“So…torture,” Mace muttered. “You’re sending us to be tortured.”
“You really want to get into it with me, Mace?” Ky asked, his gravelly voice rumbling with warning.
Mace slumped in his chair. “No, sir.”
Kynan slid a challenging look over at Blade and Scotty. “How about you two? Got anything to say?”
They both echoed Mace’s, “No, sir.” They even matched his resigned and miserable tone.
Training with her father couldn’t be called pleasant on agoodday. It could be considered downright hell on the bad ones. Usually, it fell somewhere in the middle, but at the end of a session, you pretty much just crawled home and collapsed into bed. You might wash off the blood and treat your wounds if you had any energy left at all.
“This isn’t a punishment,” Kynan said, more gently. “Well, mostly. Maybe you’ll remember it the next time you get stupid during a mission. This is about teamwork. Obviously, there’s a problem here, and you need to work it out. And there’s no one better than Ares to force you to confront the root of whatever has gotten between you.”
Terror shot through Scotty like a lightning bolt. The root of their problem washer.There was no way her father could find out. No. Fucking. Way.
“What if we promise to work things out on our own?” she asked.
Please, please be cool, Kynan. She crossed her fingers.
“If you could work it out on your own, you would have done it already,” he said, and her heart sank. “But I’ll tell you what. If Ares thinks you guys are back to normal before the two weeks are up, we can cut this short.”
Okay, that might work, but—
“And if he doesn’t think that when the two weeks are up?” Blade asked.
Kynan’s smile was grim. “I think you all know the answer to that.” He gestured to the door. “You’d better hurry. Ares is waiting.”
Chapter 21
The first day of training was brutal beyond anything Scotty had ever experienced. And she’d grown up in the damned arena. She’d spent countless hours sparring with demons, angels, and Horsemen. She’d nursed a thousand wounds and had broken several bones—most of which she’d kept from her mother.
Her dad had been the suck-it-up-buttercup kind of father, but her mom? Cara was tough as nails in many ways, but she didn’t handle her daughters being injured well.
Her mother would have flipped outhardtoday.
Today had been like all those other days put together and distilled into nothing but carnage.
And her father hadn’t even been there.
Nonstop waves of Memitim had come at Scotty, Mace, and Blade, and the angels had used not only physical weapons but also their angelic weapons. For four hours, the Memitim attacked, and when the onslaught finally stopped, Scotty and the guys fell to their knees in the bloody sand, unable to move, rendered quivering jelly.
They’d thought it was over. A handful of Memitim brought water and protein bars, and then Tavin, a Seminus doctor from UG, had come to heal them of their cuts, burns, and crush wounds.
After he left, the battle began again, this time, coming from Ares’s Ramreel security staff. Three hours later, the water, food, and healing routine came again.
This time, though, when Tavin finished, her brother Rath came to tell them they could go home.
The one good thing about their hours of training was that they’d been either too busy or too exhausted to argue with each other, and as they limped in silence to the Harrowgate, they could barely breathe, let alone talk.
“See you guys tomorrow,” she croaked as Mace and Blade stepped into the gate. They both nodded as it closed.
She leaned against a pillar and groaned. She didn’t want to do this for two weeks. She didn’t want to do it for another day. The problem was that both Mace and Blade were stubborn as hell, and she didn’t know how long it would take Ares to beat them into compliance.
Granted, they’d worked together well today, fighting in practiced sync as if nothing had happened. But had it solved anything? She doubted it.
So, how were they going to get their shit together before Ares’s training killed them all?
Maybe she should talk to someone. Instinct had her wanting to talk to Mace or Blade, but for obvious reasons, she couldn’t.
