He means Sari—the only person I’ve ever lost to and never by my choice—but I don’t give him the satisfaction of a flinch. Instead, I grab the next blade, a little heavier, and feint a high throw. Taurus reads the telegraph, smirks, but I pivot and send it low, skipping it off the floor so the blade arcs up.
It’s a dirty trick, but he loves dirty tricks; it’s the only thing that earns his respect.
My blade catches him high in the chest, right under the collarbone, and sinks to the hilt. There’s a microsecond where he just stands there, lips parted as the blood blooms bright red on his skin. Then he roars, not with pain, but with a kind of berserk glee—as if all this violence is the only thing that proves we’re still alive.
He’s losing his damn mind over the coyote and her foppish zombie, especially since they’re threatening everyone he loves with their bullshit.
“Shut up, Taurus, just shut your damn mouth for once! Do you think I don’t fucking know that you want them dead? How many goddamned times do I have to say that we can’t wipe her off the board without consequences?”
My voice is higher than I want it to be, but I don’t back down, even as he rips out the blade with a sound like tearing meat. The bastard barely winces; instead, he lets the metal clatter to the floor and looks at me, his pupils blown and sweat dripping down his face.
I can’t tell if he’s about to laugh or kill me.
The jolt of his palm hitting my face is a static shock through my entire nervous system. I stagger at the blow, more out of practice with our usual sparring methods than I realized. For a microsecond, sound tunnels and goes silent; the lights burning into my corneas like a violent rave.
I might have deserved that.
When my brain resets, the pain is less in my cheek than in the humiliation of being so easily dropped. My vision flares and then narrows, tunneled on Taurus’s broad-shouldered shape as he stalks around the mat, daring me to rise. I’m up before he can complete the circuit, shame and adrenaline flooding my bloodstream. Bracing my legs, I plant my feet and glare at him with all the contempt I can muster. Blood from my lip spatters onto the mat, dark and embarrassing. My reflection in the wall mirrors is one of a furious, hissing predator, fangs bared as I watch him.
If he wanted to see my true self, he has it now.
He’s circling still—all lazy confidence as his eyes roam over me. For a moment, I want nothing more than to sink every blade in the room into his muscled, tattooed torso, but I know the rules of our game. We play to hurt, not to maim, because it’s about punishing ourselves. I let my breathing slow as the pain of the slap settles into the dull ache of remembered injuries while I plan my next strike.
His attention flicks to the door for a second when it rattles, and I lunge. Three steps cover the distance before I duck low to grab the sweat-slicked mat and use it as leverage to spin into a high, arcing kick. My heel finds the side of his head with a satisfying thump. The impact shudders all the way up my spine. Taurus lists sideways and staggers, his skull scraping the wall with a loud crack. He recovers with a snarl, but the look on his face is all feral delight.
“That’s the game, you dick,” I pant, backing up as he paws at the wound on his scalp. “That’s what I want today. Get up and let’s do this so we can burn off our shit. Stop fucking talking about it.”
The clone grins, his mouth full of fangs and blood, and I realize how much we both love this. “There’s my killer,” he says, voice low and ragged. “It’s a pity you don’t have the spine to use that skill on the people who deserve it. You let them hurt you, me, and the people we love for fear of upsetting an apple cart. That’s not the woman I mated.”
His words hit harder than any punch. It’s always back to Sari, that stumpy little troll who plagues us, and the only person I’ve never bested. Taurus knows I’ve been prevented from crushing her every time by others, and he presses that raw nerve as if he’s testing the structure of my soul for cracks.
I know that my only failure is the one that doesn’t stop harming the world and the very few people I give a shit about.
He advances without warning, and his next swing is a blur of motion. I duck, but I’m off balance, and his knuckles graze my temple, sending a spray of sweat and blood into the air. I grunt, tasting copper, and drop into a roll, snatching a throwing knife from a sheath as I come up. It’s a bad idea to keep using the blades, but I don’t care. I need the shock of cold steel in my hand to remind me of my power, even if I can’t use it to defend against our enemies.
I feint left then right before I slash at him. Taurus is faster—he always is. He grabs my wrist and twists until my fingers go numb and the blade clatters to the floor. For a split second, I see a phantom of his old self, the one before all of this shit—a trained fighter who only knows how to make pain a lesson. However, he’s not reliving the past; he’s squeezing my hand until the bones grind together, and the pain makes my vision go white at the edges.
“It’s your fault, Talia,” he growls, voice thick and trembling. “You keep letting her live. How many sodding times have I told you to let me bloody deal with her?”
I hiss, the pain making my voice shrill. “I don’t need you to deal with her when they aren’t ready. We both want it done, but it will make this split worse and hurt them even more than they are now. Our only option is to take it right now, and you know it.”
Taurus yanks my arm, pulls me in close, and for a moment I worry he’s going to break my wrist for real. His breath is hot on my ear. “You’re not ready, either. I can tell that you were struggling when the undead git ambled out. Wilde has always been a problem in that equation, and you need to admit it.”
I twist, desperate, try to knee him in the groin, but he blocks it and shoves me backward. I hit the mat with a graceless thud. The rage tears through me, and I want to howl in frustrated impotence.
He’s right, of course. Wilde has always been an issue as well, even when we were Cabal.
Taurus paces, panting, wiping blood from his face. His eyes are wild as he says, “You think you’re above it, but the second that prancing idgit walks in, you go soft. Just because you had the docs do whatever doesn’t make you responsible for keeping the motherfucker alive. He should have just stayed dead this time.”
“Okay, fine, but I can’t help it!” I scream. I grab the next blade, a heavier one, and throw it not at him, but at the wall behind his head. The blade sinks deep, quivering with the force of the throw.
He doesn’t flinch. Instead, he walks over, pulls the blade free, and tosses it back to me. “Get over it. It’s hard enough to managethose two without you losing your nerve because of the fucking blogger. We will have to do this at some point or our mates will never be free.”
My hands are shaking, but I catch the blade, anyway. I crouch, duck low, and come up with a slicing feint. He reads it, as always, but this time I let go of the blade at the last second and let it spin from my grip. The handle cracks him across the nose with a wet crunch. Blood fountains, and for a moment the look in his eyes is genuine shock.
“Fuck,” he says, reeling.
“Yeah,” I spit, “fuck.”
