Venture Untamed (The Venture Books)
Page 19
Everyone but Venture jumped when Fisher threw open the door and let it crash into the wall.
His fiery eyes darted from one to the other of them. Following the stares of the boys, he spied the likely culprit. “Get up!”
Venture rose immediately, determined to keep it together and appear unintimidated.
“Sir?” he said, with the ease of a servant accustomed to taking orders.
“Get out here.”
Venture’s stomach lurched. For an instant he was sorry. He was so sorry, not for what he’d done to Parker, but because he’d chosen to come here, and now he was never going to see anyone he loved again.
“You get in a lot of trouble, boy?” Fisher said once he had him in the hall. Parker was waiting out there, arms folded, scowling.
“Only when my trainer tries to kick me in the face.”
Fisher whacked him hard across the chest with his forearm, sending Venture crashing into the wooden wall. The whole building shook with the impact, and Venture bent over in pain. Fisher glanced at the open doorway to the dormitory room, then grabbed him by the collar, twisting Venture’s shirt tight around his neck.
“Come on,” he said through gritted teeth.
Fisher dragged him down the hall like that, muttering about how he deserved the wrath of Felsan, the god of pain and death. Parker followed behind them, silent. Whenever Venture resisted, the shirt tightened around his neck, and darkness crept in on his vision. Venture reached up, grabbed a fistful of fabric, and ripped it. His vision sharpened and he took a deep breath. But Fisher didn’t miss a step. His hands were big enough that he easily gripped the back of Venture’s neck, his fingers pressing in below his ear on one side, his thumb on the other, cutting off the blood flow to his head. Venture stopped resisting, but Fisher kept him on the verge of passing out the whole time, only releasing the pressure whenever his body started to go limp.
Fisher took him out the door, not to the half-sheltered breezeway between the new fighters’ dormitory and their training room, but into the open winter night, through a foot-deep layer of crunchy snow that stung Venture’s bare feet, to a side entrance of the massive, robust stone building that was the heart of Champions Center.
Fisher tossed him inside, onto the hard stone floor. Then Parker shut and locked the heavy oak door behind them.
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