With a grunt of rage, I attack him even harder, sure that if I redouble my efforts, something has to hit. I’m panting and sweating, because this is the secret of boxing: the most exhausting thing you can do in a fight is throw a punch and miss. Impact rejuvenates; punching air will suck the life out of you.
I’m trying to speed up, but instead I’m getting slower and clumsier. Despite countless hours of running and jump rope and bag work, I’m tiring, I’m actually tiring. This has never happened to me before.
And still Snow hasn’t thrown a single punch.
He waits until I realize the awful truth: I’m about to lose.
Then he goes to work on my body.
He hits me with tight, hard punches that feel like rocks propelled into my sides. I know he’s holding back, using only a fraction of his strength. And yet the air grunts out of me, forced from my lungs by the relentless impact.
He begins to taunt me.
“You think because you have abs, you’re ready to box?”
THUD. THUD.
He hits me in the ribs, the kidney, right in the gut.
My eyes water and my breath wheezes out, I’m dizzy and light-headed because I can’t draw a full breath. A punch to the jaw can shut off your brain, but bodywork takes the heart out of you.
“You think because you can beat up a boy, you’re ready to face a man?”
THUD. THUD. THUD.
I try to block the blows as Snow did, but my arms are burning and aching. I can’t even hold my gloves up anymore. I’ve become as dazed and weak as Tristan.
I won’t give up. I won’t be beaten—not by this old man, not in front of everyone.
Roaring, I attack him again with a combination that never loses, my own creation that uses an unexpected overhand right, sandwiched by a jab, a hook, and a cross.
Sure enough, as he shifts to block the overhand right, I’m able to hit him with the cross. The punch is straight and true, direct into his jaw. A punishing blow that should knock him on his ass.
It does . . . nothing. Absolutely nothing. It’s like he can’t even feel it.
It evokes no anger in him, no pain. I may as well not even exist.
Snow responds by hitting me in the face two, three, four times in quick succession. The last punch feels like an explosion in my head, like he shoved a stick of dynamite in my mouth and lit the fuse. I fall straight backward.
I sink all the way through the mats, down, down, into the blackness of the earth.
Faintly, a low voice murmurs, “Class dismissed.”
I hear shuffling feet.
No jeers, no exclamations, not even from Vanya.
They’re all as shocked as I am.
Or as shocked as I was, when I still had conscious thought.
I drift in darkness, until I feel something cold pressed against my face.
Snow has hauled me to my feet and sat me on a stack of mats. He presses a bag of ice against the swollen left side of my face.
His broad face swims into view. Unmarked by any punch from me—bearing only the scars of better men.
His blue eyes stare into mine. Still clear and hard as ice, but not cold. Instead, I see something far worse in them, something more painful.
I see pity.
“I’m not your enemy,” Snow says.
“Then I’d hate to see what you do to people you don’t like,” I mumble, through bruised lips.
Snow chuckles.
“You show promise, Dean. You’re bold. Your technique is reasonably good.”
I bristle. Even after that humiliating defeat, I deserve better praise.
“You will never learn to conquer your opponent if you can’t conquer yourself,” Snow says.
“There’s no one more disciplined than me,” I retort. “I never miss a day of training. Never eat one fucking thing I shouldn’t. I hone the mind and the body.”
“And what about this?” Snow says, laying one heavy, calloused hand on my chest.
I shake it off, irritated by his presumption.
He doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know anything about me. What the fuck is he even talking about? A lot of spiritualistic nonsense.
“I will be the best fighter at this school!” I inform him. “And that includes you. By graduation day—”
“I’m only staying a year,” Snow says, standing up. “I came here as a favor to the Chancellor.”
“To teach us to box?”
“Actually, he needed a new medic,” Snow chuckles. “Herman Cross retired. My wife Sasha is a doctor. She agreed to fill in for a year until they could find someone permanent. I’m just tagging along.”
“Oh,” I say, not sure how to respond. I hadn’t imagined Snow having a wife and possibly children. He hardly seemed human, before this moment.
“Keep ice on that face,” Snow says, standing up. “I’ll see you on Wednesday.”
4
Cat
I don’t know how in the fuck I’m going to survive two more years at Kingmakers with Dean, if he couldn’t wait until we got to the island to start harassing me.
I don’t understand why he even wants to.
I mean, I know I embarrassed him, catching him in an unguarded moment. But at the end of the day, he’s one of the most skilled and feared students at the school, while I’m a fucking nobody. If he weren’t keeping an eye out for me, he probably never would have noticed me again for the rest of our lives.
I’ve never done anything dramatic or surprising in my whole damn life. Except the one thing Dean happened to see.
God, what a comedy of errors. The fucking luck I have . . .
Why, why, why did it have to be Dean who saw me? If it were anybody else, they wouldn’t have thought two things about it.
Only Dean already had a grudge against me.
Only Dean is conniving enough to put the pieces together.
This man has been living in my head rent-free all summer long, when I should have been enjoying my first trip to America—two uninterrupted, blissful months in which the Griffins were overwhelmingly kind to me, including Caleb Griffin, Miles’ little brother, who was so friendly and attentive that Zoe thought he had a puppy-love crush.
I don’t think that was the case. Like Miles, Caleb just likes to prove himself. In this case he wanted to prove what a good host he could be.
Still, we’re friends now, and I’m glad Caleb will be coming to Kingmakers next year.
I shouldn’t have been fretting over Dean the whole summer, yet I could hardly think of anything else. He popped into my head a hundred times a day. He haunted my nightmares.
But my worst dreams featured Rocco Prince.
I’ll never forget the look of pure hatred on his face as the noose tightened around his wrist, jerking him forward. I’ll never forget the way his knife sliced down at me, missing my face by millimeters, before he was jerked over the parapet.
And then the long, strangled howl as he tumbled down . . .
And the birds. The fucking birds.
As we returned from the Quartum Bellum, I saw that flock of gulls wheeling and circling over where Rocco had fallen, screeching like they were screaming my guilt to everyone around. Tattling on me.
They dove down to the rocks, squabbling and fighting as they tore his body apart. Then they rose up in the air again, their beaks stained with blood.