She threw herself at the knife, curling around it.

He kicked her, more to get her off the knife than to hurt.

“I was going to go easy on you because you’re a little kid, but—”

She bit her tongue, hard.

It shut him up, startled him. An opportunity for her to take the knife she’d grabbed and swing it madly in his direction.

Except he knew what he was doing. On her second swing, he slapped at her wrist, and her hand went numb. The knife clattered from it.

A blow to the temple, and her vision went fuzzy in one eye, the other seeing double, like all the vision in one eye had been shoved into the other.

“I can do things other than hurt you,” he said, growling.

She brought the handcuffs down with her other hand, relying on her sense of him. She was too slow to disable her power, so she felt the initial connection, where the blunt point and serrated edge caught him in the wrist, gouging. She fell as much as she pulled down, and the thing was hauled in deeper. A fishhook set.

With a hand with one broken or badly hurt finger, she hung onto the cuffs, the rest of her reaching own, groping for the blade.

He kicked her, along the lower half of her body, and the pain was immense, jolting through her. He’d hit her in the back, near the spine. She knew he felt it, just as much as she felt the injury at the wrist for as long as her power was active.

Her fingers found the knife, touched it, made it spin instead of grabbing it.

She kicked up, toward the balls. He blocked it again, but took the momentum out of the kick more than he stopped it entirely. It made him bend over slightly, and that gave her the chance to pick up the knife.

Still hanging down, pulling on the cuffs where they were embedded in flesh, because relaxing it would mean he could pull the cuffs out, she swung wildly with the knife, aiming at the only flesh in reach—the back of the arm she was pulling down on. Four wild strokes, and she’d turned flesh there into thick ribbons, blood pouring down to the ground.

“You—”

She bit her tongue again, hard. Every part of her was tense, rigid, trembling, straining, and her face mid-bite was no different.

He hurled his mass and her mass around in a quarter-circle, screaming as he did it, because he was pulling on the cuffs and making the damage worse, but in the doing, he created an opening where he could grab her hand and peel it away from the chain of the cuffs.

She reasserted the connection as she picked herself up.