The first exchange lasted eleven seconds and Raven came out of it with her forearm ringing and a position she hadn't wanted to give. Isabella had taken her right side—the healed forearm, the side she led from, the side that carried the specific weight pattern that Raven had never fully corrected because Isabella had trained it into her at sixteen and it had been too deep to undo. She knew about it because she had put it there.
Raven adjusted. Changed the lead. Isabella let her—let her, the deliberate permission of a woman giving Raven the adjustment to see what she'd built on top of the old foundation—and in the half-second of reorganization Isabella moved through the center and caught her shoulder with a drive that should have taken her off her feet. Raven went with it instead of against it, redirected the momentum, used the fall to put distance between them. She came up already running the geometry.
