I’d suggest she’d try therapy, but I’m not that much of a hypocrite. Murdering our enemies is a much better use of our time than talking out our feelings.
Besides, I don’t trust anyone on campus not to tattle to the higher ups. Samantha is in a precarious enough position as it is.
Samantha’s kick is a bit too slow, but I bend with it anyway.
“Yeah, like that,” I say. “But with more force. I can take it.”
She grumbles, but she tries again. This time, she catches meoff-guard with the quick kick to my shin, but I only grin at her as pain shoots down my leg.
“You’re insane,” Samantha mutters.
I clench my fists, but I force myself to keep smiling. “I’ve been told.”
“Here, Samantha, practice with me,” Carly says. “Pandora can watch our technique.”
How are they supposed to learn if they spar with each other? They’ve got no reason to hurt each other. But I step back anyway, and I watch the two of them practice the moves I’d taught. Shins, knees, jabs into the armpits and knees to the groin. They’re doing it all in slow motion, barely touching each other, but at least they get the gist of it.
After a few rounds of me correcting their stances and movements, Carly bends forward and rests her hands on her thighs. “Okay. I’m exhausted.”
“I’m done for today too,” Samantha says.
Already? We’ve barely gotten started. I remind myself that the two of them haven’t been training to kill since they were seven, and that they’ve barely even been training to run.
“Make sure to do cardio every morning,” I say. “None of this will help you if your energy flags after five seconds.”
“Funny. Reaper says the same thing,” Carly complains.
“And he’s right, for once.” I walk over to the punching bag and run my hand down the length of it.
I imagine somebody grabbing Carly and Samantha, all of their training going to waste because they’re scared motionless, and my fist lashes out. I punch the bag a few times, and I wish I had my knife so I could slash it up and destroy it. I kick it too, over and over, until I’m the one who’s completely breathless.
When I’m finished, Samantha surprises me by handing me a sports bottle of water.
“You’ve been doing this forever, haven’t you?” she asks. “It’s easy for you.”
I take a long gulp from the bottle before nodding. “Yeah. But we’ll make it get easy for you, too.”
I go over to where Carly is sitting against the wall and join her. After a few seconds of hesitation, Samantha sits down on my other side.
“You fight like my brother,” Carly says quietly.
I’ve seen how Reaper fights. He beat River pretty badly during the street fight. River will say it’s because he was already exhausted by that point and Reaper is bigger, but that sounds like the excuses of a man bested.
I grin. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Carly shrugs. “Our father taught him. I asked my dad to teach me too, once, but he said ‘chicks’ didn’t need to know how to fight.”
“Okay, first off, fuck your dad,” I say. “We absolutely need to know how to fight. Violence is always the answer when people are being dicks to us.”
“It’s really not,” Samantha says, taking a drink from her own water bottle. Her eyes go distant, and her jaw clenches. “Well, not the first answer, anyway.”
“And violence won’t prevent the bad things from happening,” Carly agrees, quieter. “It wouldn’t have stopped…”
She’s talking about that night we met, where I’d found her roofied in the Kappa Alpha frat house.
Maybe violence wouldn’t have stopped Declan from dosing her drink, but the knife I thrust into his thigh might make him reconsider doing it again.
I should have gone for his heart and made sure he never could do it again.
