Page 94 of Wicked Auction

We run it five more times. Same attack each round—me coming in for the throat, her working the escape. She's faster each time. I'm not going easy on her, and I don't intend to.

But it doesn't matter because she's a natural and she's furious, and those two things together teach a person more in an hour than I could in a week.

On the sixth, I come in the same as always, and she isn't there.

She moves before my hands close. Drops her shoulder, turns off my centerline, and I go through the space where she was standing. My own weight carries me. She catches my wrist on the way past, uses it, and turns me with it. My back hits the mat wall hard enough to wind me.

Then her forearm is across my windpipe.

She's got her weight behind it. Her face is inches from mine, breathing fast, warm against my jaw. Her hair's come loose, and it's on my throat too.

Christ, I’m hard.

Neither of us says anything.

“Good girl,” I whisper.

She holds the pressure one second longer than she needs to. Then her arm drops.

“Don't call me that when I've just had you by the throat.”

But she's smiling, and she doesn't step back.

“Noted.”

I reach past her to the bench and pick up the smaller of the two guns I've been carrying since Boston.

She takes it. Her hands are steadier than they have any right to be.

“Let me guess, your mother hired a shooting instructor to come to your house?”

She shrugs a shoulder. “Might have done.” It's adorable when she talks Irish. “My brother believed in knowing how to use one, even if you never had to.”

The gun settles in her hand, just right, her grip already adjusted. I'm aware that in that moment she could pull the trigger and it would be me she'd kill.

“He let me practice when my father wasn't home,” she says. I watch her check the chamber, smooth and certain.

“Yeah? Tell me what you know about gun safety.”