Page 83 of Nemesis

I shake my head. Opening up to him is easy. It’s always been dangerously easy. One of my fingers mindlessly lifts to my cheek, tracing the scabbed skin and tight stitches as I try to figure out how to get him to leave me alone. I don’t even realize I’m doing it until Vas’s gaze catches on the action with fierce intensity.

“Don’t,” I force out, dropping my hand.

“What?”

“Don’t look at me like that.” My eyes narrow. “I feel hideous enough.” Though hideous isn’t quite the right word. The scar is slowly healing, but it’s still angry and red, and I know it’s the first thing everyone sees when they look my way. Every time I look in the mirror, I see something new. A victim. A lesson. A weakness. The only thing I don’t see is me.

The old me.

I try not to look anymore. The lights stay off when I use the facilities.

Sudden movement jerks me from my thoughts. Vasiliy tugs one sleeve of his shirt until a pale, raised scar on his bicep is visible beneath the sprawling abstract ink. Not one of his new injuries. Those are still blue and tender.

“Do you see this?” he asks, guiding my fingers to the marred flesh. I trace the thick strip of skin. I like the sturdy texture. Not because it feels like a scar, but because it feels like Vasiliy.

“When the body heals from a large enough trauma, it doesn’t just grow back,” he explains, face going uncharacteristically serious. “It grows under and over, layer by layer, until it has reinforced the wound with so many coatings that almost nothing could ever slice that spot again.”

My next swallow goes down like a jagged stone. I don’t look away from the raised line below my fingers. Not as my vision blurs and some of those wretched emotions come racing back. It’s only when his hand captures my chin that I glance up and meet his stoic gaze.

“Your anger does not fester like an infection, Octavia. It hardens like a scar. Proof of your strength and resilience despite the horror.”

He makes it sound so easy to be strong.

“I want to harden,” I choke out, searching his decisive expression. “But I think I break, instead.”

“No, moya zlaya.” His head shakes in one swift movement. “I’ve known how powerful you were from the second I saw you. My angry girl.”

“Moya zlaya.” I taste the words in my mouth, remembering all of the iterations I’d heard of it in the past few weeks. “That’s what it means?”

He finally told me.

“I said we’d get out of there, didn’t I?”

My next breath catches.

“So you’ll let me out of training today?” I divert optimistically.

He smiles. “If you can knock me to the floor right here and now, we can skip training today.”

Asshole.

It only takes him thirty minutes to get me dressed and downstairs to the courtyard, where he hung a heavy punching bag from a nearby pole.

I don’t want to admit that he’s right about the sun and wind, though he heavily underestimated the draw of having a beautiful, tattooed man kneel before me to secure my pink wraps around my knuckles. I’m sure as hell not gonna tell him. He doesn’t need any more confidence than he already has.

“That’s not the combination,” he snaps. “Pay attention: two, two, duck, three, six.”

I huff out a breath of exhaustion, stepping back from the swinging bag. “I don’t like numbers. Can you rename them?”

“You’ll get used to the numbers. Two is your cross, three is your hook. I hope duck is self-explanatory, but I’d be happy to give you another lesson on its importance.”

Hell no. I’m not falling for those kinds of lessons anymore.

“Can you say the combination again with the words instead of numbers?” I complain. “I don’t want to learn the numbers.”

I don’t want to learn anything, in fairness. I’m pretty sure every item of clothing on my body is drenched in sweat. My legs ache in places that never got used in my dance career.

“You have to learn the numbers,” he says. “You’re just trying to keep me talking so I don’t notice you’ve stopped. Go again.”