Page 31 of Stars and Smoke
“Now you try it.”
When Sydney had struggled early on to pick up combat moves, Sauda had reassured her, telling her most people took time to train their reactions into instinct.
But when she lunged at Winter this time, he reacted instantly. Each of his moves mimed her earlier ones perfectly, right down to the specific angle of his body and the turn of his arm. He performed it so accurately that she didn’t have time to get out of his lock. His leg swept her off her feet.
She fell—and a blink later, she found herself on her back, Winter’s knee pressed lightly against her chest, the knife held to her throat.
For a moment, she just stared at him, heart pounding, all sarcasm forgotten. Her lungs squeezed in a painful spasm, and she sucked her breath in sharply. It’d taken her weeks to master those moves. Two years to make them part of her instinct. And this boy had just absorbed them like it was nothing.
Trained dancer, indeed.
“That was almost too good,” she muttered.
He winked, then got up, holding a hand out to her. “It’s just like learning choreography,” he answered.
She narrowed her eyes, studying the brief emotions flitting across his face. He wasn’t telling her something.
“You’ve been attacked by a knife before,” she said carefully.
He hesitated, then nodded. “Once,” he replied. “Outside an after-party, when a crowd swarmed me and I got separated from my bodyguards. Claire made me take a self-defense course after that.”
She frowned. “There was no article about it.”
“Because I didn’t know I’d been stabbed until Claire got me into our car,” he explained. “And I insisted on my private doctor treating me instead of going to a hospital. No word got out.”
“You told no one?”
“No one except Claire.”
Somehow, she’d thought that a guy like Winter would have wanted to talk to the press about an incident like that to drum up publicity. She wouldn’t even have blamed him for it.
Maybe Winter really was private. She analyzed his face, wonderinghow else to pry him open. Trying not to think about her own encounters with a knife.
“Nice of you not to worry your mom,” she finally said, gentler this time.
“She wouldn’t have been worried,” he answered.
She looked back up at him to see that his smile had taken on a faded quality. “I’m sorry,” she decided to reply.
“We’re fine.”
She studied his expression and filed it routinely away, annoyed by the flicker of sympathy that rose in her chest. These were the kinds of things someone would tell a person they’d consider a friend, and even now, she could sense him letting a little of his wall down to her, confiding something to her that he seemed to hold close to his chest.
But she wasn’t his friend. She was an agent training him. So she sighed, then confessed, “Do you see how I asked you those questions?” she asked.
He looked at her, confused by her pivot. “What do you mean?”
“While you were busy practicing my second piece of advice,” she said, waving the knife once, “we were also going over my third.”
Winter hesitated for a moment before realization dawned in his eyes. “You were interrogating me?”
Sydney nodded. “Being a secret agent is really about building another’s trust in you. Every moment is an opportunity for you to get details out of someone about their life, and for them to do the same thing back to you. I made you concentrate on learning how to defend yourself with a knife. Your focus was somewhere else, and I took advantage of that, asked you questions about your past while you were distracted and had let your walls down. So here’s my third universal rule. Always make the people around you trust you, and never trust anyone else.”
For the first time, there was hurt in his eyes. She had genuinely wounded him. She could see the way something in his gaze shuttered,the slight recoil of his body away from her, the sting of betrayal sharp on his face before he smoothed it over, let his walls come back up again.
She always hated this part of the training, even with someone she disliked. But deception was one of those instincts that had been trained into her, and it kept her cold.
“It’s a lonely job,” she said, “but you won’t realize justhowlonely it is until you start. You’ll learn to cope with it, eventually.”
