Make it hard, Mara. The mark is a gift.
Every single one of them told me. Leah in a corridor, Roxy with relish, Lila seriously, Ines with her eyebrow up.The harder you fight, the better. It’s your whole job. The males want the wounds. They show them off.
So even drowning, even burning, I get an arm free and I hit him.
I punch Cayzor of Eighteen in his ruined face with everything I have.
His head turns about two inches.
He looks back down at me with blood on his lip and an expression of such pure, radiant delight that I nearly laugh.
“Good,” he snarls.
Then I fight him properly.
I buck and twist and get a knee up. I claw at his chest and my human nails actually draw blood, four red lines, and hegrowlslike I’ve handed him something. I get out from under him — genuinely get out, I’m astonished — and scramble up and make it three whole strides before he hooks an arm around my waist and takes me down again into the wet grass.
We roll. I’m shrieking at him, furious and burning and half-laughing, hitting at a chest like a wall while he takes every bit of it. I bite his shoulder and taste blood and he throws his head back androars, and it isn’t pain, it’s triumph, and it echoes off trees that aren’t there.
He pins me. Both wrists in one hand, over my head. He has both my wrists in one enormous fist. He outweighs me by four hundred pounds. Every ordinary avenue of resistance available to a human female is closed.
But I did eleven months of a self-defense course in a community hall in Singapore province when I was twenty-six, because my mother made me, and I hated every minute of it and complained the entire time.
And the one thing I remember — theonlything, the thing the instructor said over and over — is that no matter how big somebody is, no matter how strong, there is always one joint on them the same size as the one on you.
I get my left hand loose. I find his little finger.
And I wrench it sideways with everything I’ve got.
There’s acrack.
Cayzor rears up off me with a roar that shakes the whole forest.
And I lie there in the wet grass with my heart going and think, quite clearly:oh no, I have broken my husband’s hand at our wedding.
He looks at his finger.
It is at a bad angle. It is at areallybad angle.
He looks at me.
And Cayzor of Eighteen — the most feared male on this planet, the male who hasn’t smiled since he was nineteen rotations old — bares every fang he has in something that is unmistakably a grin, and says:
“Mine.”
“Yours,” I gasp.
And he comes down on me with a broken finger and doesn’t stop.
The tunic goes. He takes it off me in one movement and I’m naked in the green dark under him and the air is cool everywhere and he ishot, he’s furnace-hot, and every place his skin meets mine burns.
“Mara.” My name comes out of him wrecked. “Mara — “
“I know.”
“I don’t — “ His whole body is shaking with the effort of holding still. “Tell me if I — “
“Cayzor.” I get both hands on his face. “I’m not made of glass. Stop being careful.”
