Moon's Debt

Chapter Eleven : Close Quarters

Sera's POV

Ren pulls out of my morning sessions three days after the mark first showed itself, and he doesn't pretend there's a complicated reason for it.

"You're stronger than before , you and Cas can safely match now," he says, watching me roll my shoulder where Pria caught me wrong the day before. "Stronger than most of us, honestly, and getting stronger fast. Dax is taking over."

"Dax has a pack to run."

"Dax," Ren says, with the particular flatness of a man choosing not to comment further, "has decided this is part of running it."

I don't argue, because arguing would mean admitting how much that answer unsettles me, and not for the reasons it probably should.

He's waiting in the yard the next morning before I get there, already stripped down to a plain shirt, sleeves pushed to his elbows, and something in my chest does an inconvenient, traitorous thing at the sight of him standing in the early light like he's simply always belonged in it.

"Ren tells me you've gotten dangerous," he says, by way of greeting.

"Ren exaggerates."

"Ren doesn't." He tosses me a practice blade, wooden, worn smooth at the grip. "Show me anyway."

We start slow. Or he starts slow, testing, the way you'd test ice before putting your full weight on it, and I match him for the first several exchanges out of something like caution. It doesn't last. Whatever's been waking in me since the mark appeared doesn't seem interested in caution, and within a few minutes I'm moving faster than I mean to, faster than I entirely understand how to control, and he's matching me step for step, adjusting, correcting, never once letting me land a hit clean but never quite putting me on the ground either.

"Better," he says, breathing harder than I expect for a man who barely seems to strain at anything. "Your instincts are ahead of your training. That's going to get you hurt if we don't close the gap."

"So close it."

Something in his expression shifts, and he sets the practice blade aside.

"Hand to hand, then," he says. "No weapon between us."

I should have known that would be worse.

We circle each other in the packed dirt, and it isn't like sparring with Cas or Pria, which is the straightforward physical grammar of blocking and striking and recovering. Every time he closes the distance, I'm aware of him in a way that has nothing to do with strategy: the warmth coming off him even in the cool morning air, the low, deliberate control in every movement, like he's holding something back that I only catch flashes of when his focus slips for half a second too long.

I go for his wrist, quick and low, and he catches my forearm before I connect, turning the momentum against me the way Ren taught me to expect, except his hand doesn't just redirect. It holds.

We ended up chest to chest, his grip locked around my forearm, my free hand braced flat against his chest where I meant to push him off balance and instead just stopped, caught somewhere between finishing the move and not wanting to.

Neither of us moves.

I can feel his heartbeat under my palm, faster than his composure lets on, and his breath has gone shallow in a way that has nothing to do with exertion, not really, not this far into the fight. His eyes are on mine, steady and unclassified in that way he's had since the forest, except it doesn't feel unclassified right now. It feels like he's decided something and hasn't told me what.

"You're supposed to break the hold," he says, low, rougher than his usual voice.

"I know."

"Sera."

"I know," I say again, and don't move.

The mark at my wrist, pinned exactly where his hand is wrapped around my forearm, goes molten. Not the flare I felt the morning he stepped into my room; this is deeper, slower heat spreading up through my arm and settling somewhere behind my ribs, and I hear the small, sharp breath he takes when he feels it too, right against his own palm.

"That's new," he says, quiet.

"That's the mark deciding it has opinions about this," I say, and I mean it as something light, something to break the tension pooling thick in the space between us, except my voice doesn't come out light at all. It comes out barely above a whisper.

He looks down at where his hand is still wrapped around my wrist like he's only just realized how long he's held it there. His thumb moves once, barely, tracing the edge of the spiral without seeming to decide to, and the heat under my skin answers him, pulsing brighter.

"Dax," I say, and I don't know myself what I mean to follow it with.

He lets go first.

It isn't sudden or a retreat exactly, more like a man setting down something fragile before he's ready to, careful even in the leaving of it. He steps back half a pace, putting proper distance between us, the kind we're supposed to be keeping, the kind training partners keep.

For the length of one held breath, neither of us can look away.

His jaw is tight, his eyes darker than they were a minute ago, and I know without being told that whatever crossed his face just now, whatever crossed mine, gave away more than either of us meant to hand over in a training yard at ten in the morning with Ren watching from the p

ackhouse steps.

I don't know which of us is going to speak first.