Page 105 of Dmitri

“You’re welcome.” I slip the phone into my back pocket.“Time to stretch.”

I’ve laid one of my mats out for her already.

Yanking her wet hair into a low pony, Daelyn gets on the floor and starts warming up. The smile is gone from her sweet face, and her mask is back on. She’s bendy, I’ll give her that. Once Daelyn’s warmed up, we go over the combos I taught her yesterday. She’s a little sloppy and slow, which is fine. I don’t expect her to be a savant in the ring on day two.

We go at it for three hours before I allow her a break.

“That felt better.” Daelyn wipes the sweat from her brow. “Can we do it again?”

“As many times as it takes for you to feel confident, Firefly.”

I’ve gone back to calling her that nickname. It keeps slipping out and honestly, I don’t want to stop. She might be my enemy, but she’s still mine.

Daelyn disarms me three more times but gets madder about it instead of happy. “Damnit!” She throws my knife on the ground. Fisting her hair, she walks in circles around me.

Maybe a short break is in order.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” I ask, picking up my knife and heading to my mini fridge to grab her a bottle of water.

“What?”

“You asked me, and I told you. Now I want to know yours.” I keep my tone level and body disengaged.

She takes a long pull from the bottle, guzzling it down. After wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she says, “I once had two slices of cake for breakfast when I was told I could only have one.”

My anger flares. “Bullshit.”

“Bullshit is you saying that crying in front of your mother is the worst thingyou’veever fucking done.”

It takes all I have to not punch a wall. Keeping my hands at my side, I suck in three calming breaths and sit on my cot. “The day I cried in front of her set a series of very bad things into motion directly afterwards.”

“How?”

“I was upset about something and broke down in tears and screamed at my mother. She got mad and busted my skull open with a vodka bottle from the freezer. My dad walked in on us fighting and finally learned that she’d been abusing me for years. She was pregnant at the time too, so instead of going after her, he lost his head and took his anger out on someone else. That someone else died and my father went to prison, where he was recently murdered. So yeah, my showing vulnerability to my mother was the worst fucking thing I ever did because it cost me everything.”

Daelyn drops her attitude immediately. “Jesus, Dmitri.”

“Your turn.” Sitting with my elbows on my knees and hands clasped, I keep my tone level and bored. “The suspense is killing me.”

“Okay. Here it goes.” Daelyn tosses her hands up. “I’ve done a lot, but the highlights probably include being an accomplice to robberies, a liaison for a drug cartel, facilitating seven hand offs for unregistered guns, I’ve committed arson by burning down a competitor’s barn, and once, when I was eight, I stole a pack of pop rocks from a convenience store.”

I don’t think she’s joking.

“Drug cartel?”

Daelyn nods. “And arson.”

“And guns.”

“Don’t forget the pop rocks.” She sighs as if the confession has lifted a weight off her chest. “I’ll take full blame for the pop rocks, but the other shit I’ve done, I didn’t have a choice. I mean, I guess I did. It was do it or suffer the consequences.” Daelynshrugs, shaking her head. “I didn’t think I could survive too many more consequences.”

I want to kill the man who owns her.

“He’s got videos of everything,” she says quietly. “Every bad deed I’ve done for him. He’ll use it to get Addie taken away from me if I don’t…”

“If you don’t fuck my life up and ruin me.”

“Yes.”

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