Chapter 162 — I Was Right

Chapter 162: Chapter 162 — I Was Right

~ Raven ~

Raven let the smile fade and turned her attention back to the reason Dante had dragged her here in the first place.

She looked around the training room once more, taking in the padded floor and the open space between them.

"So this is your plan for the Concord?"

Dante leaned one shoulder against the equipment rack. "What plan?"

Raven gave him a look. "You pulled me out of combat class, brought me here and reserved an entire training room. I’m assuming you didn’t do all that for the scenery."

His mouth curved.

"You said the highest four women in the Court compete at Concord," Raven continued. "You also seem convinced I’m going to be one of them before the concord."

"I am."

"There are less than four weeks."

Dante said nothing.

Raven gestured around them. "The women I’m supposed to fight have probably been training for years. I only started learning how to fight properly after coming to Valerius, so what exactly do you think you’re going to accomplish in less than a month?"

That was when Dante smiled.

Raven frowned at him. She was being serious, and somehow that only seemed to amuse him more.

"Why are you smiling?"

Rather than answer, Dante pushed away from the equipment rack and headed toward the center of the room.

"Watch."

Raven stared after him. "You do realise that doesn’t answer anything I just asked."

"I know."

Before Raven could tell him precisely what she thought of that, Dante rolled one shoulder, then the other, and settled into a stance she had never seen him use before.

That was enough to quiet her.

There was usually something loose about the way Dante carried himself even when he was about to fight. He always seemed to have more time than everyone around him, right up until somebody ended up on the ground wondering what had happened.

This time was different. His weight shifted slightly forward, one foot angling as his hands came up, and then he moved.

Raven’s eyebrows rose.

What the fuck was that?

Dante stepped sharply to one side and twisted through what looked like the beginning of a strike, only to abandon it halfway through.

His weight dropped with the motion, one leg sweeping around before he rose into another turn so quickly that the second movement seemed to begin before the first had properly finished.

He pivoted again, drove half a punch forward and changed it into an elbow before it could land. The next turn took him low, his body rotating through an angle that looked as though it should have left his entire side open, except somehow it didn’t.

Raven watched for several seconds, increasingly convinced that whatever she was looking at could not possibly be a normal fighting style.

Was this supposed to be combat?

Because it looked suspiciously like somebody had taught Dante an extremely aggressive dance and forgotten to provide the music.

She opened her mouth to tell him exactly that.

Then something rushed through her, and the words disappeared before they could leave her mouth as her attention narrowed until all she could properly see was Dante.

He shifted his weight onto his back leg and suddenly the movement no longer looked strange. Raven could see why he had done it before the next turn even came. His foot needed to land there because otherwise the rotation that followed would take too long.

The unfinished strike from earlier had not really been unfinished either. It had shifted his shoulder, opened his hips and carried his body directly into another attack without forcing him to stop and reset.

Dante changed direction again, and Raven followed him without thinking.

Another step flowed into another turn. A strike became something completely different halfway through, yet somehow every change made perfect sense now.

That was the part Raven couldn’t understand. A minute ago the entire sequence had looked ridiculous, but now she could see where his balance sat, when it shifted and exactly how far his next step needed to travel before the rest of his body committed to it.

The strangest part was how easy it felt, far easier than something she’d never seen before had any right to feel.

She had never learned this style. She had never even seen anything remotely similar during her combat lessons, yet the longer she watched Dante move, the more certain she became that if he stopped right now and asked her to do the same thing, she could.

Not after several days of practice or after he broke the sequence down and corrected her over and over again.

Now.

The certainty came so naturally that Raven almost missed how impossible it was.

Dante’s eyes flicked toward her, and something in his expression changed before he suddenly increased his speed.

The movements should have become harder to follow. His feet were moving quickly enough now that Raven ought to have lost the sequence somewhere between the turns, especially once the transitions began coming one after another without any obvious pause.

Instead, everything seemed to become clearer.

She could see where one movement ended and the next began even when Dante barely seemed to separate them himself. When he drove forward, stopped his momentum with one foot and spun back through it, Raven understood exactly how the motion worked before he completed it.

His shoulder shifted and she knew what would follow, while the moment his hand came up she already understood where it was going.

Something warm began spreading beneath Raven’s skin, but she barely registered it because Dante had changed the sequence again.

This part was more complicated. He dropped lower, rose through a turn and changed sides halfway through what Raven had expected to become an attack. For the first time, she almost lost the line of the movement, but a moment later something clicked into place and the answer became obvious.

Of course.

Her pulse jumped with the realization.

Dante’s attention snapped fully onto her.

For the smallest moment, his movement faltered, so slightly Raven might have imagined it. Then his entire expression changed.

The amusement that had been sitting there since they entered the room disappeared, replaced by an intensity that made Raven’s brows pull together.

Why was he looking at her like that?

Then Dante smiled again, but there was something different about it now, something sharper and far more excited.

He turned away and continued, only this time the sequence became noticeably faster.

Raven’s frown deepened as she followed him. It took her another few movements to understand what he was doing.

Oh.

He was making it harder on purpose.

Apparently whatever reaction he had noticed from her had been enough to convince him to test it.

Fine. Raven kept watching.

The warmth beneath her skin spread through her shoulders and down her arms, leaving her strangely energised rather than uncomfortable. If anything, the sensation seemed to sharpen the movements in front of her.

Dante shifted his footing and changed direction, and Raven understood it. He turned through another strike, altered the angle halfway through and drove into something she had never seen before, but she understood that too.

The sequence grew steadily more difficult, yet each new movement carried the same strange familiarity. Raven could not explain how something she had never learned could feel as though it belonged somewhere inside her already.

Her heart began beating harder.

This made absolutely no fucking sense.

Dante had trained for years. She knew that much simply from fighting him. Even after becoming Awakened, even after everything that happened during the Hunt, he had put her flat on her back in seconds without touching his Lattice.

And now he was performing something complicated enough that Raven should have needed every movement explained to her one at a time.

Instead she found herself watching him with the same thought returning again and again.

I could do that.

Dante rotated through another turn, his foot sliding back before his weight dropped, and Raven knew how that would feel. His shoulder lowered into the next transition and she understood exactly why, while another change in direction seemed obvious before he even finished moving.

White light slowly gathered across Raven’s eyes without her noticing, but Dante did.

The next time he looked at her, whatever uncertainty had remained in his face seemed to disappear, and he pushed harder.

The sequence became faster and more violent, his steps tightening as sudden changes in level forced his entire body from one direction into another without warning. Raven should have struggled to keep up, but the movements remained clear enough that she could almost feel them rather than simply watch them.

Heat spread beneath her clothes. Energy ran through her muscles in restless waves, making her body feel lighter than it should have.

Dante moved through another transition and then another, while Raven had the strange certainty that he was coming toward the end before she could have said how she knew.

He stepped across himself, twisted through the final turn and drove into one last movement before stopping completely.

The sudden silence left Raven disoriented for a moment. Then the rest of the room seemed to return around her: the padded floor beneath her boots, the weapon racks along the wall, the faint sounds of activity somewhere beyond the closed training-room door.

When Raven’s attention finally returned to Dante, she found him staring at her.

His chest rose and fell heavily, and with each breath a thin curl of steam escaped his mouth before dissolving into the air between them.

Raven frowned when she noticed his amber-gold eyes were glowing.

Not faintly either. Light burned through them steadily while dark red-gold lines had begun glowing beneath the skin at the open edge of his collar and heat distorted the air around him.

For someone who had just spent the last several minutes moving like a man determined to beat an invisible army to death, Dante looked absurdly pleased with himself. Pleasure was too mild a word for what was on his face.

He looked almost ecstatic.

"What?"

Dante didn’t answer.

"Dante."

His eyes remained fixed on her, and Raven finally looked down at herself.

Her breath caught when she saw the way she was standing.

Her feet were planted apart, one slightly ahead of the other, while her knees were bent beneath her. One arm was raised across her body and the other rested lower, held in a position that felt so natural she had not even realised she was doing it.

She stared at herself for a second before slowly looking across the room.

Dante had already straightened, but Raven remembered exactly how he had ended the sequence.

She was standing in the same stance.

Her gaze dropped again.

When had she moved?

Raven straightened quickly and became aware of something else at the same time. Her skin was hot, not painfully so, but warm enough that she could feel it beneath her clothes, and the strange restless energy still humming through her muscles made her feel as though she had spent the last several minutes training beside Dante rather than standing across the room watching him.

She flexed one hand, but the sensation remained.

"What the hell just happened?"

Dante finally came out of whatever state he had fallen into.

He straightened fully, though his eyes never left her, and for another moment he said nothing before the smile returned and spread slowly across his face until Raven’s confusion began turning into irritation.

"What?"

Dante shook his head once, still smiling.

"I was right."

Raven stared at him.

Of course that was what he chose to say.

"Right about what?"

His smile only widened.

Raven’s patience gave out. "Dante, what exactly do you think you were right about?"

He looked directly into her glowing white eyes, whatever amusement remained in his expression buried beneath something much stronger now: certainty.

"You’re the Alpha Queen."

Raven stared at him.

Dante’s smile widened.

"The Alpha Queen of this generation."