His expression tips into something that is technically not the grin but is clearly related to it. "If I can get you into a hold you can't get out of," he says, steady, like he's proposing something entirely reasonable, "you come today. Midday."
I stare at him.
He stares back. Six foot eight of absolute confidence, hands loose at his sides, utterly certain he's already won this and letting me take my time realizing it.
"And if I get out?" I say.
"Then I leave you alone about it entirely. No more mentioning it. For the whole month."
"The whole month."
"You have my word."
I look at him for a long moment. He is bigger than me. He is stronger than me. He has been training fighters for longer than I've been alive. The logical position, the survival position, is to decline this on the grounds that the outcome is not in my favor.
"Fine," I say.
He blinks. Just once, just a flicker of — something. Then the not-grin reassembles. "Fine?"
"Don't repeat it." I bring my hands up. "Come on then."
What follows is, objectively, the best I've done in two weeks of these sessions. I'm faster than I was when we started — I can feel the difference, the way my body has begun to trust its own reflexes — and I read two of his feints before he can convert them, which last week I couldn't do. There's a sequence in the middle where I have the angle and I use it, forcing him wide, and for a fraction of a second I think I've managed something real.
I almost miss the shift because I'm already calculating the follow-through.
Almost.
And then his arm comes around, not from where I'd anticipated, from the other side — my own forward momentumworking against me like a door I'd walked into — and he adjusts his grip with the fluency of someone who has done this ten thousand times, and suddenly I am in something.
I test the structure of it immediately. Hands. Feet. Hip angle. I try the twist I know works on his left side and hit nothing but more hold. I try the drop that had gotten me out of a similar position on day four and he has already accounted for it, the weight distribution completely different, nothing giving. I push against the part that should flex and it doesn't flex.
"Hmm," says Ursik.
"Shut up."
"I'm not saying anything."
"You'rehumming." I try the drop again. Still nothing. "Stop humming."
"I'm just standing here." The sound in his chest is definitely a chuckle, low and felt before it's heard, and it is absolutely infuriating. "Take your time."
I take my time. I try three more things. None of them work. He holds the structure with the comfortable patience of someone who parked themselves somewhere pleasant and has no reason to leave.
"Agreement?" he says.
"I'm still working on it."
"Are you?"
"Give me aminute?—"
"Aislin." His voice has no cruelty in it and that is somehow worse than if it did. "Agreement."
I stop moving. I breathe. The hold is solid on every axis I've tested and he has been patient about all of it and has not made me feel stupid once, which is a thing I'll acknowledge inside my own head and nowhere else.
"Fine," I say, through my teeth. "Midday."
He releases me cleanly, no drag, stepping back to give me the space before I've had to ask for it, which is a thing he always does and which I have never commented on. I straighten. Shake out my arms. He is wearing the expression that is the grin's smug older sibling and I point at it.
