Liam looked at the driver holding the couch above his head with Elena still on it.
Then he looked at Elena just be looking back at the driver.
The driver looked straight ahead at nothing in particular, his arms locked, his breathing unchanged, holding a full couch above his head the way most people hold a cup of coffee.
Elena watched Liam’s face with the patient expression of soone who had made their point and was giving it ti to land properly.
Liam closed his mouth.
The driver lowered the couch back to the floor smoothly, setting it down without a sound, and stepped back to his position near the wall.
He straightened his jacket and stood there the sa way he had been standing before any of it happened.
Liam looked at Elena. "Okay," he said. "I have questions."
"I assud you would," she said.
He moved to the chair across from her and sat down. "Before I say anything else what do you an by your fighter is still alive? That’s why I can’t be your fighter?"
Elena settled back into her seat and looked at him for a mont, deciding where to start.
"You have to understand what it was like before the arena existed," she said. "Seven families. All of them powerful. All of them needing each other because of what they controlled individually but none of them trusting each other because of what they rembered."
She paused.
"The Blade family controlled the underground trade routes. The Ashford family controlled information and money movent. The others each held sothing essential. Sothing the other six needed."
She looked at the window briefly.
"But needing soone doesn’t an you like them. And when you’re talking about families with that kind of power and that kind of history the dislike runs very deep."
"How deep," Liam said.
"Assassinations," she said simply. "Soone from one family kills soone from the other family and the other family sends three people back." She looked at him. "It escalated constantly. And because all seven families were interlinked through their operations every conflict between two of them created problems for the other five. Business would slow. Routes would close. Money would stop moving."
She turned the ring on her finger once without looking at it. "It was expensive and wasteful so it just kept happening because there was no agreed way to settle anything."
"So soone ca up with the arena," Liam said.
"The Blade family," she said. "Stiles’s grandfather actually.
He proposed it to the other six families as a neutral solution." She looked at Liam directly. "Each family selects a fighter and that fighter represents the family in any dispute that would otherwise result in conflict between the families themselves. You have a problem with my family you don’t send an assassin. You send your fighter to and whoever breaks that thier families would be wiped out by the other families."
Liam thought about it. "That’s actually not a bad solution."
"It kept the peace for thirty years," she said. "Mostly."
She shifted slightly in her seat. "The contract that ca with it is the part that makes it work. Every fighter signs it when they’re chosen and unlike the small families fighters our contract binds them completely to our family so they cannot leave voluntarily."
"Cannot leave," Liam said. "As in they’re stuck."
"As in the contract has no exit clause," she said.
The room was quiet for a mont.
Outside the lake sat still and dark beyond the window.
"Death is their freedom," Liam said.
"Yes," Elena said. She said it quietly. Not dramatically. Just the plain truth of it sitting in the room between them.
Liam let it settle.
He sat with it properly turning it over and understanding the full weight of what she had been trying to tell him at the restaurant.
Not just the danger of the arena itself but the specific inescapable structure of what being her fighter would actually an.
He would be trapped as a fighter for the rest of his life.
"I understand now," he said. "Fully."
Elena looked at him as sothing in her face loosened slightly with a particular relief of being understood rather than just heard.
"I wasn’t expecting your fighter to be him though," Liam said, glancing at the driver.
Elena looked at the driver and then back at Liam and sothing happened in her expression that was close to a laugh but quieter than that. "Really?," she said.
The driver turned his head toward her.
She nodded once.
He reached into the collar of his jacket and pulled it down off his shoulders in one movent, letting it fall. Underneath he was wearing a plain dark shirt.
He took the hem of it in both hands and pulled it up and off over his head and dropped it on top of the jacket.
Liam stared.
The man was built in the way that made the word built feel insufficient.
His chest was wide and deep, the muscle sitting heavy on his fra, his shoulders broad enough that the proportions of the room seed to shift slightly around him.
His arms were the kind that ca from actual use rather than a gym, thick and functional, the veins visible across his forearms.
His stomach was flat and defined, the lines of it clean despite his age.
He turned around slowly.
On his back, sitting between his shoulder blades, was a number.
Three.
Liam looked at it.
Then he looked at Elena.
"You seem surprised," she said.
"I’m more impressed than surprised," Liam said. He looked at the driver again. "Number three. I know he’s strong but a number. An actual number." He looked at Elena. "How strong is he?"
"Stronger than anything you’ve encountered so far," she said. "And I an that without exaggeration."
"What’s his ability?"
Elena glanced at the driver with an expression that carried a specific kind of quiet pride in it, the kind you had for sothing you had protected for a long ti.
"My divers is known as Wrath... Wrath isn’t just a na," she said.
"The angrier he gets the stronger he becos."
Liam looked at the driver standing there bare-chested and composed, his face carrying the sa mild unbothered expression it had carried every single ti Liam had been in the sa room as him.
The man who opened car doors and said yes ma’am and stood quietly near walls.
"He’s so calm though," Liam said.
Elena smiled. The real one, the one she didn’t produce for rooms full of people. "Don’t judge a book by its cover."
Liam looked at Wrath one more ti.
At the number on his back with his fra and the absolute stillness he carried everywhere like it cost him nothing.
"I’d like to see it," Liam said.
Elena looked at him with an expression that said that was either the bravest or the least inford thing he had said since walking through the door and she hadn’t fully decided which.
"No," she said. "You wouldn’t."
---
A narrow path ran from the side of the lake house into the trees and opened up about two minutes walk in into a clearing that felt like the forest had simply decided to step back and leave a space.
The ground was flat and covered in short grass that grew without anyone tending it, the kind of grass that was soft underfoot and slightly damp from the air coming off the lake sowhere behind them through the trees.
The treeline ran around the full edge of the clearing, tall and dense, the branches overhead thin enough in places to show strips of dark sky and the occasional star between them. Sowhere in the trees an owl was doing sothing.
The lake was audible from here, just barely, the sound of water against the bank coming through the treeline as a low continuous presence underneath everything else.
Elena had found a thick flat topped log near the edge of the clearing that had been there long enough to look like it belonged, and she sat on it with her legs crossed and her hands in her lap, looking across the open space with an expression that communicated she had agreed to this under protest and was reserving the right to say she told him so afterward.
Liam was standing on one side of the clearing.
Wrath was standing on the other.
Shirtless still, his number three visible between his shoulder blades when he had turned.
He stood with his hands at his sides and his feet shoulder width apart completely still and his face carrying nothing readable.
He looked like a man waiting for a bus, very calm and extrely muscular man waiting for a bus.
Liam rolled his shoulders back once.
He reached his arms across his chest one at a ti stretching after he was done he started working through his neck and his hips then going through the motions of it properly rather than rushing.
He felt the damp grass under his shoes and looked across the space at Wrath and felt sothing in his chest that was not quite nerves but was adjacent to them in an interesting way.
Elena watched from the bench. "Wrath," she said. Her voice carried clearly across the quiet of the open space. "Don’t go all out. Understood?"
"Don’t listen to her," Liam said imdiately.
Elena turned her head and looked at him.
"I an it," Liam said. He looked at Wrath across the grass. "Don’t hold back."
Wrath looked at him.
Then at Elena.
Then back at Liam and sothing moved in his expression and that was first thing that had moved in it since they had co outside it was sothing that wasn’t quite a smile but was in the sa family as one.
"I wouldn’t dare hold back, Master Liam," he said. His voice was low and even and carried across the space without effort.
Liam looked at him. "Master Liam?"
"Yes sir."
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