Chapter 7: What I Learned in Four Months

He came in like a wrecking ball, right hand loaded, aiming to end it in one. Four months earlier, that punch would have killed me. I slipped inside it. Elbow to the throat. Heel of my palm to that milky eye. Then — because Nikolai had drilled it into me until I did it in my sleep — I took his knee out sideways with a stamp kick and let two hundred and eighty pounds of momentum do the rest. Jace Mercer went down in his own conquered courtyard, and the sound he made was not a warlord's...