Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

T he good thing about military training was that nothing surprised her. Adrenaline was an old friend, and when she looked up from a particularly interesting chapter about glaves to see her ex-boyfriend standing in the doorway to her apartment with a baseball bat in his hand, all she felt was crystal-clear clarity on the right course of action. First, she got to her feet, the book falling to the couch with a heavy thud. She held eye contact with Billy, direct and assertive. And she stayed back. Their height difference was likely to embolden him — he’d always been smug about how much taller than her he was. As if height was some kind of indicator of virtue. But the joke was on him. At four foot eleven, she was tiny, it was true — only barely scraping the minimum height requirement for the military. As a kid, it had kept her up at night, and she did everything she could to try to grow taller — she finished her vegetables every night, stood up as tall as she could, did lots of exercise in an attempt to try to get her bones to grow, just a little more.

But her height wasn’t a drawback. Men like Billy, they saw her stature — and her gender, for that matter — as weaknesses to be exploited. But Anna was a lot smarter than men like Billy. She knew they were assets. And she used the stupidity of men to her advantage.

“Should’ve picked your phone up, bitch,” Billy slurred now, his blue eyes narrowed.

She looked at him, keeping the disgust she felt off her face. No need to antagonize him any more than he’d antagonized himself already. But she couldn’t believe she’d ever seen anything but a repulsive waste of human life in the man who now stood in front of her, swaying slightly, his clammy fingers clutching at the baseball bat in his hand. What was he going to do? Smash her belongings? Try to smash her? Her phone was a few inches away, and she itched to pick it up, to take a photo of him as the final evidence she’d need to put him away.

“Are you trying to go back to prison, Billy?” she asked levelly, injecting her voice with a mixture of assertiveness and kindness. It was false kindness, of course, but she was hoping she could get out of this situation without having any of her possessions smashed. She liked her things, and she hated cleaning glass out of the carpet. Plus, there was always paperwork when you beat the shit out of a civilian, even a civilian who had it coming a hundred times.

Back to prison. He deserved it. It was a joke that he’d only gotten the short sentence he had — rich parents and fancy lawyers, plain and simple. If the woman he’d been dating had been anyone other than Anna — a woman without military training, a woman like the women she worked with every day now — then he might have killed her. It had been at the last dying gasp of their relationship. She’d already made it clear that she was moving on — but in an attempt to be kind, she’d invited him over for one last dinner together in her apartment so that he could collect his things and they could part ways as friends. Of course, that hadn’t worked. Billy had turned up drunk and full of resentment, and though she’d tried to control the situation, he’d swung a fist right at her jaw. When she’d blocked it, he’d just kept on swinging. Even with her training, she’d been taken aback, and he’d landed a few solid blows on her face and head before she’d seized his arm and wrenched it behind his back, dislocating his shoulder and breaking the arm in two places for good measure. Then he’d lumbered around her apartment like a wounded bull, bellowing and screaming and breaking all her things, until the police had been called. Her bleeding nose and black eye told the story eloquently, and he’d been jailed for assault and battery. Six months. Better than nothing.

But it clearly hadn’t taught him his lesson. She moved away from the couch, walking backwards — and he followed her, a lopsided grin on his face. He was a pale guy who burned easily, with light blond hair, and his complexion got ruddy like that when he had too much to drink. He was ignoring her attempts to calm him down, to reason with him, and she heaved a sigh. There was only one move here. In one fluid motion, she knelt by the couch, flipped open a display case she kept there, and withdrew what was inside it.

“Nice toy,” she said, nodding to the bat in his hand. “Do you like mine?”

It had been expensive — more expensive than she was willing to let on to her parents, who had always taught her to be careful with her money. But when she’d seen it online, she’d been exultant from signing three new clients in a row after a free session of self-defense training she’d done at a local women-only gym. She’d deserved a treat, she’d told herself — and besides, she needed a decoration for the blank space just above her couch. It would look great there. But she hadn’t had a chance to put up the display case yet. Thankfully, it had arrived just on time, earlier that week.

Anna Clarke lifted the antique broadsword in both hands, taking a warrior’s stance. Billy’s eyes widened comically, and he actually staggered at the sight of the sword, as though it had taken the wind out of his sails. Suddenly he didn’t look so menacing with his baseball bat. All the swagger in his gait disappeared, leaving a slightly lopsided-looking man stammering insults with a lot less energy than he’d possessed earlier.

“Bullshit,” he spat, a sudden burst of confidence seeming to pour back into his body. She raised the sword a little, cautioning him — he at least had the good sense to keep his distance from her. But he raised his baseball bat. “You don’t know how to use a sword. Dumb grunt like you probably doesn’t even have a gun around.”

Calling her a grunt wasn’t the insult he thought it was. Some of the finest people she’d ever met were grunts. And he was wrong about guns. She had a modest but deadly weapon in her bedroom. But the truth was that Billy wasn’t a big enough threat to bring that out for — not that she’d be telling him that. No sense aggravating him unduly. She knew him well enough to know that he’d be easily scared off with a broadsword. Besides, she knew from unpleasant and regrettable experience that he tended to get turned on by women with guns, and she was absolutely done being his sexual fantasy. No jerk-off material here. Only an angry woman with a sword that was nearly as long as her body.

He was also wrong about swords, funnily enough. It was true that the US Military didn’t exactly spend much time training their soldiers in the use of antique weapons. But it just so happened that Anna Clarke didn’t just spend her Saturday nights moping about, wishing she had a date. She spent them at a local chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronisms, where there was a thriving fencing scene. Dozens of nerds met once a week to discuss historical re-enactments, everything from medieval cooking to clothing to (and this was a rather popular one) sword fighting. She’d been a member since she was fourteen-years-old. Her father’s doing, actually. She’d been struggling at school in History class, which she hated, and he thought it might be a good way to show her that it wasn’t all boring old dates and dusty books — that history was still alive and well. And it had worked better than he’d imagined. Not only had young Anna aced History for the rest of her schooling, she’d also never wanted to leave the SCA. She’d rejoined when she left active duty, and it was a bright point in her week.

She couldn’t wait to catch up with her friends there at the meeting tomorrow, actually, she thought with a grin. God, wouldn’t she have a story to tell them. She’d already been looking forward to filling them in about her new toy — now she had a thrilling tale of home invasion to add to the mix.

She took a few steps toward Billy now, raising the sword. It wasn’t sharp — it would’ve been far too dangerous to ship it like that for a start — but honestly, it didn’t need to be. Broadswords weren’t about a sharp cutting edge, not really — they were about hitting your opponent as hard as you could, and hopefully opening a hole in their body. If she swung this hard enough at Billy, with all the force in her wiry little body, he’d be lucky if the worst he got was a broken rib. And he knew it, too. He was looking at the sword with unease, now, and she knew she’d cracked his confidence.

“Why don’t we just talk about this like grown-ups,” he appealed to her, suddenly reasonable.

She felt a savage burst of anger flare in her chest. Just like him, to threaten her with a weapon and then behave as though they were both equally at fault when she defended him.

“Leave my property immediately, you gaslighting piece of shit,” Anna hissed through her teeth, keeping a friendly smile fixed on her face as she said it. “Never contact me again. Never look at me again. Forget I exist. Move on with your pathetic life, you piece of human garbage. I’d rather be eaten by wolves than ever see you again, let alone talk to you. I can’t believe you’re stupid enough to think you’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell of getting back together with me. Now go, before I laugh so hard, I throw up.”

It felt good to unleash on him in person — to actually see the bursts of anger and resentment in his eyes as she laid into him. Carried away a little, she made a little feint toward him — just a quick jab with the sword. But he clearly didn’t realize it was a feint. With a shriek of fear, he dropped the baseball bat and ran backwards out of the apartment, almost falling over the railing as he sprinted away toward the elevator. She was glad he hadn’t fallen, she reflected, amused, as she followed him out on to the walkway to make sure he was gone. It was a two-story drop, and it would probably have killed him, and though she didn’t think she’d grieve for him, there’d be cops all night and she’d definitely get a shitty night’s sleep.

Her neighbor poked her head out of her door. Yasmin was a sweet old woman in her forties with a couple of extremely overweight Persian cats who was always willing to share a cup of tea and a good chat about whatever was happening on the news. Anna had always liked her and took it as a great compliment to have been entrusted with the duty of feeding Percy and Peter the last time Yasmin had gone to visit her sister interstate.

“You alright, Anna?”

“Just fine, Yasmin, thanks.” Yasmin knew the full story of Billy — he’d made more than a few phone calls during one of their little catchups, and Anna had wound up telling her all about him. It had felt good to get it all off her chest. And Yasmin, surprisingly, had a lot of her own stories about nasty ex-partners. She’d been instrumental in encouraging Anna to start teaching self-defense to women, actually. Empowering them to stick up for themselves against abusive partners, giving them the weapons they needed to feel confident in their ability to defend themselves. It was only one piece of the puzzle, of course — stronger sentencing for convicted abusers would be a good start — but it was something Anna could teach.

“Course you are. If you want to press charges, let me know. I heard most of that. Paper-thin, these walls.”

“Thanks, Yas,” Anna said gratefully. “Hope you weren’t asleep already.”

“Nah, I’m a night owl. Glad you’re alright. Neat sword,” she added with a grin, then clicked her door shut. Anna took another deep breath in through her nose, then out through her mouth. This had been a much more eventful Friday evening than she’d been ready for.

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