Marcus doesn’t enjoy this.

He wants that noted, at least internally, at least in the private record he keeps of himself that has no audience but his own conscience. He’s never enjoyed this part. The physical end of things has always struck him as the least elegant instrument available — the choice you make when patience has run out or when you need information that won’t come any other way.

He needs neither.

He knows everything already. He has the intelligence on the Mountain Pack’s positions, the patrol rotations, the defensive strategy Elena will deploy when the main push comes at dawn. He has thirty years of that knowledge in his own head and he doesn’t need a single word from the boy on the post.

What he needs is for Elena to know what’s happening here.

That’s different.

The Shadowpine camp’s interrogation structure is a clearing ringed by pines about fifty meters from the main fire. Practical, not dramatic — space for the work, screened enough from the main camp that it doesn’t distract the wolves who need to be functional at dawn. Varek offered his own people for it. Marcus declined.

He does this himself.

The boy is conscious.

That’s the first thing he establishes when they bring him in. He was out for maybe two hours — head impact at the gorge, which was unfortunate but necessary, you can’t contain a wolf who’s fighting like that without taking him down first. The shoulder is probably damaged from earlier in the night; he’s been holding it differently since he came around. The cuts from the gorge fight are numerous and superficial except one on his left side that’s deeper than ideal but not life-threatening.

He’ll live through this.

That matters. A dead hostage is a different kind of pressure than a living one, and living is what Marcus needs him to be.

He’s bound at the post with his arms above him, which is standard, which puts the body in a position that makes everything more acute without doing lasting structural damage. His head is up. His eyes, when they find Marcus, are gold and completely present.

No fear in them.

Marcus expected some fear. This is a twenty-year-old. He’s been beaten and captured and he woke up in an enemy camp and there should be at least some fear.

There isn’t.

There’s something else. Something that Marcus has to look at for a moment before he places it. An absence. Not of emotion — the opposite of absence. He’s furious, clearly, and underneath the fury there’s something else, something settled, like a person who has located the deepest floor in themselves and is standing on it.

Marcus thinks about where that comes from.

Elena.

She’s been teaching him things. Not just the fighting, not just the protocol and the border knowledge and the tactical vocabulary. Something more interior than that. He’s watched it happening for six weeks from behind meeting room doors and across council tables and in the training yard where the boy’s whole quality of movement changed in ways that have nothing to do with footwork.

She’s been teaching him how to take things and not break.

That’s going to make this longer.

He starts with the basics.

Not cruelty — methodology. He’s been clear with Varek’s wolves about this: the goal is observable damage, the kind that travels through a report, that arrives in Elena’s imagination before any messenger does. The goal is not unconsciousness and not serious impairment.

He works.

The boy doesn’t make noise at first. That’s will, not absence of feeling — Marcus can see it in the jaw, in the way the tendons in his neck cord up and then deliberately release, the specific technique of someone controlling their own body’s response. Breathing through the nose. Exhaling through the mouth.

Elena teaches that. Marcus has heard her, through doors, counting to ten.

He works longer.

Around the third interval, something changes. Not breaking — the boy doesn’t break, Marcus is increasingly certain he won’t break in any useful timeframe — but something becomes less controlled. The breathing comes out through the teeth instead of the lips. The jaw unclenches slightly. The sounds he’s been suppressing start to escape in small increments, not words, just the involuntary grammar of a body being pushed past its planned threshold.

Marcus steps back.

Looks at him.

The boy’s head is down now. His hair is damp. His chest is moving fast, recovering, and in the firelight his face has the particular quality of someone concentrating very hard on something internal, some resource they’ve found that Marcus can’t reach.

"You’ve been trained to take pain," Marcus says.

Nothing.

"Not by anyone here. You arrived knowing how. Four years." He walks a slow circle. Not for theater — just thinking, which he does better moving. "Four years of living rough, fighting for everything, nothing given. You learned to manage it."

The boy’s head comes up slightly.

"She’s changed it, though," Marcus says. "What I mean is — the nature of what you’re protecting has changed. When you were alone, pain was just information. Your body telling you what was happening. No weight to it beyond survival." He stops. "Now there’s weight."

He sees it land. The subtle tightening.

"She’s pregnant," Marcus says. Conversational. "You’re going to be a father. And you’re here, and she’s there, and what I’m doing is reaching through that distance and—"

"Stop." Rhydian’s voice comes out rough and low and from somewhere that isn’t the same place his earlier silence came from. Not will. Something rawer.

Marcus stops.

The boy’s head is fully up now. His face is a specific kind of wrecked that Marcus recognizes from thirty years of watching wolves carry things — the face of someone whose composure is functional but only just, being held together by something that has nothing to do with technique.

"You think this is about her," Rhydian says. His voice is uneven at the edges. "You think hurting me hurts her and that’s the point."

"It is the point," Marcus says. Simply.

"She’s not coming." He holds Marcus’s gaze. "Not for this. Not how you think." His breathing is still short. "You’ve spent thirty years in that Pack and you never understood her."

Marcus looks at him.

"She’ll come," Rhydian says, "because that’s what she does. She’ll come and she’ll have a plan and the plan will be better than yours because she’s been thinking three steps ahead since before you started this." Something shifts in his face. "And I’ll still be here when she gets here, because she taught me—"

He stops.

His head drops slightly and comes back up.

"She taught me," he says again, quieter, from the deep floor, from wherever that settled thing lives in him, "that pain doesn’t own you. That you can feel it and stay." He meets Marcus’s gaze. "She taught me that. You can’t take it back out."

A long silence.

Marcus looks at the boy.

At what Elena has built in six weeks out of a feral rogue who bit her on the first day. At what that looks like when it’s tested by something that Marcus has been practicing for thirty years.

He finds he doesn’t have a response.

He picks up the instrument again.

He works.

And the boy’s jaw comes up higher every time, not lower, which is not what Marcus expected and not what he accounted for, and there’s something in it that sits badly in his chest in a way he doesn’t examine.

The last interval ends.

Silence.

And then Rhydian raises his head and Marcus is two feet away and the boy’s mouth works and— 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

He spits blood directly into Marcus’s face.

The blood is warm. It lands on Marcus’s cheek and his mouth and the bridge of his nose.

He doesn’t move.

He stands there and he feels it.

"She taught me pain is nothing," Rhydian says. The voice is almost completely gone now, barely a sound. But it’s steady. "You are nothing."

Marcus takes the cloth from his pocket.

He wipes his face.

He turns and walks away from the post without looking back, because if he looks back he will see something in the boy’s eyes that he already knows is there and cannot use and doesn’t know what to do with.

Something that looks like winning.

From a post in an enemy camp.

At dawn, Elena will come or she won’t.

Either way, Marcus thinks, walking back toward the fire, toward the hundred and four wolves who are going to need direction in approximately two hours—

Either way, I’ve already lost something I didn’t know I was betting.

He keeps walking.