"Well, some men can pull them off," I said, just about to skirt around the corner of the island when he suddenly lunged, snagging my knife hand at the wrist. But the grip loosened almost immediately after he grabbed me, his gaze focused there, making my own move over, wondering what he was looking at.
It took a full beat before I realized it was the bruises.
They'd faded. Really, they were almost gone, just a little smudge of blue under the skin. But Roan had eagle-eyes. They saw everything. And there was no mistaking that he was bothered by their presence, like he didn't think his hands were capable of doing that.
"Just put the knife away." It was both a command and a question and a plead somehow all at once. "I don't want to fight with you."
"Well, you don't get to make that decision," I informed him, taking advantage of his weakness, pulling my hand free.
But I knew as I did so that I did it carefully, arching up the blade of the knife. Avoiding cutting his palm as I did it.
I threw myself around the corner of the island, putting it between us, watching his body because his face never gave any of his moves away.
I'd learned that the hard way.
"I get you're mad, Mack, but this fighting is useless."
To that, I snorted. "Hey, I'm not the one with a hole in my thigh and concussion. So, this fighting has been pretty useful to me."
"To what end? If you were going to kill me, you'd have done it while I was unconscious."
"Maybe I just like hurting you," I suggested, seeing his hips tilt just a second before he lunged, giving me enough of a chance to twist back and away, dancing just out of his reach.
"Maybe," he agreed, stalking closer, removing the island as a barrier between us.
There are moments when you are facing up an opponent where you know you're fucked.
This was one of those moments for me.
He was between me and the door, between me and the hallway where I could find my taser.
He had a good seventy pounds on me.
And I wasn't one-hundred percent sure I could sink a blade into him.
That was the funny thing about knives people who'd never used one wouldn't know.
They're intimate.
Way more so than a gun.
You had to be close to sink one in; you could feel the blood on your hands; you could watch the pain as it crossed their faces.
In life-or-death situations, you didn't care too much about those things. Well, statistically, women did. Women hesitated. Women didn't want to hurt anyone. But that had been trained out of me a long time ago. I never hesitated. In a moment where the choice was my life or yours, I would always, always choose self-preservation. I would never pause to feel bad as I slipped the blade in between your ribs, jabbed it into your belly, sliced it across your throat.
I survived.
That's what I did.
And to do that, I had to be willing to be intimate with pain and death.
Yet, there he was, the man who had hurt me more than anyone else could possibly do, the man who had taken more from me than I knew was possible, the man I had been hunting for years, and I wasn't sure I could do it.
Get that close.
Pull back.
Plunge forward.
Slice through skin and fat and muscle.
So, yeah, I was fucked.
I only had a few little things going for me.
I was fast.
My bathing suit was tight and slippery and wet.
And he didn't want to hurt me.
All I needed was to catch him off-guard, charge, strike, disorient, hurt just enough that I had a window to get away.
Plan made, I tossed the knife, watching as his gaze followed it for just a split second before rushing him, hand raised, fist curled, striking out.
But his head whipped, seeing the attack in his peripheral, moving just enough that my fist grazed instead of struck.
Judging by the ache of pain in my knuckles, it had still hurt, but hadn't stunned him, stolen his focus.
"Mack..." he said, hands moving up, palms out, voice a bit like a warning, a bit like a plead. "We don't have to do this," he started, tone reasonable. But then he fucked up. Because he added it. A word he lost the right to say to me. "Sweetheart."
The hesitance that had been swarming my system disappeared. The rage that had been coddled to my chest all these years came back, intensified, reddened my vision, made my skin flush.
And I just... lost my shit.
Fights were best two ways.
Careful and calculated, or desperately fighting for your life.
But based on feelings, based on hurt and anger and regret and grief?
Yeah, it was sloppy and unskilled.
It made it easy to evade.
At least for someone like Roan, someone trained to read a fight, know to interpret how the body moved before each strike, it was easy for his hands to slap my strikes away, to slip to the side when I charged forward.