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“Then let me train!” she screams in frustration.
“She can do it,” I butt in before they start literally ripping into each other. I can feel their anger from here. They spin to face me, Nico looking incredulous. “She can hold her own. Let her show you.”
I think he’s going to refuse, his face set in stone and his shoulders rigid, but he grits his teeth and sighs.
“Fine. You’ve got one chance to show me.”
She huffs and pushes past him back into the hall, and he calls someone over, letting them actually spar this time. And Harlow smashes it. She uses his overconfidence and size against him, barely breaking a sweat as she puts him on his back, locked in place, and it’s only a matter of time before he gives up. He fights it—probably out of pride—but it’ll happen.
“I fucking hate this,” Nico murmurs, and I know he does, even if she’s currently winning. He looks like fucking shit, and he’s barely holding it together, watching her every second.
“Well, get over it. This was all your doing.”
“I know,” he says dejectedly, the anger disappearing for something that looks a lot like devastation. “I just want to know how she’s handling it.”
“Ask her.”
“Yeah, right,” he scoffs. “Easy for you to say. She talks to you, trusts you. She won’t even look at me.” I know I shouldn’t, but I feel for the guy. Something bigger than we know is clearly going on, because this is not the guy we all knew.
“A good start would be to stop acting like an asshole.”
“I don’t have a choice.”
I’m not even gonna try and decipher that.
“Then stop treating her like she’s fragile. She wanted to enter on her own, remember? She doesn’t need you wrapping her up in cotton wool now. If she’s going to swim with the sharks, she may as well have teeth.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Nico
“Baxter, look a-fucking-live will you?”
I bark at the guy, who spins quickly with a frown from where he’s sparring with another guy. His trainer uses the distraction to knock his legs out from under him. There’s no hitting pause in The Games.
It’s the final few minutes of the last session of the second day, and everyone not finishing up sparring is cooling down. I’m being an asshole—I know I am—but I can’t seem to help it. I’m constantly in a bad mood, wanting to bring everyone else down with me. The regret and frustration and anger boils up inside me until I explode at whoever is closest. I can’t decide what’s worse—the sessions where I can watch Harlow continuing on without me, or the ones where I have to imagine what she’s doing. Maybe it’s the evenings I spend alone, wondering what she’s doing, and with who. Speaking of who, Ezra pins her lightly to the mat and lowers himself to whisper something in her ear, his hand moving to her bare waist.
“Do you think you can keep your hands to your fucking self?” I call as I pass, and they look up at me.
“Might defeat the purpose of sparring,” Ezra fires back with a smirk, and I clench my teeth so hard I hear the clack.
“Dismissed,” I shout to the room, then head to my office across the hall. I throw myself into the chair, sulking a hell of a lot for a fully grown man, but I don’t get to spend long in my pity party before there’s a rap at the door. It’s pushed open before I can answer, and my uncle strides in, closing the door behind him and sitting opposite me. I should’ve locked it.
“How’s it going?” he asks.
I glare at him as if he needs any more explanation, and he grimaces.
“Nico, I know—”
“You don’t know, so don’t even pretend.”
He holds his hands up with a wry smile on his face. “You’re right. I don’t know what it feels like to not want to be here. I never felt like I had a choice. Maybe it’s my fault for making you think you did.”
I sigh, guilt taking the edge off my anger. He’s always protected me from the worst of this life, shielded me from having to be integrated too early. But he’s wrong. I always knew that as long as my father was in charge, there was no way out. I pushed against it—found ways to get a bit more freedom by working and studying, not wanting my head to be filled with the biased propaganda of a madman—but deep down, I knew. This was my future. There was no choice.
“You didn’t make me think that,” I tell him. “I always knew.” He protected me from the worst of my father’s decisions; that can only be a good thing. Plus, having someone I can trust and go to in this place when I clearly don’t have my father meant the world to me growing up. It still does. “And, as much as you’ve protected me up to this moment, there’s no way to fix this. It was my fuck up. I just have to go through it now.”
“This isn’t your fault, Nico.”
