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He draws closer, ignoring me when I try to shove him away again and following me when I step back. “I want to see if I cut the skin.”
“You haven’t.” He might have. It hurts like a bitch.
He continues inexorably forward. “I’d like to see.”
“I’m not taking my pants off for you.” My back hits the mirrored wall.
“That’s fine.”
Luca removes his helmet and kneels in front of me. He grabs my tights in both hands and pulls, easily tearing into the sheer fabric. The hole reveals the skin of my thigh, now marred by an angry red welt.
“Look what you did, you asshole,” I snarl, glaring down at him.
Luca’s silver-blond hair is slicked back, wet with sweat, and there’s a rare flush on his face. His pallid eyes, that sickly grey like an absence of colour, glint with satisfaction.
“Come on, Lynch. I didn’t even draw blood.” He licks his lips slowly, pink tongue wetting pink lips, then raises one hand and digs his thumb into the welt—hard. “Does that hurt?”
Of course it fucking hurts!I bite back the truth, and I kick him hard right in the shoulder. He falls back hard, and I stand over him, boot on his chest, digging my heel, hoping it’ll be enough to crush his flimsy heart.
“Doesthathurt?”
He grabs my leg in both arms, locking it in, and twists sharply to the side. I go flying and hit the floor on my side—the bruised one. Luca rolls himself up on top of me, pinning my hips under his as he sits up. He looks down at his chest, the dirty boot print I left on his pristine white uniform.
“You got dirt on my plastron,” he says.
His voice has that deadly, icy calm, like the hush before a blizzard.
“Buy a new one.”
He shakes his head slowly. “That’s not the point.”
“You hit me first.” I buck my hips, trying to throw him off me, but he grinds himself firmly down on top of me. He’s surprisingly heavy—maybe the inbreeding that fucked his heart up hasn’t affected his bone density.
“I’ll hit you again if you don’t stop moving,” he says
“I’ll hit you first.”
“You wouldn’t—”
I throw my hand as hard as I possibly can and slap his face with all the strength I can muster. The impact is a loud crack; it echoes through the room. His face whips to the side under the force of the blow, strands of silver-blond hair flying across his forehead.
He turns his face slowly back to centre. His cheek glows an angry red, the shape of my fingers imprinted like a star.
For a second, nothing happens. Silence hangs thick and heavy, like the curtain rising over a stage. Luca’s face is expressionless, his eyes are hooded, irises dull. My breath remains stuck in my chest, swelling in the cage of my ribs, not daring to flee. Would he kill me?
If he did, he’d do it like it was nothing, and nobody would ever know. I’d vanish off the face of the earth, my name erased from existence.
But he doesn’t kill me, and the tension lingers and grows, suffocating as a lungful of snow, as Luca remains still, his hooded gaze locked into mine.
Then, almost imperceptibly, his expression changes. An ever-so-slight softening in the arid grey of his eyes, a mix of surprise and something close to appreciation. Without a word, he lifts himself off me and stands. He adjusts his uniform with conscientious precision and reaches down. Grabbing me by the front of my shirt, he hauls me up to my feet.
“Next time,” he remarks, his voice surprisingly calm and composed given my handprint is now an angry red welt across the left side of his face, “wear proper attire if you intend to interrupt my fencing practice.”
I straighten myself up, fixing my shirt, and eye Luca with a wary glance.
“Next time,” I tell him, “don’t provoke someone who finds your face so irresistibly slappable.”
When Luca is busyputting his equipment away, I try to make my way out of the fencing salle before he changes his mind about the slap and decides to kill me after all. But before I can get halfway to the door, Luca calls after me.
