“You’re flicking your wrist too late. You want to cock it back and release it just as you straighten your arm. Watch me.”
He lifted his arm, wrist cocked, and then brought it down. Flicking his wrist just as his arm straightened at shoulder height, he sent the star flying directly into the center of the target.
Or at least she assumed the star went into the center of the target. Frankly, she was too busy admiring the way his shoulders bunched beneath his tunic to pay much attention to anything else.
“See?” He turned to her.
“No, I wasn’t . . . yes! Yes, I see the star”—she glanced quickly at the target—“right in the center. Well done.”
He raised a brow. “Thank you. Your turn.”
“Where did you learn how to use all the weapons in our arsenal?” she asked as he went to collect the star. The sudden stiffness in his (unfairly distracting!) shoulders sent her scrambling for a different question. “I mean, you’re about my age, right? Kind of young to be a master of so many weapons unless you had training. I know there’s an academy in . . .”
He’d turned to face her, and the look on his face told her she’d stumbled into something he didn’t want to discuss. “I picked up things here and there. If you have questions about my ability to perform my job—”
“Oh please.” She stopped herself from rolling her eyes. Barely. Score one for proper princess behavior. “You just impaled a hand-sized star into the dead center of a target fifty paces away. And you destroyed those men who were trying to take Cleo and me yesterday. Your abilities are not in question. I was making conversation. It’s what friends do.”
He frowned as he approached to give her the weapon, careful to keep from touching her.
“This will be a lot easier for both of us if you tell me what topics are off-limits for conversation with your friends.”
He stood, silent and still.
Fine. She could outwait him. She crossed her arms over her chest so she could look vaguely intimidating and accidentally poked one of the star’s edges into her rib cage.
“Ouch,” she muttered, and then gave Sebastian a look that dared him to remind her that the star was sharp. “Are you going to answer my question, or am I going to have to continue to injure myself while I wait you out?”
Stiffly, he said, “I don’t have off-limit topics—”
“I beg to differ.”
“—because I don’t have friends. I don’t need them.”
Ari’s chest ached at the carefully blank expression on his face. At the way he said the words as if they didn’t matter. She smiled—not a gentle, pitying smile because, stars knew, she hated being on the receiving end of those, but a genuine, wide, all-teeth-on-display smile—and bumped his shoulder with hers. “Well, you have a friend now.”
He stiffened as she touched him, and then slowly relaxed, though she could see that he was forcing himself to look like the touch hadn’t mattered.
She turned toward the target. This time, she was going to hit something other than the floor. Apparently it was all in the wrist. Her arm whispered against Sebastian’s as she raised it over her head, and he immediately took several steps forward and to the right so that he could watch her form.
Drawing in a deep breath, she focused on the target and tried to remember every step of the process. Grip one edge of the star between her index finger and her thumb. Step forward with the opposite leg. Cock her wrist. Drop her arm and straighten it at shoulder height and then flick her wrist. Or was it flick her wrist just before she straightened her arm?
She hesitated a split second as her arm fell past her shoulder, and then quickly snapped her wrist forward and threw the star with all the strength she had. It flew to the right, and Sebastian gasped as it grazed his side.
“Oh no!” Ari rushed to him as blood soaked his tunic. “Please tell me I didn’t just kill you.”
“You didn’t just kill me.” He peeled up the stained fabric to reveal a long, narrow slash of open skin.
“I’m so sorry.” Her hands hovered uncertainly in the air as he let the tunic fall, covering the wound as it kept seeping blood.
“It’s just a flesh wound,” he said. “I’ve had worse.”
She stepped closer to him, trying to gauge how much blood was on his tunic.
“At least it wasn’t my eye.” The corners of his mouth twitched slightly.
Seriously? Now he was going to (kind of) smile?
“I can’t believe you’re making a joke. I could’ve impaled you in the stomach. Or the heart.” Her eyes widened as the sickening possibilities hit her.
“This is nothing.” Blood dripped off the edge of his tunic. He grasped it and began pulling it over his head.
“I’ll get the medical supplies. Where are they?”
“In the chest beside the stairs that lead to the upper deck.”
The tunic slid over his head, and Ari stared at the muscles that defined his stomach. At the wickedly raised scar that slashed across his chest. At the, stars help her, way his shoulders moved as he rolled the tunic into a ball and pressed it against his wound.
She needed to focus. Preferably on something other than Sebastian. She was turning to fetch the medical supplies when Sebastian twisted at the waist to throw the bloodstained tunic toward the edge of the arena. The sight of his back stopped her. His skin was a mess of crisscrossed scars, some faded to a faint shining white, others still a raised purple-red line that said they’d been inflicted within the last year.
The ache that had started in her chest when he’d said that he didn’t have friends ignited into something that seared her heart and pricked tears against her lashes.
He was her age. Yet some of those scars looked like they’d been there for at least a decade. She’d like to meet the person who could lash the skin from a child’s back, and then she’d like to strap that person to a bale of hay and keep practicing until her throwing star landed dead center.
“Do you have the medical supplies?” he asked as he turned and caught her staring (mortifyingly) openmouthed at him. His body went still, and an expressionless mask slid over his face. His eyes were guarded, as if bracing himself for her unwelcome pity.
Which meant Ari had to talk about something else—anything else—to cover up the awful ache she felt when she looked at him. She took a breath, hoped inspiration would hit, and said the first thing that came to mind.