Chapter 10
Chapter
Ten
The request comes through Dalton, of all people.
He brings it to me while the compound is down and the halls are mine, because he’s human and awake and I’m the only command he can reach in daylight.
Maximus is in the field with Erik, walking the northern approach to the estate, due back at dark.
Catherine asked Dalton last night, at the end of his rounds, in the polite voice she uses for the staff, and Dalton brings it to me because I’m here, and because, I suspect, he’d rather I be the one who says no.
“She wants to train,” he says. “Physical conditioning. Basic self-defense. Her words were, ‘I spent three hundred years unable to stop anything that was done to me. I would like to stop being that person.’”
“And she asked for me.”
It isn’t a question. The request has my name in it before Dalton opens his mouth again.
“She asked for you,” he confirms. “A woman. A fighter. Her words were that she has only ever been handled by men, and she’d like to learn from someone who knows what it’s like to fight her way out of a room instead of being carried out of one.”
I add it to the file I keep on the file she’s building.
It’s a good reason. It might even be true.
That’s the problem with Catherine. Everything she says is a good reason, and every part of it might even be true.
And this one is aimed with a precision that makes my jaw tighten, because it’s built so that refusing it means I’m afraid of her, and agreeing means I’m inside her reach, and the construction is flawless.
I stand in the empty hall with the daylight sealed behind the shutters and I think about a woman in a locked wing asking, gently, for me by name.
“Tell her yes,” I say.
Dalton’s eyebrows climb. He’s too professional to say anything, and too human to keep it off his face.
“Dusk.” Catherine won’t surface before then. None of them do, except Maximus and me, and the immunity that lets us walk through noon is not a thing she carries. “The training floor. Just us.”
We meet at dusk. The guard Marcellus posted after the corridor incident walks her down and takes the door, and Catherine steps onto the training floor in borrowed workout clothes with her hair tied back, and stands at the edge of the mats, polite, unsure she’s allowed on them.
“Thank you for this,” she says. “I know what it costs you.”
“It costs me an hour.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.” I step onto the mats. “Come on. Show me where you are, and we’ll build from there.”
She comes on carefully. We start with stance, balance, the basics of not falling down, and at first she is exactly what her chart says she is, a starved woman fresh out of a cell, weak, willing, grateful, wobbling on the turns. She shows me the frailty first, and watches whether I soften.
I don’t soften. I correct her stance with two fingers and keep the pace exactly where a recovering body needs it, and somewhere past the opening drills, the frailty stops being the whole story.
It’s small things. Her eyes run my reach, my stance, the space between us, and the running is efficient.
She resets her stance from the ground up, feet first, a fighter’s reset, without being told twice.
When I sweep her, slow and announced, a teaching fall, she takes it well.
Slaps the mat. Rolls to her feet with an economy that a starved beginner shouldn’t own.
Catherine moves trained. It’s there in the first honest exchange and it never goes away.
Somebody taught her. Somewhere in Konstantin’s keeping, somebody taught her to move, and taught her well, and taught her in a school I recognize, because I’ve watched Konstantin’s people fight and I fought Valentina’s, and the deliberate control of a body that learned what its keeper rewarded is written in her footwork where a beginner’s clumsiness should be.
Midway I feed her a jab, slow, telegraphed, a teaching strike she’s supposed to see coming and step away from.
She steps away from it. But the step is wrong.
Not wrong as in clumsy. Wrong as in better than the lesson, a slip at an angle I haven’t taught her, her weight already loaded for a counter she doesn’t throw, and for half a second the beginner is gone and something built stands in her place.
Then she stumbles the recovery, one beat late, and looks embarrassed.
“Sorry,” she says. “I don’t know what that was.”
“Beginner’s luck,” I say, and we both hear what I don’t say.
We drill on. Between rounds she talks, light, harmless, the register from the dinner table. “You fought before. Before all this.” Not quite a question.
“For money.”
“Were you good?”
“I’m alive.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It’s the only answer that ever mattered.” I reset my stance. “Guard up.”
She puts her guard up. It’s flawless. A breath, and it’s less flawless, and I pretend not to watch the adjustment.
Partway in, the two of them wake. The flutter under my ribs, the shift of small live things registering effort, and I ease the tempo down two notches without breaking rhythm and let the next drill be footwork.
Catherine’s eyes flick to my midline and away, one beat, filed. She files everything. So do I.
She’s hiding most of it. That’s the part that matters.
The wobbles are placed. The gratitude is placed.
Her breathing is wrong for the effort, too even, and a starved body burns through its reserves fast, and hers is pacing itself.
She’s showing me a recovering victim learning her first stance, and underneath the performance there’s a trained body holding itself down to the role, and she’s good enough that if I didn’t read opponents for a living, I’d have believed every wobble.
Near the end she rests, hands on knees, selling winded, and asks the question the whole hour was maybe for.
“Does he know you’re doing this?” Casual. Eyes on the mat. “Maximus.”
“He will.”
“He won’t like it.”
“He doesn’t have to.”
She straightens. Something crosses her face that she lets me see, which means it’s a move, and what it looks like is respect.
“He never let me learn,” she says. “Anything that could have saved me. He kept me safe instead. You know how that ended.” She rolls her shoulder, winces on schedule.
“I used to think it was love. Now I think it was inventory management.”
It’s aimed at my marriage and it lands in history instead, and I file the miss with the hits.
Even her misses are information. She’s telling me the story where Maximus caged her, and inviting me to wonder what he’d do to me, and the story would work on a woman he hadn’t already tried to cage and lost to.
“Water,” I say. “Then footwork.”
I know an audition when I’m in one. I just haven’t worked out yet what part she thinks she’s reading for.
So I teach. I give her exactly what a genuine beginner would get, stance and balance and the first defensive frames, and I watch her pretend to learn what she already knows, and the hour runs out with both of us sweating and neither of us honest.
“Same time tomorrow?” she asks. Hope, pitched perfectly.
“Same time tomorrow.”
The satisfaction on her face reads real. So does the frustration under it, and underneath that, a patience that is neither.
“Why did you say yes?” she asks, at the door, while the guard waits.
“Because if someone’s going to teach you how to be dangerous,” I say, “it’s going to be the person who’ll have to answer for it.”
She holds my eyes. Neither of us has offered trust, and neither of us has asked for it, and the truce holds, temporary and on purpose.
“Good night, Celeste.”
“Good night, Catherine.”
Maximus is back late, and he takes the news about as well as I expected, which is quietly and badly.
“You put yourself in reach of her.” His anger is the quiet kind. Voice level, hands still. “Alone. On a closed floor. For an hour.”
“With a guard on the door, light contact, my tempo, my floor. And Seraphina reads me at dusk and dawn.” I sit on the edge of the bed and pull my boots off. “I was never in danger, and you know it, and that isn’t what this is about.”
“You’re carrying...”
“Light contact,” I say again. “My tempo. My floor.” I set the boots down. “Say the real thing.”
He stands by the window with the shutters open to the dark, and the real thing takes him a minute to say.
“She asked for you by name,” he says. “She didn’t ask the compound for a teacher. She asked for my wife. If she’s what we think she might be, then I just watched you walk into a proximity she designed.”
“And if she’s what she says she is, then a woman who has only ever been handled by men asked for the one woman in this compound who fought her way out of a cage.” I stand and cross to him. “But that isn’t what happened either. You want to know what happened tonight?”
He waits.
“She pulled her strikes, Maximus. All of them. Every single one, including the ones a beginner wouldn’t know how to pull.
” I let that sit. “She’s trained. Konstantin’s school, or near it.
She’s hiding it under a recovery she’s performing at half speed, and she’s good enough that the performance would hold for anyone who hasn’t fought for money.
Tonight it was a slip step she tried to unlearn in real time and a guard she had to sabotage to make ordinary.
Tomorrow I’ll feed her something faster and watch what her body does before she can stop it.
” I look up at him. “You have a compound full of people who can watch her sit at dinner. You have exactly one person who can stand on a mat with her and read what Konstantin actually built. That’s why it’s me.
Not in spite of what she might be. Because of it. ”
The anger shifts. I can feel it through the bond, the fear underneath it that’s been underneath everything since the training floor, and Catherine’s request lands in the middle of that fear, dead center, and he knows it, and I know it, and neither of us says her name.
“Then supervise the supervision,” I tell him. “Post whoever you want at the door. Read the reports. But I’m doing this, because she asked for me, and what she’s going to get is an audit.”
He looks at me for a long time. Then his hand comes up, and he tucks my hair back from my temple, and his fingers are steady.
“An audit,” he says.
“Every session. Every reflex she forgets to hide. Every skill she pretends to learn.” I lean into his hand.
“She thinks she’s using an hour a day to get close to this family.
She’s actually spending an hour a day showing me exactly what Konstantin made.
I’ll take that trade every night she’s willing to make it. ”
“And when the audit is finished?”
“Then we’ll know what she is.” I catch his hand and hold it against my cheek. “And we’ll know it before she wants us to.”
He exhales. The fight goes out of it. He married a fighter, and a council floor already taught him what that means.
“The guard stays on the door,” he says.
“The guard stays on the door.”
“And you tell me everything.”
“I tell you everything.” I pull him toward the bed. “Starting with the middle of the session. She asked about you. Whether you knew. Whether you’d like it. Then she told me a story about a man who kept her safe instead of teaching her, and let me hear what I was supposed to hear in it.”
His jaw tightens. “And what were you supposed to hear?”
“That you cage the women you love.” I hold his eyes. “She’s working from old maps. You tried that once. It didn’t survive contact with me.”
The line does what I built it to do. His shoulders come down a degree.
“And this. She asked me a question at the door tonight. She asked why I took the assignment myself.”
“What did you tell her?”
“The truth.” I sit, and look up at my husband, and give him the sentence I gave her. “If someone’s going to teach her how to be dangerous, it’s going to be the person who’ll have to answer for it.”
He’s quiet. Then, low: “She’ll have understood that as a warning.”
“Good,” I say. “It was one.”