Page 43 of Fought it Through the Teeth

A third kick. Morgan cries out again and this time the sound escapes completely — raw and cracked and involuntary, the sound of a body reaching the limit of what it can absorb without protest. He is curled on the stone floor with his arms around his ribs and his hair in his face and blood on his lips, and Ivan is standing over him and he is not a fighter. He is not Eskil. He is twenty years old and he weighs a hundred and forty pounds and the man above him is a war general who has done this to people before, to women, to brides who didn't obey, to anyone who had the misfortune of being smaller and weaker and within reach.

Then there is a fist in his hair hauling his head up.

Ivan lifts him by the hair until Morgan's back arches and his neck strains and his eyes water. Ivan's face is inches from his, close enough that Morgan can see the broken blood vessels in his nose and the flat, killing fury behind his eyes.

"You think this is a game?" Ivan says. His voice is low and almost gentle and infinitely worse for it. "I have been killing men longer than you've been alive and you presume to attack me?"

He shoves Morgan sideways.

Morgan hits the table holding the ale jug and the remaining cups and it goes over beneath him. Pewter clatters across the stone. The jug shatters and dark liquid spreads across the floor, and Morgan lands among the wreckage with ceramic shards biting into his palms and his cracked ribs catching the table's edge on the way down. His vision whites out. When it comes back he is on the floor surrounded by broken pottery and spilled ale and the overturned table, and Ivan is standing over him.

Morgan tries to crawl away. His hands slip on wet stone and broken shards and his knees won't hold and he is dragging himself across the floor with blood in his mouth and ceramic cutting into his palms, and he is not fast enough. He will never be fast enough.

Ivan grabs the back of his collar and hauls him to his feet.

The fabric digs into Morgan's throat as he's wrenched upright, and then a hand replaces it. Ivan's fingers wrap around Morgan's windpipe, and Morgan's lungs are burning and his ribs are screaming and his vision is going gray at the edges.

"Beg," Ivan says. His voice is quiet and conversational. "Beg me for mercy, and I'll consider letting you keep your teeth."

Morgan has one clear moment — one single moment of perfect, terrible clarity.

He thinks about Eskil. He thinks about his brother standing on the steps of the Keep at Valen with the sun in his hair, waiting for Morgan to come home. He thinks about the look on Eskil's face when he finds out what happened here — the grief, the fury, the devastating self-blame that Eskil will carry for the rest of his life because he sent his little brother south and his little brother didn't come back. He thinks about his failures. The mission. The intelligence he gathered that will die with him in this room. Fenris, the heir no one knows about. The Jakadi alliance. The staging ground. Everything he learned and cataloged and filed, the weapon he was so proud of building, gone because he couldn't drive a dagger six inches further into a man's chest.

He thinks about how badly he has fucked this up and how many people he has let down.

And then a tattooed arm comes around Ivan's neck from behind and drags him backwards off him.

The hand releases Morgan's throat. The fist releases his hair. Air rushes into his lungs and Morgan gasps and chokes on it and rolls sideways on the stone floor and his vision clears just enough to see what is happening above him.

It is Bohdi.

Bohdi is behind Ivan with his arm locked around the warchief's neck, hauling him backward. The sight of him is wrong in every way — he is gray-faced and glassy-eyed and his legs are barely holding him upright and there is nothing in his expression that resembles the man Morgan knows. No grin. No charm. No easy confidence. What is on his face is bare and primal and running on nothing but instinct and spite and whatever part of Bohdi's body is too stubborn to be put down by a drugged cup of ale.

Even so — sweating, shaking, half-conscious, fighting his way through a fog that would have dropped any other man — he is still more than Ivan can handle.

Ivan thrashes in his grip. The warchief is strong, enormously strong, and he wrenches sideways and drives an elbow back into Bohdi's ribs and Bohdi grunts but doesn't let go. His arm tightens. His teeth are bared. The muscles in his forearm stand out beneath the tattoos and his bicep is flexed against the side of Ivan's head and the warchief's face is going red and his struggles are becoming wilder, more desperate — beginning to understand that the arm around his neck is not going to release.

And Morgan does not let the opening pass.

He can barely breathe. His whole body is screaming — the ribs, the face, the throat where Ivan's fingers left marks that will darken to bruises before morning. He still gets up. He gets his knees under him and then his feet under him and it takes everything he has, every scrap of strength and will and the vicious stubbornness that Eskil put into him and that Morgan has carried his entire life. He sways. The room tilts. He tastes blood and swallows it and raises the dagger, because Bohdi taught him to hold on and he held on.

He plunges the blade into Ivan's neck.

The steel goes in with less resistance than he expected. He had braced for bone, for the grinding halt of metal against something solid, but the blade finds the soft tissue of the throat and Morgan drives it in to the hilt and then jerks it across with both hands and every ounce of force he has left.

The blood is immediate. It sprays across Morgan's hands and his wrists and the front of his shirt in a hot, arterial gush that doesn't stop. Ivan makes a gargling, wet sound, and his body convulses in Bohdi's grip. His hands come up to his throat, and his eyes are wide and incredulous — he has killed wives and discarded sons and terrorized an entire clan and cannot quite believe that a slender blond prince has just opened his throat.

Bohdi lets go.

Ivan crumples. He hits the floor in a heap and the blood spreads beneath him — fast, dark, pooling across the stone in a tide that reaches Morgan's boots and keeps going. The gargling sound continues for a few seconds and then it stops and then there is silence.

Morgan just killed someone.

He stares at the body. Ivan's eyes are open. The blood is still spreading. The dagger is in the man's neck and the firelight catches the wet blade and the room smells of copper and smoke and death.

A wave of panic and disgust rolls over him that he cannot swallow down.

It comes from everywhere at once — from his stomach, from his chest, from the back of his throat where the taste of blood has been sitting since Ivan's hand connected with his face. His body rejects what he has done before his mind can process it. His knees buckle. His hands start shaking — violently, uncontrollably, empty and covered in blood — and he can't make them stop.