But she was crying.
Her wide, green eyes glistened with moisture as she looked up at me with unfathomable hope and relief washing her features. “Emily,” I repeated, and one tear escaped the outside corner of her eye, tracing slowly down her cheek. I brushed it away with a thumb and my chest tightened. What was I doing?
“Emily,” I said firmly.
She nodded dazedly and made an effort to pull herself together. She shook herself, and suddenly her eyes were dry, clear when they met mine again. “Something I need to know?”
She said the words, but I didn’t think they’d fully registered. “About where I’m taking you,” I explained. “About… the Division.”
As quickly as her embrace had sprung upon me, it was gone. I felt suddenly bereft, and it was dizzying, alien. She had moved back, never taking her eyes off me, face blank with shock that was swiftly turning to horror.
“The Division?” she whispered, and it was unclear if the words were meant to question me or convince herself of what she’d heard. Either way, she didn’t believe it. Didn’twantto believe it.
“She’s safe, Emily. They won’t hurt her. It was the only way—”
“You took my sister to the Division?” she hissed.
“I had no other choice. They are the only ones I could trust with her.”
She looked sick. And afraid. Her gaze flicked to the door and I stepped sideways toward the bed, hands up in the palms-out gesture reserved for wild animals, in my attempt to block her long enough to explain. I threw everything in my sway toward her, pleading for calm, and for a moment, I thought it worked. Until she had a knife point aimed at my chest.
“Don’t,” I said tightly, battling with anger that I’d left a weapon within her reach and alarm at the speed at which she’d retrieved it.
She didn’t speak, but I could see she was measuring her options. Suddenly her questions the previous night took on new meaning and I couldn’t help but wonder about her own “education.”
My stance adjusted to more of a ready crouch. It was only a serrated stainless blade, but I was quickly becoming aware of her capabilities. She had eluded Morgan’s men. Certainly they wouldn’t have considered her a threat, merely another human, easily swayed. But she had still managed to find us, walk herself into that warehouse. His warehouse.
The lingering pain in my shoulder became a niggling distraction.
“Let me past,” she said in an unsteady voice.
“You can’t, Emily. Let me explain—”
“Let me past,” she repeated, though this time it was saturated with hatred and despair.
“You’ll never find them,” I said. “Not without me.”
She considered that for less than a second before tightening her grip on the knife. “There is nowith you.”
I hadn’t expected her to know the Division. But the revulsion in her words made me wonder if she knew more than I. “I have to keep Brianna safe,” I said. “I will do whatever that requires.”
She narrowed her gaze on me.
“You can’t do this.”
“Stop me,” she said, and I could see her decide to make a move.
“I won’t let you,” I warned. “I can’t—”
Emily rushed me. Her moves were swift and sure, and left no doubt she’d been training for most of her life. She might not have believed her mother, but she had certainly paid attention in class.
Her knife bit at me with quick, short dives between practiced leg sweeps and palm thrusts. She kept herself low, as small a target as possible, and free from my grasp. She knew I wouldn’t hurt her, or didn’t care, and worked to use my size against me. All I could do without injuring one of us was avoid her strikes.
She feigned left, and then darted right, but instead of stabbing at me flipped the tray, dishes and all, at my upper body. It should have given her the opportunity to slip by, but I was no back-alley mugger. I got a secure grip on her arm and swung her around, her back toward me, to grab the other.
I had her trapped by a firm hold on each arm, just above the elbow where I had the best leverage, and the knife fell to the floor. For half a second, I thought that meant she’d given up, but she drew her bare feet together over it and made a clumsy thrust toward my thigh without pause. I dodged the blow, but she’d lost her footing so my movement dropped her to kneeling. She tried to roll forward and catch me off balance and it nearly worked, but I was not physically unsteady, merely thrown by her maneuvers. By the idea that she—Emily—could fight this well.
I pulled her from the floor and she drew her legs up fluidly before kicking out to shove off the dresser and propel herself into me. I struggled to hold her. It was not unlike holding a cat. Some wild, ninja, cat.