It hurt him not to win. He thought he was good with a knife, and I was making him realise that he wasn’t. I should’ve let him win. It would’ve cost me nothing. And he was my boss, in a sense. But I couldn’t do it. There’s a corner of contempt we reserve for those who hate us, when we’ve done them no wrong: those who resent us without cause, and revile us without reason. Andrew was corralled into that corner of my disdain as surely as he was trapped in the dead end of the training corridor. And contempt almost always conquers caution.
