Free The Keep: The Watchers by Verónica Wolff Page A

strangling me from behind. I clawed frantically at his forearm, but it was a steel band around my neck. “Enough,” I croaked. “Stop.”
    “
You
didn’t stop,” he growled, and it was a feral sound, like he’d already made the full transformation from teenaged boy into something monstrous. He flexed his arm tighter. “Not when you fought
her
. This is for Emma.”
    My movements grew weaker, slower. I needed to think this through, but it was so hard. He’d choked off blood flow to my brain, and I was fading fast. If I didn’t stop him, he would kill me.
    No
!
a voice shrieked in my head. My own panic would be thething that killed me. The first order of business was to calm the hell down. I’d held my breath for far longer than this. I grew utterly still, envisioning a self that didn’t require oxygen to survive.
    We’d practiced choke holds in Priti’s class. I knew the move I had to do. Pictured the mechanics of my escape. I wasn’t strong enough to pry my way out, but I could use leverage against Yasuo. The right twist, the right flex and angle…It was all physics.
    Power, not strength.
    The thing about grappling, it was counterintuitive. To get away, first you had to get closer.
    I grabbed Yasuo’s wrist and wrenched myself even more snugly into the crook of his elbow. The move opened the tiniest gap for me to shift, and I twisted in to him. Hugged him tightly around the waist. I ducked, bowed, and then was free.
    I shoved off him at once and began to jog back and away, under no illusions that I could beat him if the fight got ugly. “Don’t…say…” I coughed and clutched at my aching throat, catching my breath. “Don’t talk…about Emma.”
    When he didn’t pounce on me, I slowed. Stopped. And then I stared.
    He was simply standing there, quaking, looking like a shell of the Yas he’d been. He was off his game. So much so, I wondered if I actually
might
have been able to beat him in a fight.
    It gave me the courage to risk saying more. “This is the last thing…” My throat spasmed, coughs racking me, but I managed to catch my breath and swallow. “She wouldn’t want this.”
    I paused to give my words meaning beyond this one tussle in this particular hallway. She wouldn’t have wanted us to fight here, and more than that, she wouldn’t have wanted this distance between us. We were becoming exactly what the vampireswanted us to become: scared, estranged, suspicious—things that made us need them.
    “We don’t have to do this,” I said. It was a simple statement, and yet to believe it stole just the tiniest bit of power from them. I’d find ways to steal even more.
    I’d convince Yasuo that I wasn’t the enemy. Convince him that I wasn’t the one to attack. If he channeled his anger at the real culprits instead, if we sided together against the vampires, we’d be stronger. Power could be ours for the taking.
    Power, not strength…my new motto.

CHAPTER NINE

    I was shivering in the bitter January night, trembling, race-walking back to the dorm. Yas had profoundly freaked me out. He was increasingly unstable, and I worried he was losing it, like in a fundamental about-to-snap sort of way.
    I understood his anguish. His anger. But his fury went beyond grief or blame to something deeper. He felt horror, and he blamed me. If I found out what happened to Emma, maybe I could convince him that her death wasn’t my fault. Maybe then he’d forgive me.
    Carden had sensed my distress, and this time, he hadn’t waited. He came right to me, catching up with me on the way back from dinner—right after my tussle with Yasuo. Like,
right
after.
    He simply appeared beside me on the path, startling me. “Who hurt you?”
    I put a hand to my chest, gasping a breathy half laugh. “Don’t do that.”
    “I caught you unawares.” His eyes hardened. “You mustalways be on guard. It is a lesson you must learn if you are to survive.” He softened, putting a fingertip beneath my chin. “And