Page 80 of The Dangerous Dance

I look at the courtyard.

"That's all," Mackenzie says. "She just said to tell you."

I nod.

Mackenzie puts her hand on my arm once, briefly, and then she goes to stand with Finn and Gianna near the far wall, where they'll watch from, and I stand in the center of the courtyard and wait.

Declan comes out at five past nine.

He's dressed for it — no coat, which in this cold is a statement, hands already wrapped, which means he's been preparing too. He looks like himself in a way he hasn't in months, which is to say he looks like the Declan who existed before Connolly got into his ear and started dismantling things. The anger is there — it's always there with Declan, it's the fuel he runs on — but it's clean anger now. Directed.

He stops across from me.

We look at each other.

Behind him, near the wall, I can see Finn's face — watchful, still. Gianna beside him with her arms crossed. Mackenzie with her jaw set.

"Ready," Declan says. Not a question.

"When you are," I say.

He comes at me first.

The thing about fighting your brother is that you know everything.

You know the tell in his right shoulder before he throws. You know he drops his left when he's tired. You know the three-strike combination he's been using since he was nineteen that starts with a jab and ends with something that comes from the side and which you have to watch for specifically because it's fast enough to be a problem even when you're expecting it.

You also know how to hurt him. Really hurt him. The specific points that aren't about physical pain but about the other kind — the things you could say, the ways you could use twenty years of shared history against him in the moment, the shortcuts to damage that only someone who knows someone completely can take.

I don't take them. Neither does he.

That's the thing about this old way, the thing my father understood when he instituted it and the thing I've been trusting today — when you fight someone you love, even in anger, even with everything between you, you don't go for the things that can't heal. You go for the things that can.

We go for the things that can.

It is brutal anyway.

He catches me across the cheek in the first five minutes with the combination I was watching for and was a half-second slow on, which Mackenzie registers from the wall with a sound I hear even from across the courtyard. I get him in the ribs twice in the next exchange, which I know from the way he adjusts afterward costs him. We go to the ground once and come back up and neither of us stays down.

Finn moves forward at the fifteen-minute mark. I can see him in the peripheral, debating. I give him the smallest shake of my head. He stops.

Twenty minutes. Twenty-five.

He's breathing harder than me, which is fitness rather than weakness — Declan has always trained for power rather than endurance, and endurance is what this requires. I've been waiting for it. Not cruelly. It's just the shape of how this goes and we both knew it going in.

At thirty minutes I catch him properly — not the face, the side, the ribs I already hit earlier, and I feel rather than hear the way it takes the air from him, and he goes down on one knee.

He stays there for a moment.

I step back.

I wait.

He looks up at me. His face is various colors of damage that I'll feel some accountability for later and which he would reject any apology about. His breathing is controlled despite everything, which is Declan — the control is always there, even in extremity.

He holds my gaze.

He stands.