12. Chapter 12
Jace was in the training yard in the middle of the morning when she came looking for him.
He had his coat off. Sleeves shoved up. One of the ranked wolves in the yard was showing a younger one a sequence of moves, slow, and Jace was standing at the edge of the sparring square with his arms folded the way an alpha stood when he was watching somebody else teach.
He saw her walk up before she'd decided to say anything.
He didn't ask what.
She had the tire iron in her shoulder bag.
She'd brought it. It went into the bag when she'd put the bag on, the way it always did, even though she'd lived at the compound for ten days and nobody here had ever given her a reason to keep it on her.
She stopped at the edge of the square. Her coat was open.
Her fists were in her pockets. Her breath went white.
“Teach me something.”
He uncrossed his arms.
“What do you want to know?”
“I want to know how to hurt a man bigger than me.”
A muscle moved in his jaw. Didn't go further than that.
“Then I'll teach you. All of it.”
He moved her into the back half of the yard where the snow was packed flat. Cleared a wedge of it. The other wolves kept working the middle square. None of them looked over. Their courtesy had shape. It said her space, not ours.
He took off his watch. Put it on the fence post.
“Feet apart. A little more. Bend your knees. You're going to feel silly. You're not going to feel silly for long.”
She did it.
“Weight under your center. If I press your shoulder, where do you fall.”
He pressed his palm to her shoulder. Pushed. She fell backward onto her heels half a step.
“Backward. Which means somebody bigger than you takes the top of your chest and you're gone before you know it. You want the weight forward. Over the balls of your feet. Not your heels.”
He adjusted her.
“Try again.”
He pushed. She didn't fall.
“Good.”
His weight lifted off her shoulder clean.
He taught her how to turn a wrist grab on the thumb.
He taught her how to break a grip on her upper arm by going with the force not against. He taught her that the strongest part of her skull was the front, not the top.
If she was going to headbutt she did it between the eyebrows or at the nose, never down onto a crown.
She'd drop herself before she dropped the man she was headbutting.
“Nose,” he said. “Always nose. Nose and eyes. Mouth if you have to.”
“Mouth?”
“You bite. It's ugly. It works.”
“Charming.”
“It's a fight, Maren. You win by making the person trying to hurt you stop wanting to try.”
“Good. I'm done playing target.”
“The places to aim. Throat. Solar plexus if he's given you the mid-line. Knees. A kneecap gives easier than an arm. Groin always.”
“Groin always.”
“Groin always.”
She filed it.
“Show me the knife thing.”
He pulled a flat wooden practice knife from a rack on the fence. Put it in her right palm.
“Grip like this. Thumb on top. No wrist. All from the shoulder. You're not carving. You're scoring. You get one stroke and you get out of reach before the other guy processes what happened.”
He walked her through it. Three times. Four. His hands on her hands adjusting the grip. His voice at her ear when the grip went soft. “From the shoulder. Not the wrist. Like that. Good.”
He pulled a zip tie off a coil on the fence post and cinched her wrists together in front of her, snug, the little plastic lock sitting up between them.
“If someone binds you and they're careless enough to do it in front, that's a gift.
You don't saw at it. You raise your arms up over your head”—he lifted his own to show her, elbows loose—“and you drive them straight down into your hips, fast, elbows flaring out wide.
The lock's the weak point. Speed breaks it, not strength.”
She tried it. Brought her bound hands up and snapped them down, and the tie held, because she'd kept her elbows tucked.
“Elbows wide,” he said. “You're hugging yourself.
Don't hug yourself.” She went again, flared her elbows out on the way down, and the plastic cracked on the second pull and her wrists came apart at her sides.
He nodded once. “That. When it's real you won't get to think about it.
Your hands'll just do it.” She rubbed the red line off her wrists and filed it where she filed the things she meant to keep.
She was getting the hang of it. She was getting winded too. She hadn't run anything harder than a grocery-store aisle in three years. Her forearm shook by the sixth rep.
He let her rest.
Passed her a steel canteen off the fence post. She drank. Gave it back. Got her breath.
“Can I headbutt you?”
His mouth did the thing. The almost-smile.
“You want to headbutt me.”
“I want to feel what it's like.”
“You'll hurt yourself.”
“I'll use restraint.”
“That's the opposite of the entire point of headbutting.”
“Jace.”
“Fine.”
He crouched one inch so his forehead was at her level. Held still. Looked at her steadily.
“Easy.”
She put her forehead against his. Slow. Made contact the way you made contact with a wall you were going to push off from. Held it there a second. Pushed off.
“Harder than I thought,” she said.
“That's why it works.”
“Also harder than I thought because it's you.”
“Noted.”
He was still crouched one inch lower than his full height. His eyes at her eye level had warmed. She was aware of how close she was. She stepped back.
He straightened up slow.
“Again,” she said. “From the start.”
The sun went low while they worked.
The yard emptied around them over the course of the afternoon.
The ranked wolves who'd been drilling in the middle square finished their work and racked their practice pieces and walked off toward the lodge.
Two wolves went past with a toolbox on a sled.
One of them tipped his head at Jace. Jace returned the gesture. Neither of them looked at her.
She'd been pushed, turned, thrown at the wrist, walked backward through a disengagement, instructed on where her center of gravity was and wasn't. She could feel the pleasant ache that came after a body had finally done something other than carry a tire iron across a parking lot.
She was also aware, the whole time, of his hands.
They'd been on her. Not often. Not long. Corrective. Her hips once, to level her. Her wrist twice. Her shoulder three times. Each touch was clean and it left when it was done. None of the touches lingered.
None of them were what touched her.
What touched her was the way he moved around her. The way he stood just-close-enough-to-reach-her and not one inch closer. The way his voice did a soft thing when she got a rep right. The way he didn't perform any of it.
She watched him across the yard while he restrung a practice piece on the rack and didn't realize she was watching him until he turned and caught her watching.
Came back over.
“One more,” he said.
“One more.”
“Your grip's sloppy on the knife.”
He stepped behind her.
She knew he was going to before he did. Her shoulders knew. Her shoulders had started tracking him the way they'd started tracking his feet on her porch. She held the practice piece. She held it the way he'd taught her to hold it. She knew the grip was fine. He knew too.
He stepped behind her.
Put his hand over hers on the grip.
“Shoulder,” he said. “Not wrist.”
Her free hand didn't come up at first.
His chest was against her back through two coats and a sweater. Warmer than she'd have thought fabric would let through. His breath was at her ear on the side she wasn't used to hearing breath from.
His hand over hers didn't adjust the knife grip. It stayed where it had landed. It made no effort to move the practice piece. It made no effort to guide her wrist through the shoulder-driven stroke he had just told her the grip was sloppy for.
His hand was just on her hand.
She should have said something.
She didn't.
The other hand came up.
Slow.
Came up to the back of her neck, to the strand of hair that came loose at some point in the afternoon and was sitting against the collar of her coat. He brushed it off her neck with the side of one finger. The finger didn't linger. The finger left.
Her neck was bare.
Cold reached her skin.
She also felt, at a half-inch's distance, his mouth.
Not a touch.
The heat of a mouth about to touch.
She shut her eyes.
She didn't turn around.
She also didn't step away.
His breath warmed the bare strip above her collar. Her whole body waited for the half-inch to close. He waited too. He was giving her the choice. He was going to let her make it in her own time, the way he let her make every choice in her own time.
She would have.
She was going to.
“Alpha.”
The voice came from across the yard.
Theo.
Her lungs started again. She hadn't known they'd stopped.
Jace lifted from her grip. His other arm came off her neck. His chest left her back in the slow quiet way a body left that had been there on purpose and wasn't pretending it hadn't been.
He stepped around her.
She turned.
Theo was at the fence line, his arms crossed, his face carefully neutral. He was a man who had done this job for twenty years and knew the only thing that could make a moment like the one he'd just interrupted worse was a face with anything at all written on it. His face had nothing written on it.
“Alpha. Rachel needs you.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
Jace did something small with his jaw.
“Rachel's the healer.”
“I wasn't asking.”
“There's only one woman for me. Isn't Rachel.”
He said it with his mouth doing that thing it did when it wasn't quite a smile. He was watching her. She was supposed to make a face back. Her face wouldn't decide what to do.
“I was aware of that,” she said.
“Good.”
He held out his hand.
She took it.
Her palm fit into his the way it had fit into his on the stairwell above a body seven nights ago and on the walk back from a clearing six days ago and against the side of his coat during the ninety seconds she'd cried into his shoulder two days ago. He closed his fingers.
They walked across the yard toward the medical cabin.
Theo walked two paces behind.
Her palm stayed in his until they got to the step of the cabin.
She let go first.
Neither of them said the thing that was sitting an inch away from both their mouths.
He went up the two steps of the medical cabin and opened the door and went in.
The door closed behind him.
She stood in the packed snow of the compound at the bottom of the steps with her fingers still held in the shape of his. It was cold in the air. She didn't close her fingers on the shape because she didn't want to close her fingers on it.
She walked back to her cabin.
The walk was three minutes. She knew it was three minutes because she had walked it ten times now.
At her cabin door she set her palm on the knob. Stood a second. Put her forehead against the wood of the door. Not hard. A press.
Tender, she thought.
Warm where I thought cold.
The heat of a mouth about to touch.
She opened the door, stepped inside, closed it behind her. Went to the kettle since she didn't have anywhere else in the cabin she could go.
She put the kettle on.
She put her palm on the wood of the table where the tin sat with its envelope.
Her hand didn't shake.
She also didn't open the tin.
The kettle started its small sound at her elbow. She watched the steam come up out of the spout. Stood at the kitchen table, palm pressed to the wood. Didn't cry. Didn't laugh. Didn't put the kettle on a second burner. Stood there until the whistle started, and took the kettle off.