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 acompound 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.”
