But he had another, too, as it turned out: months of actually feeding himself and of spending his days hauling debris from point A to point B, of scaling wrecked staircases and jungle trees and generally exerting himself had enacted changes under the skin, rendering arms more wiry and hands, despite their intermittent trembling, more powerful.
The initial struggle only took a few seconds, and it was ended by Taym's hand closing ungently around her throat, enough to hurt but not enough to strangle, and shoving her back, hard, against the closest tree.
(It felt so much like April's neck under his hand; it felt so much like the guilt and relief of shutting her up, finally; of putting an end to her terrifying, pointless sobbing.)
"You do not get a pass," he spat, Georgian accent suddenly crawling around the edges of his words, the drawl a strange counterpoint to the snap of each syllable, "because you're a girl. Do you know how many people around here accuse me of theatrics? They ought to spend one ******** day with you. Do not ******** overreact to me again. It's not cute and it's not entertaining." He shook her hands off his other arm, and without hesitating returned in kind what she had just given him. "Straighten the ******** up and get to work."
Nio Love
