Chapter nineteen
Jessica
I've started looking forward to combat, which is a sentence I never thought I'd think.
Somewhere in the last several weeks it stopped being the thing I dreaded and became the best hour of my day — sweaty, exhausting, and mine.
I've got a rhythm now: wrap my hands, tie my hair back, meet Luke in the arena, and spend an hour learning how not to flinch.
I'm good at it these days. Not great. But good, and getting better, and there's nothing like the feeling of my body finally doing what I tell it to.
Today, when I walk in, Luke's already there wrapping his hands — and about ten seconds behind me, Torres strolls in too.
He doesn't ask. Doesn't wait to be invited. He just walks in like he owns the place, drops his bag next to mine, and starts stretching.
"...Hi?" I say, grinning, surprised and pleased. "What are you doing here?"
"Heard this is where the magic happens." Torres rolls a shoulder. "Figured I'd find out what all the after-class disappearing's about."
So he followed me. Or close enough — he's watched me vanish every afternoon for weeks and finally decided to see where, and being Torres, he didn't ask anyone's permission. He just showed up and made himself at home.
I glance at Luke.
Luke has gone very still.
He doesn't say anything for a moment, and the moment stretches, and I watch his jaw tighten before he goes back to wrapping his hands with a little more focus than the job needs. "This is a training session," he says finally. Cool. Clipped. "Not a spectator sport."
"Good thing I'm not here to spectate." Torres drops into a stretch, unbothered, meeting the chill head-on with an easy grin. "I'll pull my weight."
Something passes between them — quick and male and completely over my head, two very different men taking each other's measure across a mat. Luke's face doesn't change, but the temperature in the room drops about ten degrees.
I decide, cheerfully, to ignore whatever that is.
"Well, I think it's great," I announce, because I do, and I bump Torres's shoulder with mine. He bumps mine back, easy, familiar.
Luke's hands go still on the wrap for half a second. His eyes track the shoulder-bump like it personally offended him.
"Warm up," he says. Flat. And turns away.
Here's my problem, and it announces itself thirty seconds in, Luke's taken off the academy jacket tonight.
He's training in a fitted shirt, and I have trained with this man every single afternoon for weeks and somehow never — until this precise moment — fully registered the situation happening under that shirt.
The shoulders. The forearms. The controlled power of him when he steps through a demonstration.
He's showing me a combination. I'm supposed to be studying his technique. I'm studying something. I'm not a hundred percent sure it's the technique.
"You following the footwork?" Luke asks.
"Mm-hm," I say, with the confidence of a woman who was absolutely not following the footwork.
I glance over and Torres is watching me with one eyebrow raised nearly to his hairline, because Torres notices everything, and I give him a look that says, very clearly, shut up. His grin widens.
"Something funny?" Luke asks, not looking up.
"Nope," Torres and I say at the exact same time.
Then Luke comes to fix my stance, which he's done a hundred times, which should be the least remarkable thing in the world. Tonight it is not the least remarkable thing in the world.
"You're opening up here," he says, and steps in behind me. One hand settles on my shoulder, adjusting the angle. The other comes to my waist, repositioning my hips, and my brain — my traitor brain — goes completely, embarrassingly quiet.
"Am I?" I manage.
Luke pauses. "Yes."
"Right." Riveting stuff, Jessica. Truly.
He moves me again, and his chest nearly brushes my back, close enough that I feel the heat coming off him, close enough that I become suddenly, acutely aware of how much bigger he is than me—tall and solid and warm, right there, while my pulse kicks up for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with a combat lesson.
"Try it again," he says, stepping back.
I try it again. I botch it completely.
Luke looks at the mess I've made of a movement I've done right forty times. Then he looks at me.
"Your fault," I inform him.
His eyebrow lifts. "My fault?"
"You distracted me."
The words are out before my brain can review them. There's a beat of silence in which I fully register what I just said, out loud, to a prince.
Luke's mouth curves, slow. "Did I?"
Oh, hell.
I plant my feet and square back up, face burning. "Shut up and teach."
He's definitely smiling now. I can feel it without looking. Across the mat, so is Torres, and his is much more dangerous, because Torres is going to bring this up later.
"Spar with Torres," Luke says after a while. "I want to see you move against someone who isn't me."
And the second Torres and I square up, the whole energy of the room changes.
Torres isn't precise like Luke. He's unpredictable — quick and instinctive and a little chaotic, fighting like a guy who learned it the hard way instead of from a manual, and I love it, because it means I have to react instead of anticipate. We're trash-talking before the first exchange.
"You sure about this?" I ask, circling.
"I've been doing this since before we knew wolves existed."
"And yet."
I catch him once — a clean tag to the ribs that makes him grunt — and I whoop, and he narrows his eyes and gets me right back, and I go for a sweep, and he catches me instead, and then we're both going down in a tangle of limbs and laughter and I land half on top of him.
And then nobody's laughing.
His hands are at my waist where he caught me. My palms are flat on his chest. We're both breathing hard, faces inches apart, and I can feel his heart going as fast as mine — and all at once I'm thinking about his room, weeks ago, the strand of hair he tucked behind my ear.
Torres's gaze drops — just for a second — to my mouth.
I see it. My stomach flips clean over.
"Again."
Luke's voice cracks across the arena like a dropped weight.
I look over. He's standing with his arms crossed, expression carefully, completely blank — and somehow that flatness says more than a scowl ever could.
I roll off Torres and scramble up.
"I think," Torres murmurs, low, just for me, getting to his feet, "we're in trouble."
I press my lips together so I don't laugh.
"My turn," Luke says, stepping onto the mat where Torres just was. "You're with me."
I eye him. "You look awfully serious all of a sudden."
"I am."
And then he comes at me.
It's harder than usual — faster combinations, tighter angles, less space, like he's decided tonight's lesson is keep up or don't. And I do.
I keep up. I block, I slip, I counter, my body doing what weeks of this drilled into it, and I'm good — genuinely, thrillingly good, meeting him strike for strike.
He presses, and I read it right, and for one glorious, impossible second I catch him off balance and think — I've got him. I'm actually going to put Prince Lucian Draeven on the floor—
Then he reverses it so smoothly I don't even feel it happen, and the mat comes up to meet my back. Not hard. He controls the whole fall, one hand cradling so my head never touches down.
And he comes down with me.
Suddenly Luke is above me. One hand braced on the mat beside my head. The other closed around my wrapped wrist, pinning it gently to the floor. His body is a warm weight over mine, close, so close, and we're both breathing hard, and my brain goes completely, utterly blank.
Luke looks down at me.
I look up at him.
Neither of us says a word.
And I become aware of everything, all at once — his breath, uneven; his weight, careful and solid; his hand wrapped around my wrist; the green of his eyes this close; the line of his mouth; my own pulse slamming so hard I'm sure he can feel it where he's holding me.
His gaze drops.
Oh.
Oh.
"Are we still training?"
Torres's voice, from a few feet away, easy and pointed all at once.
I jerk my eyes away. Luke releases my wrist immediately and is on his feet in one clean motion, offering me his hand, face shuttered. I take it. He pulls me up like I weigh nothing.
Neither of us says one single word about what just happened. I am certainly not going to be the one to bring it up.
Torres gives me a look.
I refuse, on principle, to meet it. It's only then that I notice we have an audience.
Soren and Ander are back in the bleachers. Of course they are. Sitting there like this is dinner theater, and they saw all of it — the tumble with Torres, the mat with Luke, everything.
Fantastic.
I grab my towel and wipe my face. "Do you two just come here to judge me?"
"Mostly," Soren says.
I laugh, surprised — that's practically a full comedy set from him.
Then Ander, unexpectedly, says, "You're dropping your right shoulder."
I turn. "What?"
"When you get tired. You drop your right shoulder."
He rises and comes down from the bleachers, and I watch him approach — and because apparently today is the day I'm noticing every single one of them, my brain helpfully supplies: damn it, that one too.
Ander's gorgeous in a completely different way than Luke. Colder. Sharper. All clean lines and blue eyes and a stillness that reads as a warning.
It is, I decide, deeply unfair that all of the guys look like that.
He stops in front of me and demonstrates the drop — shows me how my guard sags on the right when I'm winded.
I try to fix it.
His mouth tightens.
"What?"
"You're still doing it."
"Very encouraging. Thank you."
For half a second, Soren looks amused.
Then he steps around behind me.
"May I?"
I blink.
I did not expect may I from Ander Ardent, who told me to return to my table the first night I met him.
"...Sure."
His hand settles on my shoulder.
And—
Oh.
He's barely touching me. Just the warm weight of his palm through my shirt, but my entire body notices. My breath catches, and some stupid instinct tells me to lean back.
Into him.
I absolutely do not do that.