Chapter 5 #2
The difference is incredible. The blades move faster, the connection point is harder, and the follow-through carries me an extra two inches past the target line. Two inches that, on a human body, would be the difference between a wound and a kill.
"Better," Carmelo says. He goes back to his barbell.
That's it. No praise, no additional instruction, no attempt at conversation.
He identified a flaw, corrected it, confirmed the correction, and returned to his own training.
The entire interaction lasted ninety seconds and contained more useful combat instruction than three years of sessions with Marco's trainers.
"Thank you," I say.
Carmelo picks up the barbell. "Your blades are good," he says to the weight and not to me. "Custom. The finger rings are fitted. Whoever made them knew what they were doing."
"A smith in Naples. My father commissioned them when I turned fifteen."
"The father who sold you."
The words are flat. No judgment, no sympathy.
"The father who sold me," I confirm.
He finishes his set and racks the weight. Picks up his knife from the bench, holds it for a second in a grip I recognize because it's the same grip I use on Vita, the comfort grip, the one that isn't about readiness but about grounding. Then he puts it back on his belt and walks toward the door.
"Train here at two," he says without turning around. "I'll show you the counterstrike for the heel correction. It changes the X into a combination."
"Every day?"
"Until I decide you don't need it anymore."
He leaves. The gym door closes behind him, and I stand on the mat with Vita and Morte in my hands and a giggle threatening to burst out of me.
Gia is going to be sooooo jealous.
Carmelo just adopted me. I don't think he knows he did it, and I don't think he'd describe it that way, but the man who communicates through violence and silence just offered me daily training sessions without being asked.
I reset my stance. Ball of the foot. Hip rotation. Drive through.
The X lands with a hundred percent power for the first time in twelve years.
I'm running the combination drill when the gym door opens again. The footsteps are different, harder soles, the stride of a man who walks into rooms expecting them to rearrange themselves around him.
Matteo.
He's in gym clothes. T-shirt, shorts, sneakers that look new enough to suggest he bought them specifically for this trip.
The suit is gone and without it the body underneath is visible, broader than the tailoring suggested, with arms that say he's been in a gym before.
There's a look on his face that I've seen on men who come to the gym to burn off something they can't say out loud.
He sees me and stops, registers the karambits in my hands, the heavy bag in the corner, the sweat on my skin, the stance on the mat.
"The gym's occupied," I say.
"The gym is communal."
"Then use the other side."
He doesn't use the other side. He walks to the heavy bag beside the one I’m using and starts wrapping his hands, and the deliberateness of choosing the bag six feet from me instead of the one across the room is a provocation and we both know it.
I go back to the drill. The sheathed blades fly through the air and I focus on the combination Carmelo described, adding the counterstrike, extending the X into a four-move sequence that ends with Morte at throat height.
Matteo hits the bag. No gloves, just wraps, and his form is self-taught but effective.
He hits hard and his knuckles are used to impact, which means the lawyer has been punching things for a while.
The pretty-boy exterior has a layer underneath it that knows how to cause damage, and the contradiction between the courtroom posture and the raw, untrained power in his fists is something I try desperately to ignore.
We train in proximity. Neither of us speaks.
The silence between us is loaded in a way I hate because that means the other person is occupying space in my head, and I don't want Matteo Billone in my head.
I want him in a different building, on a different continent, attached to a different woman's name on a different marriage certificate.
Instead he's a few feet away, hitting a bag with his bare hands, and every time his fist connects I can hear the exhale that comes with it, and the sound is doing something to my body that I refuse to focus on.
Matteo stops hitting the bag. I don't look at him. I can feel him looking at me, feel the attention on my back, on my hands, on the blades, and being watched by someone I'm going to marry in five days is a specific kind of pressure that I haven't trained for.
"The footwork changed," he says.
He's standing by his bag with his hands at his sides, wraps dark with sweat, his hair falling forward, and his eyes are on my feet.
"What?"
"Your footwork. It's different from when you started. The left foot is higher. The cut is harder." He pauses. "Carmelo?"
"How do you know that?"
"I saw him leaving when I came in. And the correction is the kind of thing only someone who fights with blades would notice." He unwraps his left hand, pulling the fabric through his fingers. "He's good. Better than good. You should keep training with him."
"I don't need your advice on my training."
"It's not advice. It's observation."
"Observe quieter."
His mouth moves upward in a slight smirk, but he kills it before it forms. I almost made Matteo smile and he caught it and stopped it the way I catch and stop the things my body does when he's too close.
"I have a question," he says.
"I have a policy. No questions from men I'm being forced to marry."
"The karambits. Vita and Morte. Life and death." He finishes unwrapping his right hand. "Which one do you reach for first?"
I stare at him. It's a question nobody has ever asked me, and the specificity of it catches me off guard because it means he's been paying attention.
Not to my body, not to my face, not to the things men usually pay attention to.
To my hands. To which blade I draw first and what that says about the woman drawing it.
"Vita," I say, and I don't know why I answer.
"Life first."
"Life first. Then Morte if Vita isn't enough."
"So you lead with life and follow with death."
"Don't fucking read into it, Billone."
"I'm not reading into it. I'm asking." He picks up his water bottle and drinks, and the sweat on his neck catches the light and I look away because looking at the sweat on his neck is making my stomach flip.
"You could lead with Morte. Most people trained for lethality would.
The kill shot first, the follow-up second.
But you lead with Vita, which means somewhere underneath the Castillo training and the six kills and the reputation, you're choosing life before death. Every time."
"You're reading into it."
"I'm observing."
"How about not fucking observing me at all. I already told you once."
He picks up his wraps, slings them over his shoulder, and walks toward the door. As he passes me, close, too close, close enough that I can smell the sweat on his skin and the soap underneath it, he stops.
"For what it's worth," he says, "I would have picked Vita too."
He leaves. The gym door closes and the room is empty and the lights hum their flat, ugly ass sound and I'm standing on the mat with Vita in my right hand and Morte in my left and a confused storm of emotions rising inside me.