He jerked away from my touch, his face crunching with anger.
“You always say you’re sorry, Brex,” he said, his jaw twitching. “But I’m always the one who actually is.” He snorted, twisted around, and walked away, leaving me staring after him, tears filling my eyes.
I slowly made my way to my room, shutting the door. Peeling off my wet jacket and tossing it in the laundry basket, a sting of disappointment slouched my shoulders. The only items filling it would be my clothes tonight. Just one person ever went through my dirty clothes, finding the items I stole: my maid, Maja. She helped get the product back to the Savage Lands. Both her son and daughter worked in factories there, barely able to buy bread. She was the one who told me tales of the barbaric living conditions scarcely outside the walls of Leopold. Honored and grateful for her position here, she still tried to help her grown children and their families survive, to afford medicine and food.
Tonight was a failure on all fronts.
With a sigh, I strolled into my huge bathroom, showering the Danube off my skin, and crawled into bed, sinking into the soft mattress with sheets that felt like butter. In the dark, my mind drifted back to Caden. He was Istvan’s only child. I knew the pressure Caden was under, the constant need to prove his worth to his father. But still, I pushed because I sensed the boy I loved was slipping through my fingers.
And he was all I had left.
Chapter 3
My spine struck the mat with a smack, a groan puffing out of my chest. I wanted to lay there for the rest of the day. Maybe take a little nap.
“Again, Kovacs,” a voice boomed from the side of the mat. Sergeant Bakos clapped his hands together to get me moving. “You are off your game today.”
I was more than off. Only two hours of sleep will do that to you. Plus, my bones were protesting the dive roll onto the pavement and the swan dive off the bridge last night. Because of the adrenaline, I didn’t feel the impact at the time. Now everything hurt, and I moved much slower than normal.
Usually I would have pinned my opponent to the mat by now, my elbow in their throat. My skill was a sore spot with the other cadets, mainly the guys, though the girls were on a mission to drop me as well. But I could see their moves miles away.
The men really took it personally, proving sexism was still alive and well. Not just because I was a slim, petite-boned girl, but it seemed to piss the boys off that I was pretty too. As if that was the reason they lost their concentration. As if someone who looked as I did shouldn’t be able to outmatch them.
Sometimes guys got turned on, laughing and thinking it was a game until I tossed them down like sacks of flour. Their little fragile egos couldn’t handle it.
Aron Horvát was one of those. He flirted—a lot—when he wasn’t threatening me.
“Right where you should be…on your back for me, Kovacs,” Aron murmured, winking, his brown eyes rolling salaciously over me.
“Fuck you, Horvat,” I snarled, getting to my feet, my joints protesting the movement. Adjusting my dark cargo pants, I brushed back a few strands of hair that strayed from my ponytail, sweat trailing down my back.
“What is wrong with you today, Kovacs?” Sergeant Bakos walked over to me, rubbing his dark brown buzzed head. A few salt-and-pepper hairs were sprinkled through, ones he didn’t have when I joined the academy at fifteen. Five years of dealing with me did that to people.
He was the training instructor here, coaching the students over the years and turning them into soldiers. He was brutal and relentless, but I respected him, and he didn’t care what gender or body type you had. He simply expected the best from you, teaching you how to use your limitations as positives.
At five foot five, he was a little shorter than me but built of solid, rippling muscle. No guy here, not even Caden, could outfight him. He showed us strategy and how your own flaws could be an asset in a fight.
He made me into the fighter I was today. He encouraged me to work harder. Do better. I hated disappointing him.
Like today.
“There’s no excuse, sir.” I lifted my head, pinning my arms behind my back in soldier stance.
“That’s right.” Bakos nodded. “Your enemy won’t give a shit you didn’t sleep well the night before or have a tummy ache.” He stepped back off the mat, speaking to the seven of us still left in this year’s class. “They will kill you in seconds. Attack without warning. Slaughter you without thought or remorse in a blink of an eye.”
“Like The Wolf,” Hanna said in a spooky voice, her playfulness dropping the moment Bakos glared back at her. “What? We’ve all heard the tales. He will kill you without blinking…and he’s so unbearably hot, you go willingly.”
“Hanna.” Bakos sighed in annoyance. “I’m here to train you guys for real enemies, not make-believe ones.”
“My sister’s boyfriend’s father said he was very real,” Hanna countered. “Saw him fight a dozen men at once in the Fae War.”
“Did he tell you Santa Claus was real too?” Bakos clipped. “The Wolf is nothing but an exaggerated and glorified tale, inflated every time he is mentioned.”
We all had grown up hearing about the legend of Warwick Farkas. Not fae or human, but a living ghost. His last name meant Wolf, which is how he got the moniker, not because he turned into one. His tale was told to candidates to make them wet the bed at night. The stories about him left you in awe and horror at how easily, and how many, he killed. Barehanded. Gutted, burned, tortured, skinned alive.
“Back to reality.” Bakos clapped his hands. “The threat of another war is on our doorstep, and our enemy is stronger, faster, harder to kill, and can shift or disappear in front of our eyes. We must be faster, fight even harder, and become smarter than them.” He pointed at me to get back into position. “You will not get a do-over out there, so I never want to see anyone giving me less than one hundred percent. You got it?”
“Yes, sir,” we replied in unison.
I dropped down into a defense position, my eyes settling on Aron. A smirk spread over his mouth. Aron could have been good-looking enough, and at one time, I even thought so, but his jealous nature and constant need to be better than everyone made him ugly to me now. He was average in everything, including fighting, with deep insecurity issues that made him overcompensate and fluff his ego to the point I looked forward to sparring with him in class.
Here I could punch the crap out of him and not get in trouble.
“If you wanted to be under me again so bad, Kovacs, all you had to do was ask. Clearly, Markos is not satisfying you…though I’ve heard he’s giving it to Lilla really good.”
I gritted my teeth, moving around him. Don’t let him get to you, I chided myself. Aron loved finding people’s Achilles heel and biting down on it.
“Unlike you, she’s a real screamer.”
Rage boiled through my chest, spreading up my esophagus.
Bakos allowed shit-talk and taunting. Nothing was off the table because what we’d face out there would be much worse. He wanted us prepared to handle it all.
“Does Markos know I was there first, popped your cherry?” He nodded down to my crotch. “How do you think he’d feel about that?”