Tenzin followed Beatrice at a distance. The cool, polite mask was gone, and the anger she had been repressing had simmered over into a raging boil. Beatrice walked to their sparring studio at the back of the house, next to the indoor pool.
“I understand why you’re still angry with me,” Tenzin said. “If you want to—”
“Angry?” Beatrice reached for a dagger off the wall and pivoted, flinging it close enough to Tenzin’s head to gust her hair off her neck. “You do not understand what I’m feeling if you think it’s anger, Tenzin.”
The sensation of the knife whispering against her skin set Tenzin’s teeth on edge. “Feel free to thank me anytime.”
Beatrice grabbed one of the hook swords she favored and didn’t wait for Tenzin to grab a weapon before she swung it in a circle over her head. “You think I should thank you?”
“Absolutely.” Tenzin flipped heels over head, grabbing a pike from a bracket on the wall as she landed. “We both know you wanted him changed too.”
“Only if he wanted it!”
“Bullshit.” Tenzin parried another strike from Beatrice’s blade. “If he’d been dying in your arms, what would you have done?”
“I would have protected him,” Beatrice yelled. “He wouldn’t have been in a situation where—”
“You and Gio put him in that position when he was a child!” Tenzin knocked her blade off-balance and thrust the head of the pike toward Beatrice. “He had to kill a man when he was sixteen years old! Were you there? No. I was.”
“Fuck you!” Beatrice grabbed the second sword and hooked it on the first, creating a lethal, whirring orchestra of blades coming ever closer to Tenzin’s neck.
The wooden shaft of the pike cracked; Tenzin tossed it aside and reached for a blade of her own. The steel clashed between them, and sparks flew in the darkness. Beatrice was an expert swordswoman, and since Tenzin was keeping to the ground, they were evenly matched.
The clanging ring of steel filled the air, and every instinct in Tenzin’s body went on alert. She had to focus everything she had on not killing her opponent.
That would be bad.
“He cried in my arms,” Beatrice said. “He kept saying, ‘I might have lived. I might have been okay, B.’ Did you even once consider taking him to the goddamn hospital?”
Tenzin nearly tripped. “And let the human butchers gamble with his life?”
“Well, what were you doing?” Beatrice reached for the handle of her second sword and gripped it in her left hand.
“I saved his life.” Tenzin locked her sword in Beatrice’s handle and pulled up, dragging the woman closer. “I refused to gamble with his life. I had to be sure; I didn’t have any other choice.”
“So you took him to your father?” Beatrice was crying bloody red tears that tracked down her face. “After everything Zhang did to you, you gave Ben to him?”
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