22. Chapter 22
twenty-two
T he big house was like a cave. Sounds echoed through the hallways. Lina lowered the book she was reading onto her lap and listened to the music leaking through the open door of Raul’s library.
The melody started out mellow and haunting, Lina got goosebumps on her arms. She could picture Curtis’ face concentrating on his finger work. It was incredible what he could do with that instrument. She loved the acoustic guitar and felt he ought to play it more. During the tour, though he did acoustical parts for some ballads, most of Canis Major’s songs were electric, fast, and high energy.
Putting her book aside, Lina followed the music. As she drew closer to the source, she felt the tempo pick up speed, and so did her feet, as if she was a mouse being led by a fife.
She found him in the sunroom with a view of a large pond. The room felt warm as the winter sunshine filtered in through the glass roof. Curtis sat on a couch playing his guitar with his eyes closed.
How does he do that?
Lina stood by the door and just watched him. How his fingers moved to create the notes and the timbre of the sounds. How his face expressed the emotion of the melody. He was one with the instrument and the music.
It sounds anguished.
Lina felt a wrench in her gut.
Abruptly, the music stopped. Curtis looked up in shock, but when he realized it was just her, he relaxed.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you,” Lina quickly said. “The music brought me here.”
He smiled. “Really?”
Lina went to him. “It pulled me in. It was so gripping.”
Curtis looked at her. “Yeah, I had to get some frustration out. The punching bag helped some this morning, but I still can’t get out of my head.”
She took his hands and gently caressed the redness on his knuckles. “Didn’t you wrap them?”
“Yeah. But I must’ve punched hard.”
“Why do you punch bags when you can make music like that?” Lina asked. “It seems to me the creative output is a much better way of letting out frustration.”
“Music still soothes me, but some feelings require a different approach.”
“What’s bothering you?” Lina almost didn’t want to ask.
He turned his hand around one of hers and held it. He put his guitar away with the other before settling back on the couch.
“This whole thing.” Curtis sighed heavily. “But I only have myself to blame. I keep thinking back, why was I at that club that night? I didn’t even want to be there. I was trying to escape, to get out, when I stumbled onto Rocco Stiletto and Sean Murphy.
“If I hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t be risking my family’s safety. And now all of us are yanked away from our homes without knowing when we can return, or if we can ever return. We can’t even find out if they’re okay right now.”
“Your family is safe, Curtis.” Lina squeezed his hand. “In the last communication I had with Marcus before we went dark, he told me they’re safe and sound.
“And this isn’t your fault,” she added. “You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But you were also probably meant to be there, because if you weren’t, Rocco wouldn’t have been apprehended.”
“But if he hadn’t, then there wouldn’t be this war between these families,” he argued. “Seems like a bad case of domino effect to me.”
“Believe me, whatever issues are between those families, they existed before you stumbled onto them,” Lina said. “Look, we can talk about what-ifs all day, but it won’t change the fact that this is where we are. We can only work with the cards we’re dealt.”
Curtis rubbed his face roughly with his hand. Obviously, her words didn’t ease his guilt. And guilt was something Lina understood well. Marcus had tried talking to her about it the way she’d tried with Curtis, but the guilt stayed.
“Hey, since we can’t really do anything about this until Raul gets back, I have an idea on how to get that frustration out,” she suggested.
He glanced at her. His eyes twinkled with a more suggestive idea than she had in mind.
“Come on.” Lina stood and pulled him up by the hand.
She led him through the hallway and turned toward the gym. Curtis pulled her to the other side toward the staircase instead.
“No.” Lina laughed. “Trust me.”
“Where are you taking me?” Curtis asked, and when he figured out where they were going he complained, “But I’ve worked out this morning. My knuckles still feel raw.”
“We’re not working out.” She pulled him into the gym. “We’re training.”
“What?” Curtis stared at her blankly.
“Fight training.” Lina climbed into the ring. “Get in here.”
“But I’m not dressed for that.” He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt.
“When some Stiletto thug attacks you, you’re gonna tell them to wait so you can change your outfit?” she goaded him.
Curtis gave her a stink-eye before he climbed into the ring. “This is not how I pictured this going.”
Lina ignored him and waited until he stood before her.
“Okay, I have to tell you I have some training,” he said, cocking a hand on his hip. “I’ve been working out at an MMC dojo in the past year.”
“That’s good. I don’t have to give you the basics, then.” Lina had noted Curtis must’ve had at least defensive training based on the way he’d stopped the guy with the knife in Barcelona.
“I’ll be the attacker. Try to dodge and avoid me hurting you. Don’t attack back for now, okay?” Lina said.
“What’s the fun in that?” he protested.
“We’ll come to that.” And without warning, she came at him straight, thrusting a fake knife she’d sneaked inside her sleeve before she got into the ring. Raul had a full arsenal of training to very-real fighting knives.
Curtis was surprised by the move, and automatically jumped back and to the side and used the bottom of his hand to hit her knife hand and force it away from him. In a real attack, of course, Lina wouldn’t stop there.
“What the fuck?” he yelled. “Is that thing real?”
“Nice reflex.” Lina straightened and smiled. “Again!”
Curtis watched—with what he was sure was a dumbstruck expression—as Lina flipped the dagger in her hand and attacked him again, this time in a slicing motion. She was so fast that the only way for him to avoid the knife was to drop to his back and crab-walk away from her. It wasn’t a graceful move, but it distanced him from her.
This time, Lina didn’t stop. She went after him, and once again, flipped the dagger into a stabbing grip. She leapt to gut him right in the midsection.
“Shit!” Curtis rolled away, barely missing the tip of the dagger. He scrambled up to his feet and quickly faced Lina in a defensive stance. “You’re fucking crazy!”
“Get me to drop the knife or try taking it from me this time,” Lina ordered.
“I don’t want to hurt you!” Curtis said.
Lina looked at him with a bemused smile. “Let’s go.” She dropped to the ground and rolled toward him, slicing at his shin.
Curtis instinctively jumped over her flying arm, and again just barely missed her next slicing movement in the opposite direction, toward his thighs, which made contact.
“Fuck!”
“You’re not dead yet,” Lina warned as she lifted the dagger up to drive toward his gut.
Curtis caught her wrist in both of his hands at his chest level. But before he could twist her arm, she dropped the knife, caught it with her left hand, and planted it in his stomach.
“You’re dead,” she announced.
His heart was running a mile a minute. Sweat dripped over his wide eyes as he stared at the fucking fake knife. He dropped her arm a little forcefully. “Motherfucker!”
He had to walk around calming his heart as he warily watched the not-even-winded Lina. “Holy shit, you’re fast.”
“You have pretty fast reflexes, too,” Lina said, standing at ease in the middle of the ring with her arms at rest behind her. “You’re too tense—”
“I had a ninja lady trying to kill me, of course I was fucking tense!” Curtis pointed at her with an are-you-kidding-me outrage face.
She laughed. “In an actual situation, it will be ten times worse. We need to train to stay cool and not panic.”
“How do you not panic when there’s someone coming at you with a knife? Or worse, a gun?”
“Well, if guns are involved, I recommend you find cover and duck,” Lina said. “But if you’re in a close-contact combat, you have to trust your mind and body to do what it’s trained to do. You said you’ve been training. Tell me more.”
Curtis scratched his head and shrugged. “Obviously, it didn’t do me squat.”
“I think you did well.”
“You killed me!”
Lina chuckled. “You evaded the first two and blocked the third strike.”
“Just to be killed by the fourth.”
“Well, that’s why we’re here.” She asked again, “So, mixed martial arts fighting. A little boxing, jiujitsu, Taekwondo?”
“Yeah. I learned some kickboxing and judo techniques, too.”
“So, a lot of close-contact fighting during training?”
Curtis nodded.
“Okay. Now, you’ll need to learn to fight an opponent with a weapon. You don’t want to be rolling on the ground with an armed assailant unless you have control of the weapon.”
That makes sense, Curtis thought. They did roll around on the floor a lot during a fight, trying to pin the opponent.
“We need to improve your dodging game.” Lina brought out her hand with the knife again. “Let’s practice. You game?”
“Train me, sensei .” Curtis put his hands on top of each other in front of his face in a sign of respect.
Lina just shook her head with a chuckle. Curtis noted how much she laughed at kicking his ass. He grinned, satisfied that even if she thought he was an idiot, he could make her laugh.
“Let’s do it slower this time.” Lina, oblivious to his thoughts, now stood in front of him like earlier. “I’ll do the same moves. This time, I don’t want you to jump back, but sway wide to your left.”
“Sway?”
“Yes, just twist your body and take a big side step to the left.” She extended her knife-wielding arm.
Curtis avoided the knife the way Lina instructed. He ended up to the left of the knife. She retreated her arm and adjusted to his position.
“In an actual fight, you’re already giving yourself distance from the knife, which is the goal,” she said. “I’m going to do that again. This time, sway to the right.”
Curtis frowned as he did what she told him. “Are we dancing or fighting here?”
“Fighting is like dancing in the sense that there’s a bit of footwork. And that you should be able to read your partner, or opponent in this case. That way, you’ll be able to anticipate their next move and your countermovement.”
She held the knife at the ready again. “Let’s repeat that a little faster. Ready?”
Curtis nodded and focused on the task. He watched Lina’s arm coming at him, and he swerved to the side. She pivoted and repeated the attempt. He countered it by moving to the other side.
“That’s good. You’ve done this with kickboxing, I’m sure,” she said. “Except you’re dodging a punch, and you may only need to move your head.”
“Oh, yeah.” He frowned.
Why didn ’ t I think of that?
“You have your training, Curtis. Your body remembers how to react when being attacked.” Lina twirled the knife in her hand so now she held it tip down.
“Whoa. How did you do that so fast?” he asked.
Indulging his curiosity, Lina showed it to him by flipping it back up slowly with only her first two digits and thumb. “It’s a three-finger flip. It’s crucial to switch your grip on your knife fast during a fight.”
She gripped the handle with the knife’s tip downward again. “This is the reverse position. Holding it like this, I can do a downward stab or a side-slice, right to left, and back.” She demonstrated the movement as she explained it. “You can do a lot with a knife in this position.”
“I should get myself a knife,” Curtis said.
“No. We got distracted. What you need to do is to learn to survive a knife attack, since the people who are hunting you have a quirky penchant for them.”
“Can you blame them?” Curtis grinned.
Lina smiled. “Only you can find humor in that.”
He shrugged and realized the melancholy plaguing him had dissipated. When punching bags and playing music failed to chase it away, Lina succeeded.