training.”
I leave without looking back. I can’t look at her or I’ll never be able to make myself go. Firing up the bike, I peel out onto the dirt road that leads to the highway, but I can’t put any distance between me and the ache in my chest.
There’s no room in my life for softness or regrets. I stamp down the swell of feeling as viciously as I would the face of an enemy. A Sokolov, maybe. Or an Imperioli.
But not Scarlett. No, when I kill her, it’ll be different. Swift. And kind.
She won’t see it coming.
