Say It Again - Catherine Bybee Page 0,4

Considering she’d been in most already, she wasn’t sure if there was more to learn from the place she’d called home since she was nine. Some things change, but Richter didn’t invite that concept.

She slipped out of the thick leather pants she wore when riding and into something easier to move around in.

In front of the mirror, she brushed her long hair back into a sleek ponytail. Her naturally olive complexion set off her dark eyes, made a little more striking with the eyeliner she liked to use. She applied a nude color over her full lips and tilted her head to the side.

This was as close to her personal choice in appearance as she came. Well, when she was relaxing, in any event.

She left the small bathroom, shuffled past her bedroom space, and out the door.

Sasha told herself she wasn’t being nostalgic, yet she couldn’t stop her feet from moving the rest of her down memory lane.

How many of her instructors would still be there? It had only been eight years. In fact, there might even be students who would recognize her, although she doubted she’d remember any of them. She’d hardly known her own class, let alone one eight years her junior.

The academic building held no interest. She moved deeper into the campus and over to the dining complex. Long rows of tables like something out of Harry Potter, minus the floating candles, lined the room. Meals were a choreographed and orderly deal. The front of the room was for the youngest students. As the tables moved back to the doors of the hall, the age progressed. Faculty sat in front of everyone. Food was fuel, nothing more, nothing less. There were few indulgences at Richter when it came to meals. Birthdays were celebrated with a pat on the back or a practical joke from one student to another, not with cake.

She’d hated that when she was young. As an adult, she applauded the fact that she never struggled with food cravings. It helped that she was naturally thin. If not for her dedication to pushing her body past its comfort zone in her workouts to keep her muscles conditioned, she’d probably appear anorexic. The figure gods didn’t hand her any significant curves, and she wasn’t interested in buying them. The men she slept with didn’t complain. Then again, they’d probably concluded that a complaint would be met with a broken bone. Or a broken ego, at the very least.

Through the empty dining hall, Sasha walked past the entry to the kitchens, where she could smell the staff working on the next meal, and to the locked double doors leading to the lower levels.

She had to scan her bracelet to unlock the doors and ignored the heavy click as they secured behind her. The stairway was wide enough to funnel three students across going up and down.

One level below, she went through another set of locked doors and into the sparring gym.

Here, class was in session.

The instructors—one woman, who had her back to Sasha, and one man—were dressed in white. The students were completely in black.

She slid in quietly and tucked behind the students to observe. From the ages of the students around her, she assumed it was a college level class. Their attention was on the woman speaking. Ms. Denenberg had joined Richter in Sasha’s sophomore college year. The woman could kick any man’s ass in at least three different forms of martial arts. She used all the disciplines she had studied, along with some good old-fashioned street fighting, with a splash of krav maga, and developed her own training. She was on the mat with the male instructor, demonstrating takedowns.

The students at Richter were never taught self-defense, they were instructed in offense only. If someone was after you, you met them head-on and made them regret they challenged you.

“The neck guides the head and forces the body to go with it.” Ms. Denenberg motioned for her male counterpart to approach while she demonstrated to her students how to gain control of her opponent’s neck and used her legs to take him down to the mat. She demonstrated the same takedown three times and then switched to a similar hold from a different angle. Sasha could think of at least six different neck takedowns that she’d been taught during this very class.

“You will break up in pairs. First, ones with ones, twos with twos. Then I will pair you with new partners.”

One of the male students, a