“Pietro.”
Hoka’s voice stopped me before I reached the door.
I turned back.
He was still seated, one elbow resting loosely on the arm of the chair, expression unreadable in that maddening way of his that had once made me want to throw things at him on principle.
“What do you say to a training session? It’s been too long.”
There it was.
On the surface, an offer.
In reality, never just that.
Hoka had always used training as a way to get inside my head without asking questions outright. There had been entireweeks of my adolescence where the only real conversations we had happened with bruised ribs, a split lip, and sweat burning my eyes. He preferred truth when the body was too exhausted to dress it up.
My father gave him a pointed look from across the room, the kind that would have warned off almost any other man alive.
Hoka, naturally, ignored it.
And yet the look itself told me enough.
Alessandro Benetti did not relinquish control easily. In fact, he did not relinquish it at all unless the matter involved exactly three people in the world — my mother, my sister, and me. For us, he bent in ways he never would for anyone else.
A small, unwanted part of me was humbled every time I noticed it.
Another part was already annoyed that both he and Hoka had clearly decided I required handling.
I held my uncle’s gaze for a moment longer, then nodded once. “Fine.”
Matteo lifted his glass slightly as if in salute. “Try not to bleed on the floor. Lily will be furious.”
“She’s usually furious with you,” I said.
“That too.”
Hoka rose without another word and headed for the back of the house. I followed him through the private corridor that led down to the training room my father had built years ago, ostensibly for security drills and private instruction, though in practice it became the place where the men in my family went when words were either insufficient or too dangerous.
The room smelled faintly of leather, steel, and old sweat. Familiar enough that some part of my body recognized it before my mind did. Mats covered most of the floor, but the far wall held racks of training weapons, padded staffs, knives, and,behind locked glass, the real steel my father preferred not to leave unattended should Victoria one day get ideas.
Hoka shrugged out of his jacket and set it aside.
“You’ve been neglecting this,” he said.
“I’ve been at college.”
“That is not an excuse.”
“It was not intended as one.”
He gave the smallest nod, which for Hoka was practically warmth.
We started emptyhanded.
He did not take it easy on me. He never had, and if anything, the years had only made him more offensively efficient. He came at me fast enough to test my balance immediately, forcing me to adjust, pivot, take the impact through my hips instead of letting it knock me off-center. I blocked, struck back, caught his wrist, twisted, then nearly had him for half a second before he shifted his weight and sent me back hard enough to remind me who had taught me to fight in the first place.
“Distracted,” he said.
