I had her turn around and positioned her for an elbow strike from a different angle. She tucked her chin before I told her to, a small instinctive motion that shouldn’t have meant anything.
Naomi used to do that. Tuck her chin the same way, the same angle, before she threw an elbow on the training mat at Langley. I’d watched her do it a hundred times.
I settled my hands back on Sera’s shoulders. Naomi’s little sister. The face that had fooled me for a full second in the poolbefore my brain had caught up and catalogued the differences. The same jaw. The same hairline.
And now I was trying to teach her to survive the same kind of violence that had killed Naomi.
My hands went still on her shoulders. Sera didn’t turn around. Didn’t ask. She waited, and after a moment I let go and stepped back.
“Okay, let’s work on some wrist grabs,” I said. “Different skill set. This is about escaping a hold, not delivering a strike.”
I took her right wrist in my hand. Standard grab, thumb on top, four fingers wrapped underneath. “Your instinct is going to be to pull away. Don’t. Pulling against a grip tightens it. You rotate toward the thumb side and strip the grip at the weakest point. Fast, committed. No half measures.”
I held. She rotated. Careful, controlled, analyzing the mechanics while she moved through them.
She didn’t break free. She tried three more times with the same result.
“You’re thinking about it too much.”
“I’m trying to do it correctly.”
“Correctly isfast. Correctly isviolent. This isn’t a data model, Sera. Someone grabs you, you don’t have time to calculate the optimal angle of rotation. You react.”
I took her wrist again. Firmer this time. She twisted. Still too measured, her brain running the physics while her body waited for the answer.
“Stop thinking.” I tightened my grip. “React.”
She tried again. Her wrist turned against my thumb but the commitment wasn’t there. She was still solving it instead of surviving it.
“Someone grabs you in a parking lot, in an alley, in your apartment. They’re not waiting while you work out the geometry. Again.”
I grabbed her. Hard enough that it was real. Hard enough that the math wouldn’t save her.
She broke free.
The twist was fast and clean, and her wrist came out of my grip like it had never been there. She stumbled back a half step from the momentum, caught herself, and looked up at me.
The surprise on her face mirrored mine. She’d done it on instinct. Her brain had gotten out of the way, and her body had answered, and the answer had been exactly right.
“There it is,” I said.
She was breathing hard. Flushed from the exertion, her chest rising and falling, but the half step she’d stumbled back hadn’t created distance. Instead, it had erased it. She was right there.
She was looking up at me grinning, and I was looking down at her and the clinical framework I’d built around the last hour just wasn’t there anymore. It hadn’t crumbled or faded. It had simply stopped existing, like it had been made of something that couldn’t survive what was underneath it.
I kissed her.
I didn’t decide to. There was no moment where my brain approved the action and my body executed it. My hand came up to the side of her face, and I leaned down and my mouth found hers and everything else fell away.
Brief. Her lips slightly parted with the catch of her breath against mine. My thumb found the hinge of her jaw, her pulse hammering under my fingertips. The smallest sound in the back of her throat went through me like a current.
Then we both stopped.
I pulled back. Half an inch, then an inch, then far enough that I could see her face, her eyes still half-closed, her hand lifted toward my chest but not quite touching it. Suspended between reaching and pulling away.
She opened her eyes. I watched her working through the same thing I was. What had just happened. What it meant. What either of us was supposed to do with it.
“Your, uh.” I cleared my throat. “Your form is getting better. On the wrist breaks.”
