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“I feel nothing.” Rory raises his sword again. “En garde.”
“That wisnae ma question!”
“Then you shouldn’t have asked it while drunk.En garde.”
With a furious huff, Finlay raises his sword to his mask and the fight resumes. He launches himself at Rory again, driven by a sheer, fierce speed and a determination to attack. Again, he wins the point.
“Four-three,” he snaps with a ringing finality. He pauses and then speaks more slowly, more measured. “I want tae know something. Why Benji? Whit wiz so special about him, of aw people?”
“He’s not a high-profile target with a dark and colorful history behind him, but he has enough burning, activist narcissism that he wants to be. He’s driven by destructive, anti-systemic passion, not realizing it’s the very systems we have in place that allow him to shout about how victimized he is. He wants to be special, he wants his name to be crowed by the court of public opinion. He wants to be talked about and live a martyr’s life, so we’ll make him so. We’ll make him special.”
“He’s a useful idiot.”
“Correct.”
“And I wiz useful for ye, an aw.”
“You’re always useful to me. Friends have each other’s backs.”
“So why did ye stab mine?”
There’s a long moment of silence where Rory doesn’t react. He seems more struck by these words than Finlay’s blade the entire fight.
“En garde,” Finlay says pointedly, using Rory’s lack of action to control the fight for the first time. Rory raises his sword, but it’s half-hearted. It doesn’t matter, because Finlay quickly stabs him in the arm again and again, long enough for the buzzer to emit an almighty, ringing beep.
“I win,” Finlay declares in a pompous tone that brooks no argument. “Five-three. You lose, Tory boy. Youlose.”
Rory nurses his left bicep with the thick material of his gloved hand. “Happy now?”
“Ye dinnae get a question, loser.”
“You realize I threw the match so you could win, right?”
Finlay removes his mask, a fierce scowl on his face. “Naw, ye didnae. Quit tryin’ tae undermine me.”
But Rory just laughs.
The two of them meet in the middle of the piste to shake hands, a bizarre act of civility after the bruises they must have branded on each other’s bodies.
“So what do you want to ask?” Rory says, a tad slyly, framing it so that Finlay has to be given permission to ask the question he’s been entitled to ever since winning.
Finlay notices, because no matter what he may believe about himself, Finlay isn’t stupid. “I dinnae need yer manufactured consent, prick.” He tosses his gloves onto the bench and unhooks a wire from his sword that seems threaded through the sleeve of his jacket.
“Answer me this,” he says, and he raises his head, imperious green eyes staring at me through a sweep of damp black hair. “D’ye ken oor sassenach has been standin’ at the door, listenin’ tae us the whole time?”
