Blaze of Vengeance (Dyschord University: Chaos #3)

Pandora

I was seven the first time Uncle Slayer showed me how to wield a knife, in a cabin tucked into the woods. Papa had been there too, joking about all the ways I could screw it up, but Uncle Slayer guided me to skin the rabbit and cut it open to remove the insides.

“Don’t be squeamish,” Papa had said, and I remember wondering what I could possibly be squeamish about.

“I can’t believe you’re squeamish about this!” I shout at Samantha. “You aren’t going to break my legs with a measly little kick!”

The gym is nothing like the cabin—as long as I stay out of the large hall with the bleeding walls. This training room has mats and padding and a punching bag in the corner. The mirrors along the walls show off Samantha’s wobbly movements from every angle.

At least she dressed for training. I didn’t even think she had any appropriate clothes, but she’s in a pair of workout tights and a beige t-shirt, and her blonde hair is pulled back into a ponytail. She isn’t even wearing any makeup.

Compared to her, I’m positively dressed up. I hadn’t bothered to remove my earrings, and my shirt is a loud, neon pink with a snake emblazoned on it in white. I’ve got my brown hair in two braids that swish every time I demonstrate a dodge.

Samantha scowls at me. “I’m not afraid of breaking your legs,” she retorts.

She doesn’t try the kick I’d shown her, though.

“Maybe we should go back to the punching bag,” Carly suggests. Carly’s got the same black workout tights as Samantha, but she’s wearing a baggy blue sweater over her shirt. She tied back her thick black hair too.

We look like a proper workout class.

Samantha casts a grateful look in her direction. “I think that would be better,” she says. “I need to practice more before I try this out on a person.”

I roll my eyes. “You can hit me. I know you want to. Every single time I annoyed you, you were imagining slapping me a few times. Right, Sammy?”

“Don’t call me that,” she snaps at me. “Unlike you, Panda, I don’t get off on hitting people.” She takes a few more steps away from me. “This is stupid. I don’t know why I thought this would be a good idea.”

I take a step closer to Samantha. “Because you need to know how to defend yourself, and the school only offers lame karate classes. Or boxing, I guess, if you want to join River in beating your fists bloody.”

She needs to know how to defend herself. She can’t be helpless anymore.

Samantha can’t get caught again.

I won’t allow it.

Carly huffs loudly. “There might be classes in town?”

I shake my head. “Where? Harmony’s got like, five people living in it. They’re probably shocked when a cat gets stuck up a tree. They aren’t teaching women how to fight.”

“Harmony isn’t that small,” Carly retorts. She stands up from where she was sitting on the mat and walks over to me. “It’s great that you’re trying to teach us, Pandora, but maybe you aren’t the best one for the job?”

For a split second, my vision goes hazy, but I smile through it. “I’m definitely the best person to teach you how to destroy men. But we can skip the kicking. That was a dumb idea anyway. How are you going to overpower a man with your muscles alone? Let’s work on knives instead.”

“That sounds like an even worse idea,” Samantha says. She huffs out a frustrated sound. “All right, fine. Let’s try this again.”

“Good!” I clap her on the shoulder and get into position. “You won’t have the strength to overpower most men, so unbalancing them and fighting as dirty as possible are your best bet. If you don’t have a knife—”

“Why would she have a knife?” Carly mutters.

“If you don’t have a knife,” I reiterate, “then it’s attacking the groin, the armpits, and the knees. So come on, unbalance me.”

For all of her complaints and hesitations, Samantha has been paying close attention to what I’m teaching her. She might be reluctant to put it into practice, but I haven’t missed the way she’s watched me with narrow, careful eyes.

She doesn’t want a repeat of getting taken against her will.

She thinks I haven’t noticed how jumpy she is, how she flinches from shadows and barely leaves her room unless it’s for class. But I’m not blind, and it’s obvious that the ordeal with the Bouchard Syndicate has left a huge mark on her.

I’d suggest she’d try therapy, but I’m not that much of a hypocrite. Murdering our enemies is a much better use of our time than talking out our feelings.

Besides, I don’t trust anyone on campus not to tattle to the higher ups. Samantha is in a precarious enough position as it is.

Samantha’s kick is a bit too slow, but I bend with it anyway.

“Yeah, like that,” I say. “But with more force. I can take it.”

She grumbles, but she tries again. This time, she catches me off-guard with the quick kick to my shin, but I only grin at her as pain shoots down my leg.

“You’re insane,” Samantha mutters.

I clench my fists, but I force myself to keep smiling. “I’ve been told.”

“Here, Samantha, practice with me,” Carly says. “Pandora can watch our technique.”

How are they supposed to learn if they spar with each other?

They’ve got no reason to hurt each other.

But I step back anyway, and I watch the two of them practice the moves I’d taught.

Shins, knees, jabs into the armpits and knees to the groin.

They’re doing it all in slow motion, barely touching each other, but at least they get the gist of it.

After a few rounds of me correcting their stances and movements, Carly bends forward and rests her hands on her thighs. “Okay. I’m exhausted.”

“I’m done for today too,” Samantha says.

Already? We’ve barely gotten started. I remind myself that the two of them haven’t been training to kill since they were seven, and that they’ve barely even been training to run.

“Make sure to do cardio every morning,” I say. “None of this will help you if your energy flags after five seconds.”

“Funny. Reaper says the same thing,” Carly complains.

“And he’s right, for once.” I walk over to the punching bag and run my hand down the length of it.

I imagine somebody grabbing Carly and Samantha, all of their training going to waste because they’re scared motionless, and my fist lashes out.

I punch the bag a few times, and I wish I had my knife so I could slash it up and destroy it.

I kick it too, over and over, until I’m the one who’s completely breathless.

When I’m finished, Samantha surprises me by handing me a sports bottle of water.

“You’ve been doing this forever, haven’t you?” she asks. “It’s easy for you.”

I take a long gulp from the bottle before nodding. “Yeah. But we’ll make it get easy for you, too.”

I go over to where Carly is sitting against the wall and join her. After a few seconds of hesitation, Samantha sits down on my other side.

“You fight like my brother,” Carly says quietly.

I’ve seen how Reaper fights. He beat River pretty badly during the street fight. River will say it’s because he was already exhausted by that point and Reaper is bigger, but that sounds like the excuses of a man bested.

I grin. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Carly shrugs. “Our father taught him. I asked my dad to teach me too, once, but he said ‘chicks’ didn’t need to know how to fight.”

“Okay, first off, fuck your dad,” I say. “We absolutely need to know how to fight. Violence is always the answer when people are being dicks to us.”

“It’s really not,” Samantha says, taking a drink from her own water bottle. Her eyes go distant, and her jaw clenches. “Well, not the first answer, anyway.”

“And violence won’t prevent the bad things from happening,” Carly agrees, quieter. “It wouldn’t have stopped…”

She’s talking about that night we met, where I’d found her roofied in the Kappa Alpha frat house.

Maybe violence wouldn’t have stopped Declan from dosing her drink, but the knife I thrust into his thigh might make him reconsider doing it again.

I should have gone for his heart and made sure he never could do it again.

“Well, if we take out everybody who ever hurt us…” I trail off when I hear footsteps coming our way.

They stop outside this training room, and then the door opens and River peers inside.

I grin widely. “Hey, River! I was just telling Carly and Samantha about your dick.”

“Don’t make them jealous,” River deadpans. He nods to Carly and Samantha. “Hey. Pandora still torturing the two of you?”

I pout at him. “I have never tortured anyone in my life.”

Laughter comes from behind River. Blaze and Asch both step into the room with him.

“Believed no one ever,” Asch says. Like River, he’s dressed in workout gear, and he’s mussed. I wonder if they were sparring.

I wish I could’ve seen it.

Even Blaze is dolled up for the gym. Or is that “dolled down”? Either way, his blond hair is sticking to his forehead from sweat. It’s good to know he has to work for his abs like the rest of us.

The three of them look amazing together. I can think of a few things we could all do, sweaty as we already are…

Blaze walks over to me and squats down, then reaches out for one of my pigtails and tugs. “Are these for easy pulling?”

Samantha tenses as Blaze gets close to her, and she edges back so she’s not within easy reach of him. Never mind that he’d never touch her—he’d have me to answer to if he even tried—but since his family is responsible for her abduction, she has reason to be afraid.

“They’re for easy something, all right,” Asch says, but he keeps his distance. Of the three of them, he’s the most conscientious of Samantha, the most aware of the way she flinches and pulls away from the world.

I wonder if they could be friends.

My stomach roils at the thought of Asch getting close to anyone else.

“Hi, Blaze,” Carly greets. “If you guys need Pandora, we’re done sparring for today.”

Blaze gives her his beautiful, charming smile. “Only if you’re sure. We wouldn’t want to pull Pandora away from her friends.” He tugs on my pigtail again.

I push my foot against his knee. “You couldn’t pull me away if you tried, Blabe.”

Blaze groans. “Stop calling me that. Nobody thinks it’s funny.”