Page 17 of Oath
“Excuse me?” Arms folded, I crossed the room. The clip of my heels was muffled against the different flooring.
“Self-defense, Dollface,” he continued. “Come here so I can wrap your hands.”
That made me stop dead. “First of all, stop giving me orders. I didn’t join the army and I don’t report to you.”
He fixed those cool gray eyes on me. “No, but you are continuously going into dangerous situations and you have a mission you want to undertake.”
A mission…
“That’s just to play Am, while I fake out her boss to find out what the hell he did.” That didn’t seem even remotely as dangerous as the other challenges we’d faced. “I’ve done way harder stuff already.”
“I know.” Clipped. Terse. “You’ve handled yourself well, even if you’ve also been hurt.”
Mouth open to argue, I blinked. The compliment threw me.
“However, there’s luck, and then there’s training. Relying on luck will get you killed. You will not die on my watch. So, we need to train you.”
I stared at him and it genuinely took me a moment to find my voice. “You’re serious.”
“Yes,” he said, crossing toward me with what looked like a roll of red gauze. “Deadly serious.” The man towered over me as he took my right hand in his then began to wrap it. “We don’t have enough time to put you through an accelerated combat course.”
That made me picture both of us in fatigues with streaks of black to keep down the glare and… This close, the muscles in hischest rippled with each movement of his hands as he wound the tape over my knuckles then across my palm.
“You’re going to learn a handful of moves, then repeat them until they are second nature—until your muscle memory has you responding before you even think about it.” The measured tones jerked my gaze upward to find him not looking at me but at my hands.
“And we have this kind of time?” The leads were getting colder and colder. That was one thing when we were fighting a battle for Doc and his friends. This was different.
“We’re making the time,” he said, checking the tautness of the tap. “Flex your hand. Now make a fist.”
The manicure I’d gotten while in Braxton Harbor had grown out. So, I’d filed them and just gone for shaped at this point. The guys had picked up the polish I asked for, and the simple pink gave them the suggestion of length. Asking for another manicure so soon seemed a really bad form all things being equal.
He made some adjustment then went to taping up my left hand. “Your target has almost eighty pounds, and eight inches on you in height. Physically, you are not only smaller, youareweaker. If he decides to blitz you, and you don’t at least know some manner of real defense—he could kill you.”
It was only the hoarse note that crept into his chilly tone at the end that kept me from being a real bitch back at him. However… “Newsflash,” I said softly. “I’ve always been small and men havealwaysbeen a threat.”
Pausing when he finished taping my left hand, he fixed those stone-gray eyes on me. “Yes, they are. While I don’t think you’ll ever be able to take down a fully trained combat veteran or even a lightly trained one, particularly if they outweigh you and are much taller—there are things you can do that can incapacitate and buy you time. Even a few seconds can mean the differencebetween them getting their hands around your throat and us getting to you.”
My heart fisted for a moment, the squeeze making it kind of hard to breathe.
“You’re a lot bigger than Am’s boss.”
A faint smile touched his lips. “So, we know if you can stop me, you can definitely stop him.”
Blowing out a breath, I tilted my head. “You know, I know how to walk with my keys slotted between my fingers to create claws if I have to be on the street. I’ve carried mace before then pepper spray. I also know that if you kick a man in the balls, he’s going to be too busy holding them to hang onto me.”
“Those might be fine for a mugger, but they won’t stop someone truly determined to hurt you. Sometimes, it will just piss them off.”
“I’ve never seen a man shake off having his balls meet my knee.” Honestly, the first time I slammed my knee into the balls of a guy had been behind the bleachers when I was fourteen and a senior named Hampton had gotten really friendly. He also didn’t take no for an answer. The best part beyond the explosion of air he released had been him actually slamming into one of the struts as he doubled over.
Two hits for the price of one.
Not that I was going to bring that up right now. Am had always been big on self-defense and so had Eleanor?—
All of my mirth dissolved. Eleanor was dead.
“Kick me in the balls,” Bones said.
Wait— what?
