Chapter 363: Elena’s Submission

"Ah—"

Liam’s face met the floor.

His arm was behind his back at an angle that his arm had opinions about, Elena’s knee in the center of his back, her weight distributed with the specific efficiency of someone who had learned to do this properly and had not forgotten.

"You’re late," she said.

"I told you," Liam said, his cheek against the mat, the words slightly compressed by the position, "there was a reason—"

"I don’t care about the reason," Elena said, the hold tightening by a degree. "Do you understand what they did? Do you understand why they matched you with Gage specifically?"

"I know—"

"They want you dead," she said. Her voice had not risen. That was somehow worse than if it had. "That is not a figure of speech. It is not arena language for a difficult match. They placed you against that specific fighter because they calculated that he ends you and they keep the optics of a legitimate fight." She pressed down slightly. "And it might work."

From the doorway of the training room, Odessa stood with her hands clasped in front of her and watched this exchange with the expression of someone who found the Tuesday morning curriculum entirely satisfactory.

She smiled.

"I know," Liam said, the grunt underneath the words doing its own work. "I’m not—taking it lightly. I wasn’t planning on it—"

"You were late," Elena said.

"Because someone sent fake gang members to my workplace and one of them put his hands on Elsa—"

The hold released.

He pushed himself up from the mat and turned over and looked at her crouching beside him, the gold eyes level with his, carrying the quality they carried when she had heard something she had not been told and was deciding what to do with the fact that she had not been told it.

She held his gaze for a long moment.

"Okay," she said. "If you’re finally taking this seriously then we need to go somewhere."

He sat up and started dusting the mat off his shirt. "Where."

"Ashford Ground," she said it standing while the way people said the names of places they had known long enough that the name had stopped being a description and become simply the thing itself.

"Okay," he said.

He stretched his shoulders, feeling the specific complaint of a joint that had been rotated further than it had volunteered for, and followed her out of the training room.

They moved through the mansion.

Liam had been in this house enough times now to have a working map of it in his head, the main hall and the dining room and the corridor that led to the east wing and the staircase and the rooms he had been in. He had thought he had a reasonable picture of the place.

Then they turned through a passage he had not been through before.

A room on the left with a door standing open, the inside showing a wall of mounted equipment that had the specific organized quality of things that were used regularly and returned to specific places after each use, brackets and hooks and surfaces designed for exactly what was on them.

"What do you use that for," he said, gesturing as they passed.

"Training," she said, without slowing.

Another door on the right, closed, the sound of nothing coming from behind it, which was its own kind of presence.

"And that one," he said.

"Storage," she said.

He looked at the door as they passed.

"What kind of storage requires a door that thick," he said.

She did not answer that one.

They kept moving and the corridor ended at a set of doors that opened onto the back of the mansion and they came through them into the afternoon.

Ashford Ground was the name for a reason.

The back of the property stretched out in a way that the front gave no indication of, wide and contained, the boundary wall at the far end a distance away that made the whole thing feel less like a garden and more like its own territory.

The grass was different from the manicured lawn at the front, shorter and harder, the kind of surface that existed for use rather than appearance.

Training equipment at intervals that Liam recognised from working with Wrath. Open space in the center.

And to the right, beside a tree that had been growing in this spot long enough to have its own relationship with the sky above it, Wrath was standing.

Next to a cage.

Not a training cage. Not the kind of structure that existed for sparring or for sport. This was something else.

It was large, wide enough to contain a space rather than just an object, the walls thick dark metal, the construction of it the construction of something built by people who were serious about what they were building it for.

At the top, where the wall met its own ceiling, a row of narrow openings ran the perimeter, each one wide enough to let in a strip of light and air and nothing else.

The whole thing sat on the ground with the settled permanence of something that had been here for a while and had not been moved.

Wrath saw them coming.

He watched them approach with his hands at his sides, his expression carrying the specific quality it carried when he was waiting for something that he knew the shape of and had made his peace with.

They stopped a distance from the cage.

Liam looked at it.

At the walls and the narrow light strips at the top and the specific quality of dark that sat inside it even in the afternoon light.

"You’re not planning on putting me in there," he said. He looked at Elena. "I already apologised for being late."

"That is not why I brought you here," she said. She looked at the cage and then at him. "Although." She paused. "It would keep you safe from what’s inside it."

Liam looked at her.

Then at the cage.

’No one is breaking out of that,’ he thought, looking at the walls, at the construction of the thing, at the way it sat in the ground.

Elena looked at Wrath and nodded once.

Wrath nodded back, the small precise nod of someone who had been waiting for exactly this signal, and he turned to the side of the cage where a panel sat flush with the wall, a reader beside it, and he pressed a card against the reader.

A sound.

Grwmmmm.

Mechanical and deep, coming from below and above simultaneously, the cage responding to the card with the specific sound of something large and heavy beginning a process it had been designed to complete.

The front wall began to lower, not swinging but descending, the whole face of it going down in a controlled hydraulic movement that deposited it flat on the ground with a final sound that came up through the soles of Liam’s shoes.

*Doom!*

The inside of the cage was now open to the afternoon.

Liam looked in.

A man.

Sitting against the far wall on the floor, his back to the metal, a straitjacket on him with the arms crossed and secured in the specific way that straitjackets were secured when the person who put it on intended it to stay.

But beyond the straitjacket, chains.

Multiple sets, each one attached to a different point on his body, the other ends fixed to the wall at different heights, the arrangement producing the impression of something that had been held in this position for long enough that the chains and the wall and the man had reached an understanding with each other.

His head was down.

Then the chains started releasing.

Not all at once.

One after another, automated, the mechanism working through its sequence, each release producing a small sound, and the man’s body changed with each one, the specific change of something that had been constrained and was receiving back degrees of itself.

When the last one released he sat still for a moment.

Then he stood up.

The movement was wrong.

Not wrong like injury and not wrong like weakness.

Wrong like something that had spent time in a configuration that was not standard and was now returning to its own standard, which was different from everyone else’s.

He moved toward the opening the way certain things moved, each step landing with the placement of something that was not thinking about walking because walking was the least of what it was doing.

He came out into the afternoon light.

He stopped.

In front of Liam and Elena. His head came up.

And he stood there.

And then he went sideways.

Not fell.

Went sideways, his whole body listing in one direction the way a tree went in wind, the movement boneless and directionless, and then recovered, finding vertical again, and stayed there swaying slightly like standing was something he was doing as a courtesy to the concept rather than out of necessity.

Liam looked at him.

"What’s wrong with him," he said.

"Nothing," Elena said.

He looked at her. "Nothing." He looked at the man swaying gently in front of them. "He’s walking like the wind is going to make a decision about him any second now."

"Wrath," Elena said. "Release him."

"Yes, madam," Wrath said.

He moved to the man and worked the straitjacket fastenings with the careful efficiency of someone who had done this before and knew which order the fastenings needed to come undone in.

Elena turned and walked away from Liam’s side.

He looked at her going.

Then at Wrath and the man.

Something moved in his chest that was not quite alarm and not quite nothing.

He activated Silent Stride.

The sound of him disappeared, his breathing and his footsteps and his clothing all going quiet, and he settled into the stance Wrath had been building in him over the weeks, weight distributed, hands ready, eyes on the man.

The last fastening came loose.

The straitjacket fell.

The man stood there in the afternoon of Ashford Ground and rolled his shoulders and the rolling of his shoulders was wrong in a specific way that had nothing to do with the straitjacket, the joint moving past the range joints moved and continuing, the rotation completing itself and then continuing past completion, and the man looked at his own arm doing it with an expression of mild interest.

He stretched his neck.

The sound it made was not the sound necks made.

Liam watched this happen and his expression communicated his exact feelings about it in full detail without him deciding to communicate them.

Then the man turned his head and looked at him.

And blinked.

Liam blinked back.

The man was not there anymore.

He was in front of Liam, his leg already extended, the kick coming from an angle and a distance that the previous position should not have allowed for, and Liam’s arm came up on reflex and the block connected and the force of the contact went up through his forearm and his shoulder and into his chest and he went back.

He went back a significant distance.

While he was still in the air something caught his hand.

He felt it before he saw it, a line of something connecting to his wrist, and then the line went taut and the trajectory of his movement changed and he was no longer going back, he was going up.

He went up.

The mansion roof was visible from this height for a moment, the grounds spreading out below him, the cage and Wrath and the man all small from here, and then the line swung and he went in the other direction and then down, and the ground came back and he hit it and something in his side decided immediately and loudly that this had been a mistake.

*Crack!!*

He lay there.

He turned his head and spat blood onto the grass, tasting the copper of it, and looked at the sky above him while his body ran its assessment and reported back.

Something had given. Not catastrophically. But something had given.

He pushed himself up.

The man was moving toward him again.

Then a line crossed between them.

Wrath’s hand. Cutting it.

It was a web severing and falling, and the man stopped and turned and looked at Wrath with the confusion of something encountering an interruption it had not modeled for.

"Enough," Wrath said.

The man opened his mouth.

What came out was not words.

It was a sound that occupied the space where words would have been and had chosen not to be, something that came from the chest and the throat simultaneously, the sound of something that had decided language was optional.

Then Wrath moved.

The same way the man had moved. One position, then another, the distance between them ceasing to exist in the specific way it ceased to exist when Flash Step was used at its fullest, and Wrath was in front of him.

"Huh," the man said.

That was all he managed.

Wrath’s hand closed around the man’s head and brought it down to the ground with the focused conviction of someone making a decision they had made before and were making again, and the ground received it with a sound that ended the afternoon’s activity comprehensively.

The man was still.

Wrath straightened up.

He looked at Liam on the ground, still sitting up, his hand at his side, blood on his lip.

Elena came back to stand where she had been. She looked at the man on the ground and then at Liam.

"I would have kept him in there permanently," she said. Her voice was even. "But you needed to understand what serious looks like." She looked at Liam directly. "That is what serious looks like."

Liam looked at the man on the ground.

At the web still hanging from his palm where Wrath had cut it.

At the crack in his side that was going to have opinions for the next several days.

"Yeah," he said.

"Now you know," she said.

He looked at her.

"Yeah," he said again. Quieter this time. The word carrying something different from the first time.