10. Addie
ADDIE
PARAMORE – TURN IT OFF
In hindsight, the tequila was probably a bad idea.
Ten minutes into Beckett’s gruelling warm-up, my stomach was already protesting.
Twenty minutes into sparring, Eth managed to land a particularly solid jab to the soft spot in my lower belly—that little pouch that no amount of training or eating right would get rid of—resulting in full-scale rioting of the upchuck variety.
I choked down the nausea and coughed to combat the burn in the back of my throat, copping an elbow to the cheek for my trouble.
“Dude, what the fuck?” I hissed, now certain he’d alcoholically sabotaged me on purpose.
“Oh, don’t make that face. You’d hate me more if I went easy on you.” He dodged my retaliatory knee to his crotch area and pouted. “That’s not nice, Adelaide.”
“Fuck nice. Nice gets you killed.”
“She’s not wrong,” a calm, deep voice rumbled from just outside the borders of the mat—where he’d apparently set up camp.
I didn’t need to look to know it was the sadist himself—he’d been keeping a close eye on us all session. I, on the other hand, had been pointedly ignoring him—or at least trying to—until he spoke. Again. And again. And again.
“So, why are you pulling your punches—”
“I’m not!” I snapped.
“—Taylor?”
Oh.
Oh.
How fucking dare he?!
“I’m not,” Ethan grunted, attempting a shitty uppercut that was too slow to be any real threat.
“You are!” I realised, scowling.
That revelation, the unsubtle pointing-out by Beckett, flipped a switch in my brain. Logic went out the window, leaving only instinct behind—and considering the day I’d already had, it was an emotional warzone all up in there.
I hated the fact that Eth was going easy on me.
Hated that Beckett had been the one to point it out.
Abhorred the thought that it was because Ethan thought me weak, fragile, broken.
Detested that even if those things were true, he still thought he could win.
His hands lowered ever so slightly, exposing an opening I took full advantage of. I led with a left jab, swinging from my hips, and successfully distracted him from the right cross I was actually going for.
My fist landed with devastating impact. The bridge of Ethan’s nose crunched audibly beneath my knuckles, and his blood sprayed the mat—and still, I did not relent.
His fucking pity had broken my emotional dam, and now decades’ worth of pent-up bitterness came crashing down on the both of us. I hit, kicked, and jabbed my way through the crimson haze clouding my vision. I screamed with the force of my hatred.
Hatred of his charity, wrapped in unwanted layers of well-meaning.
Hatred of the circumstances that brought me here to this gothic hellhole in the first place.
Hatred that Fleur was gone.
That it was my fault.
That I couldn’t avenge the scum I knew in my bones was responsible—and conveniently absent from today’s session.
Red was all I could see until a thick, tanned forearm extended into my field of vision, blocking me from further rage-filled right hooks.
All of a sudden, it was not the bloodstained teeth on the infuriatingly amused grin of my lone remaining friend I was staring up at, but the grievous glare of my hateful instructor.
And you know what? Fuck him for interceding.
Beckett’s eyes flicked to my quivering fists like he knew they were not yet done hurting or causing hurt.
“Take your best shot,” he taunted, eyes sparkling. “Go on. Show me what you’ve learned.”
I was probably about to eat shit, but my fury was unleashable. At the slightest provocation, it erupted. With any luck, I could land a few well-earned blows before he handed me my ass in front of the whole class.
I feinted left but struck out with my right fist, aiming for his solar plexus.
I almost had him, too, but Beckett moved illogically quick for someone of his stature, and all my fist met was open air.
I stumbled, ducking to evade his sweeping knuckles but only succeeded in a crouch-then-roll manoeuvre.
Beckett kept coming, though. He didn’t let up—not once.
He didn’t go easy on me.
He didn’t care that my best friend had just died. Didn’t care that she’d died because of me.
And of course, he didn’t give a single flying fuck that it should have been me instead.
My attacks grew sloppier as my wrath soared, but no matter how many times I swung, it still wasn’t enough. He had me on my back, pinned beneath his obtuse frame, in front of everyone in two minutes flat.
Someone whistled like they were impressed.
Fuck them, too.
And just like that old poem, I raged—raged against Beckett’s elbow across my throat trying to choke me out—and I did not go gently into his forcible good night.
Instead, I thrashed and jabbed, even stooping so low as to wedge my knee into his balls, but Beckett seemingly had all the patience in the world and the skill with which to restrain each of my offending limbs systematically.
“Ughhh!” I roared, trying again to dislodge him.
And as I wriggled, it dawned on me that my very large, very attractive instructor was lying on top of me. His hips were wedged between mine, and I panted beneath him. I flushed at the traitorous sensations, at his proximity—and at the thoughts it prompted, unbidden.
Well, mostly unbidden.
Apparently, the same occurred to him.
“Van,” he barked.
Somewhere out of my periphery but close enough to be loud, Evander ordered the initiates out. “Alright, class dismissed. Go and eat something.”
Neither Beckett nor I made to move, not even when my classmates began whispering about us on the way out.
“Addie—” Ethan began, but Beckett cut him off.
“Out, Taylor.”
He was a hair’s breadth from violence with that lethal expression and that downright murderous tone. But I didn’t think it was aimed at me right now.
Eth took the hint. The doors swung closed behind him, and then we were alone.
Dangerously, blissfully alone.
Begrudgingly, I had to admit that his eyes were beautiful up close.
They were fractured jade and mountain forests.
They were Scottish Highlands and the sun-drenched waters of Valle Versazca—and they were staring at me with such intensity I could have sworn he was seeing through me.
All the way down to my broken, blackened, death-magnet heart… and that was the thought that undid me.
Tears pricked my eyes, but I refused to let them fall. They gathered in the corners, threatening to spill like traitorous little wenches, but I would not be the first to look away. In that, at least, I would not concede.
“Let it out, Ice Queen,” he murmured, so softly the words brushed against my cheek like a caress. “I know what it’s like to lose people you care about—”
“You think that’s what this is? Me losing someone for the first time?” I spat the words like acid, but he didn’t even flinch. “I have lost everyone. Death has claimed all the people I care about, and yet, it never claims me.”
“Is that what you want?” he asked, surprising me. “To be put out of your misery? To die? Because that can be arranged.”
Beckett rolled off me and rose to his feet in one smooth, silent movement. With his back turned—foolish, arrogant move—he retrieved something off the floor beside the sparring mat while I debated the merits of jumping him from behind.
“Beck—” Evander said from behind me.
I startled, having been entirely focused on the beast before me, I hadn’t realised there was one at my back. I guess the professor had stuck around to watch whatever show his bestie and I were putting on.
Beckett silenced him with a sharp look. Something metallic clicked in his hands, and gods help me, I knew that sound.
Was he really going to do this? Here? Now?
I stood quietly, even more slowly than he had.
Taking a deep, steadying breath, I rolled my shoulders back and glanced at the young, attractive-in-that-wealthy-yet-rebellious-kind-of-way tech instructor, and waited for what was inevitably coming.
The lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses flashed, reflecting the LED lighting, as he flicked a soft, swooping lock of honey-brown hair out of his face.
I guess he wanted to see what kind of mess my brains would make, unobstructed.
A soft, self-deprecating laugh slipped past my teeth.
He joined us on the mat, fingers flared like he was internally at war with himself, gaze flicking between his friend and his potential prodigy.
“Something funny, Sinclair?” Beckett drawled, turning to face me.
“Infinitely.” I chuckled again, thinking abstractly that it was probably for the best that my mind was a little unhinged right now. It’d make this next part easier.
“Beck,” Evander attempted again—silenced again.
Beckett extended his right hand, bracing it with his left, his feet in the perfect stance.
The laughter died on my tongue.
“Care to share what’s so funny about this?” he asked, voice lethally soft as he aimed a sexy Beretta M9 at my head.
I smirked. At least if I had to go out like this, it was with a gun I knew would take care of the job the first time round, in the hands of a man I trusted to be deadly accurate.
“It’s just that”—my lips twitched—“I’ve spent the better part of the last two years working my ass off to not become a Swallow”—a sharp huff of derisive laughter exited my nose—“and while that’s pretty much a given for female initiates, it’s just so completely ironic that now I’m going to die a virgin instead. ”
Beckett blinked twice, his brows creasing in the middle, then did that cool gun-flip thing where it spun around his index finger. He caught it by the barrel, extended it towards me butt-first.
“That’s entirely up to you,” he murmured. “Take it.”
I froze, staring at the Beretta’s sleek black surface, then back up at the intense gaze of the man offering it.
“Take the fucking weapon, Adelaide,” he growled, grabbing my hand roughly and shoving the gun forcibly into it. His fingers wrapped around mine, in a twisted echo of Pearce’s gesture a few days ago—before life changed irrevocably.