Then it clouded.
"I'm sorry," he said. "But I can't do that."
"What?" Chloe and I said it together, in the same beat, on the same note.
He looked at her. Then he turned away from her and put it to me instead, like she'd disappeared. "Can't you see it?" His voice had gone flat and far-off. "It's only a matter of time until one of us kills one ofthem. We're too damaged, Lorkin. The arena killed us. We just don't know we're dead yet."
"I don't think that's true," Chloe said.
She might as well not have spoken. He wasn't looking at the woman in his house anymore. He was looking at something the rest of us couldn't see: sand and blood and a hold full of dead brothers, and the anger I'd kept banked all morning cracked wide and caught.
"There is no force in this universe," I said, "that could make me hurt this female."
"I thought the same." He met my eyes, calm, certain. "And look what I nearly did to her."
If he thought we were the same, he was sorely mistaken. "I am not you."
"No?" It was a quiet accusation. "We came off the same line, brother. We were made by the same hands. You think yours wash cleaner than mine?"
I crossed the floor.
I didn't decide to. One breath I was beside Chloe and the next I was up in his face, close enough to feel the heat off him, my blunt horns a hand's width from his, and the room had gone narrow at the edges in a way I knew from a long time ago and had sworn I'd buried.
"Then we settle it the old way." The words came up out of the bottom of me. "You and me. One on one. You don't get to sit in your wrecked little house and decide she's not safe with me. You want to call me to the arena? Fine. Prove it on me, not on her."
His breath came hard and quick through his nose. Something lit in him that answered what had lit in me, the training they'd burned into us and never quite got back out.
"To the death, brother?" he said.
"No killing!" Chloe's voice cracked across the room. "Seriously, guys, no need to fight!"
We were already past her.
The floor jumped as we slammed together in the middle of his front room. My body knew the work. The footwork, the timing, the read of a male's shoulders that tells you where his fist will land before he throws it, all of it came back without my asking for it.
I caught his charge across my own shoulder and rolled him off it, a throw that looked like it would break him and didn't. He came up swinging just as fast, a wide arc that passed close enough to stir the air at my ear and was never meant to find me.
Neither of us was fighting to put the other down.
Our bodies knew a different job, the big arena moves that drew blood and noise and did no actual harm, the show we'd both been built to give. We gave it now to an empty street and the ghosts in the stands, the only crowd the pits had ever left us.
The pantry door went first, splintering across the stools. The wall after that. Then the whole front of the house, the doorframe cracking, and we spilled out into the churned mud of the street, Chloe coming after us yelling things I couldn't hear over the roar in my own skull.
There were people. I clocked them from far off and sideways, the old habit, a ring of them gathering at the edges and growing. Part of me played into it. I hated that part and couldn't reach it to make it stop.
Then there were hands on me, big ones.
Remmen had an arm locked across my chest and Kazan had the other side of me, his weight braced against mine, holding me up as much as holding me back, his low voice going steady in my ear,enough, brother, enough, she's watching, enough.It took the both of them.
Across the mud, Korfas had laid exactly one hand flat on Zarcal's shoulder, and Zarcal had stopped. Just stopped, gone loose and breathing, the fight already drained out of him.
One hand stopped Zarcal. It took two of the strongest males in New Knossos to stop me.
My eyes found Chloe a few feet off in the ring of watchers, mud to her knees, both hands over her mouth. Her gaze, when it came to mine, was wide and glassy.
I didn't know what the fear was for. I couldn't tell whether she was scared for me or scared of me, or of the thing she'd just watched come up out of her gentle blacksmith and throw a male through a wall.
Either way, the second her eyes hit mine, every promise I'd made her with my hands in the dark came back on me,I've got you, stay, I'll keep you.And underneath all of it, the beast they made, loose in the street in daylight for her to see.
