Page 18 of Unleash Hades
“Keep your hands up.” In a blink she was on top of me, her red gloves hurling through the air towards my face. I barely dodged in time, before she landed an elbow with her other arm, squarely hitting me in the ribs. “Protect your face. Remember your head is more important than the rest of you.”
I wasn’t sure if that was true.
The bell chimed, and I almost collapsed in relief.
“Poutain!”Fuck!I slowly lowered myself to my knees. “Are they sure they don’t want you to fight in my place?”
The sweat poured down my eyes, stinging and blurring my vision.
I heard Rose slump beside me, as she handed me a water bottle. I squirted it into my dry mouth with my fist, and we both lay down on the cool canvas for a beat. Though, I suspected that she could have gone another round just fine.
“They won’t let me do anything anymore.” She lay back on the cold ground, her arms splayed out to her side, her knees tilted in one direction. From above, she must have looked like Jesus on the cross.
If she were anyone else - if she were her husband, for example - I would not try to ask questions. But Rose was a different matter.
She was straightforward and had no pretenses. She would not waste my time, or words, with prevarications. “What do you mean?”
“It means that my father who trained me, and my husband who fought beside me will never let me into the field. I’ll never fight in the octagon again. I’m just…” she let out a sad, long, tortured sigh. “I’m a mommy.”
Children ruin everything. They take, and take, and take, and if you survive long enough for them to give you anything back, then you were lucky.
“Have you told Alastair?” I did not point out her sadness. I did not have to. It was clear as day.
“I’ve tried but he doesn’t understand.”
“Hmm.”
There wasn’t much else to say after that.
She was right. Her father would not let her go on missions, and her husband would not let her fight anymore. Her body was too precious when it held their children inside. Now, it was whatfed and nourished them. So, it would be years before she really trained again. Precious years.
And years were an eternity in the sport.
But, then again, there was also another part of the equation – the most important part.Her.
Her desires, her will, her determination.
“They might forbid you from doing things,” I said, slowly. “But they cannot stop you, without your consent.”
I groaned as I lumbered to my feet, feeling the soreness in my thighs, in my guts, in my chest. I felt pain everywhere, and we had only been at this for a few days.
I should also be learning about my mark, but I was too fucking tired. By the end of training, my old body felt like death, and my brain was too broken to read the dossier Philippa provided.
When I said that to Rose, she laughed.
“If you slept, instead of watching your screens all night long, you’d have more bandwidth.”
The irony of her statement wasn’t lost on me. My cameras took a lot of literal bandwidth. I used enough to fuel an entire Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game - the kind with wizards and thousands of basement dwellers finding serotonin in fantastical stories and victories online.
I would need to rely on Rose to know the information, because my brain was too exhausted to learn new things.
“Why do they believe the mark can point a finger at Richard Davenport?” I asked, as my addled mind tried to piece together all the bits of the operation. All the little nuances that would paint the picture of why this was happening.
“They wouldn’t say,” Rose said with a roll of her eyes. “It’s classified.”
She groaned, coming to her feet as well.
As exhausted as I was, so was she. Thank God.
