Any clothes of his would be too large, and I wondered who these once belonged to and why he had them in his closet. There was no name on the collar.
I stepped out of the washroom to Vander facing me in the center of the bedroom with his arms crossed. The morning sun shone in through the windows, revealing that his dark hair had red to it, more of a very dark auburn color than the black it had looked in the night. Those bright blue eyes slowly moved down my body, not in a scandalous way, but as if he was assessing and scrutinizing my appearance. It still made my cheeks warm. I fidgeted with my gloves, unsure what to do with my hands.
His gaze stopped on my feet. “Why are you wearing your old boots?”
“The boots you gave me are too small.” I couldn’t even get my foot in them all the way.
“Do you have giant’s feet?”
I glared at him. “No.”
He dropped his arms and raised his chin. “Nowhat?”
“No,sir.” Spending every waking and sleeping moment with this jerk was going to be harder than I thought.
He stepped closer. “Hands behind your back. Grab your right wrist with your left hand. Stand straighter. Push your shoulders back.” I followed his commands immediately. “Chin up. You’re in the League of Assassins now, you don’t look down for anyone. You meet people’s eyes, especially leadership.”
I lifted my gaze to his and met his stare. A shudder ran down my spine. There was something innately predatory about him that had the hairs on the nape of my neck rising.
He stepped behind me, and my spine tingled. “Good. Your feet should be slightly farther apart than shoulder width. Make sure your core is tight. This is our standard stance.” I turned my head to watch him circle back to my front. “How are your ribs today?”
“They hurt worse than yesterday, sir.”
“They always do. Walk for me.”
I blinked, unsure what he was talking about. “Walk where?”
“To the door and back.”
“Um, alright.” Stretching and putting weight on my injured leg made it impossible not to limp, but I hid it as much as I could. I felt like the horses that pranced around the corral at auction, though I more likely resembled a duck with this waddle. Once I reached the door, I turned on my heel and moved back toward him, hyper-aware he was once again studying me.
“How bad is your pain on a scale of one to ten?”
“One being a scrape and ten burning alive?”
He cracked a smile for the first time, hinting at his nice teeth. “Have you ever caught fire?”
“No, but I can imagine it would be incredibly painful.”
“Alright, we’ll use that scale.”
“A six. Is it fair to say I feel like I was run down by a horse?”
“I saw how hard Morrow hit you. It’s fair.” He tilted his head side to side as if contemplating something, then went to the washroom. It sounded like he was rifling through the cupboard, and he returned with a small, brown-tinted glass bottle. “It’s a white willow bark tincture. It will ease the pain some. Three drops under the tongue will do.”
I wrapped my fingers around the bottle and pulled the dropper top. It tasted terrible. I gave it back. “Thank you, sir.”
He tossed the bottle on his bed and marched for the door. “When we return, you’ll go through the manual I gave you and familiarize yourself with our rules. Your apprenticeship will be nearly a year unless you don’t pass the final exams and assessment next May. During this year, you will follow my lead, and I expect you to do well, I don’t care that you’re not from here. You’ll have to try harder than the others. You won’t see or communicate with your family or anyone you knew before until your apprenticeship is over. You are here to train and kill vampires, nothing else matters.”
An entire year without seeing or speaking to my family? I felt homesick already.
“What happens if I don’t pass?”
His eyes narrowed ever so slightly. I got the impression he wouldn’t let that happen.
“You keep training until you do.”
I shut the door behind us and winced at the tightness in my leg, and the ache in my ribs, as I struggled to keep up with him in the corridor. I gripped the railing as we moved down the spiral stone stairwell, leaning on it more than I normally would. Abreeze whistled through the open windows, bringing with it the smell of wheat fields. I paused to peer out over the land. It was difficult to see beyond the forest, but through the breaks in the colossal trees surrounding this place, I spotted the tops of the highest buildings in the city. It must be a mile from here. I hadn’t realized we had walked this far.
