Controlled Descent

It sounded so fucking dramatic to put like that, but it was true. She made no noise—he’d taught her better than that—and a slip of a thing like Kenna could bend herself into almost any shadow, so no surprise he couldn’t see her. But a shift in the air currents of the sleeping loft told him somebody had taken refuge in the night-shrouded rafters, and this interloper seemed much larger than the previously-resident raccoon. By the time John started down the open staircase, his every professional instinct flared in a warning almost as aggressive as the personal instincts that pulled him in a much different direction.

She’d found him.

Good for her.

He made a production of descending the stairs to the wide-plank floor of the living area, and crossed to stand before the fire. He held his hands to the heat, turning his wrist so that the broad, flat face of his watch mirrored the room behind him.

No sign of movement. That’s my girl.

The warmth seeped into his skin as he weighed his options, testing impulse against sober second thought, disliking how readily he still inclined to the risk of the former where Kenna was concerned. Not a problem he’d had before she came along, and as many years as he’d had to get used to it, he hadn’t yet. Provoked by his own embarrassment, he spoke.

“Can’t have been easy, finding this place.”

He looked down at leaping tongues of yellow flame, relishing the ready energy of new fire.

“You must’ve had one hell of a teacher.”

She didn’t answer the taunt, but he’d not imagined she would. He might not have properly shaken her—you could never tell with Kenna until you looked her right in the eye—but he’d at least have knocked her off balance. There was no harm in giving her a minute to collect her thoughts. After all, he wanted to see if she would really try it; if she meant it.

You’ve got to mean it. Otherwise you’ll hesitate when it matters most, and then they’ll have you. If the person you’re going after ever gets the upper hand, they’ll mean it enough for both of you.

Stepping back from the hearth, he strolled to the built-in shelves beside the fireplace, a once-was bookshelf repurposed as a generously stocked dry bar. Back when he’d imagined he would be spending weeks out here with only his thoughts for company, he’d deemed the purchase of some really self-indulgent labels more life preserver than luxury. Now he took particular care opening his preferred bottle and savouring the first mouthful. He figured if she did somehow see it through, he ought to go out with the best in hand.

When he was still alive after his second sip, he considered that as clear an answer as the fact that she let him finish the whole glass.

She waited until he lowered his hand for the final time, using his own movements to cover her drop from above. She handled that very well, he had to admit: broke from the shadows with every appearance of purpose, light-footed and lethal, speeding silently across the floor, knife hand upraised for what he knew too well to believe would be her kill.

He handled her gently, all things considered. Ducked to the left, because she always struck right—What does it even matter if I’m predictable? It’s not like it will ever be anyone I know—and disarmed her three times in rapid succession: first knife, second knife, garrote. Then, rather than slam her face-down into the bar, as he would have done to anyone else, he scruffed her like a kitten and delivered two body blows: one to the gut, functional, to wind her in midair, and a second to the kidneys, corrective, I taught you better than that.

He had it in mind to lay her out on the couch in preparation for a proper scolding, but she surprised him. Recovering breath in record time, she kicked out, rebounding off the bar to roll over the hand that held the nape of her neck and pull free. She landed almost squarely on her feet, two arm’s-lengths away. Then she just . . . stood there. Glaring.

The sight was so familiar that he forgot himself so far as to smile. Wasn’t that Kenna all over? She could have run as soon as she landed, and probably would have made it out of the cabin in the time it took him to regroup, but his damn stubborn girl was too in love with the follow-through to turn tail.

He welcomed her second rush, not just because it meant he’d be able to finish this on his own terms but because he saw in it the proof of who she really was, who she still was, even all these months after he’d left—after he’d been sent—and whatever efforts they’d made to realign her loyalties. She reached him in commendable time and he set her off with little trouble, spinning her around and sending her back out, unable to resist launching her with an open-palmed crack across her ass. She whirled, bristling with indignation, to be met with his deepening grin.

“They really thought you were ready for this.”

Her scowl deepened. “I am.”

He didn’t bother to conceal the expanse of his smile: sincere, sympathetic, fond. “Oh, honey. No.”

He cast a quick, appraising eye over her stance, picking out all the old weak points he’d worked so hard to train out.

“Left leg,” he said sternly. “You shouldn’t let me see that you favour it.”

She was halfway through an automatic correction of her stance before she caught herself, and flushed.

Not embarrassment, he noted; guilt. He’d made her feel her own lack of allegiance to the new trainer, whoever it was. Well, that was all right. Loyalty was not a fault, and he planned to make full use of hers.

“They should have operated on that.”

Though the negligence to which he alluded was not her own, Kenna still sounded defensive. “It’s strong enough.”

“Strong enough isn’t good enough.” He was no longer their tool, and did not bother to conceal his disgust. “It should have been repaired properly. Instead . . .”

He let her think he was going for the bad leg, sustaining his forward rush just long enough to see her shift her posture in defence before he struck. Rather than target the leg, he went for the hip she used to compensate for it, bearing more of her weight than it should have had to.

He hit her hard, open palmed, spinning her sideways. She was so light, so slight, that he could have managed it with half the force, but this was as much remedial instruction as anything else. He needed to make her see the inadequacy of their treatment, and the risk that lay in their decision to leave her at the mercy of an injury it should not have been her job to compensate for in the first place.

Let her feel the flaws of the program. Let her discover in real time the life-and-death truth of what he’d tried to tell her, before he asked his favour and they’d deemed him disloyal and made him obsolete.

You need a break John, Angelman had told him, friendly enough at first. Friendly always came easily to Angelman. There was so much misdirection inherent in the ruddy outdoorsy complexion, thick white hair, twinkling dark eyes and avuncular good humour. He looked like everyone’s favourite uncle, and up to a point he even seemed to enjoy playing the part. Take some time for yourself; get your head right. We’ll wait. You come back when you’re ready, and there’ll be a place for you here.

John had to pretend he believed that just to make sure he was given the chance to leave. The most dangerous moments had come as he walked out of the building; he knew better than most would, all the ways they could have dealt with him. But they let him leave, and he considered it evidence of their own indecision over his value to them. Contempt had straightened his spine as he walked to his car, confident that he had judged their weaknesses aright.

They’d been fools to let him go.

They were fools twice over to send Kenna to finish him.

He’d had time to anticipate. He’d even wondered, once or twice, if Angelman could really be naive enough to send her; there had always been a chance he would tap someone better suited to the job. But Angelman was a poet at heart. He would not have been able to resist the beauty of sending John’s last trainee, his last full-fledged apprentice, to close the book on him. He would have delighted in the symmetry of seeing John written off by his own handiwork, like a coda whose composition mirrored the sonata’s opening notes.

So they’d sent Kenna, still soft and pliant under the veneer of her survivor’s grit. Kenna in all her half-trained, fully-flawed glory, John’s last and most all-consuming project, over-emotional, unprepared, come to stand trembling and uncertain in the face of her former teacher’s calm confidence.

Unsure that she wanted to do this.

Certain that she did not.

He faced her, light and ready on the balls of his feet, and kept his tone equally light.

“They want me dead, do they? Guess they can’t want it too badly, or they wouldn’t have sent you.”

Kenna’s shoulders heaved with the struggle to suppress her own emotion. He suffered an inconvenient twinge of pity at the sight.

“Stop that.” He watched her narrow frame tense, and shook his head. “Kenna, god damn it. We’ve been over this. Suppressing all that is a waste of time. If you don’t let yourself acknowledge what you feel, you’ll spend all your energy fighting yourself when you should be fighting me.”

“I can’t fight you!” she wailed, and it was a relief, hearing her break through the training they’d tried to layer over his own. He hoped it was a relief to her too, just letting it happen.

Kenna had been a bottle rocket when he’d started working with her, a barely-contained ball of panicked hyper-vigilance, and his fuckwit of a boss had wanted to teach her to kill. His every professional instinct had fought taking her on as his next project, but Angelman had taken a fancy to her so release to the streets they’d pulled her from had never been an option. They had tapped Oren for the job, but John knew how Kenna would end up if anybody else had taken her on. So he’d subsumed his professional instincts to indulge the personal. He’d spent years working on her to open up, pull every unnamed, unacknowledged thought, fury, fear and hope from the dregs of her disordered soul, and get to know them better.

“They’re all you,” he’d said quietly, one day they had pushed it a little too close to the edge and she’d snapped, sobbing, breaking down in his lap. “Every one of those things you feel is a part of you. No use pretending they’re not. You have to learn to live with them, Kenna. It’s the only way.”

But it had taken her too long to get herself sorted, and he refused to push her beyond her own ability. He’d told Angelman they should reconsider her place in the program, cycle her out, and he had not let himself wonder whether that suggestion was professional or personal instinct taking the wheel. In the end it didn’t matter, because Angelman would not hear of it. So they’d pushed John out instead, pushed Kenna through the program, and sent her to finish him off.

He could have told them that would never work.

He’d have to show them, instead.

He manoeuvred so the couch stood between them, then made a show of leaning forward to prop his elbows up along the back and clasp his hands together, relaxed and easy.

“You really planning to kill me, kiddo?”

She hiccuped, and damn it, there was that twinge again, the traitorous personal instinct forcing him to track the way she flicked a sleeve under her eyes to catch the tears that welled up there.

“I have to.”

“Well. We both know that’s not exactly true. But leave that for the moment. You have your orders and you came here because of them. Fine. Forget that. I’m not interested. I’m asking you, Kenna: are you planning to kill me tonight?”

If he’d been a better man it would have felt unfair, making her meet his gaze like that, anguished and soul-scarred to find herself incapable of the very thing he had trained her for. Instead it felt like a victory, watching her know herself unready and seeing in her own inability the proof of his ability to rightly gauge her readiness. Her face twisted, pretty features disarranged in a grimace of self loathing, and the one ugly emotion, the most personal instinct of all that John had always forced himself to name at the end of every day he spent with her, struck him full in the chest as merciless as a body blow.

“Kenna.”

Her name tore from him, rough and raw, and she either misheard his meaning or heard it just fine and chose to pretend she hadn’t.

“I can do it,” she insisted. The lie was cobweb-thin in the quiet of the room, its strength born of the program girls' most vital asset, that purest raw will to live. He was not conscious of showing pity, but some tell must have won control of his posture or face because she tipped her chin.

“I can!”

He sighed.

“Very well,” he heard himself say, purely calm and insufferably reasonable. “If you will insist on trying, I’ll claim instructional forfeit when you fail.”

That rattled her. Whatever she’d expected him to do—to want from her—it clearly had not occurred to her that he wanted this.

“You—but you never . . .” She stared at him in desperately evocative confusion. He fought every urge that gaze awoke, promising himself full naming and indulgence of each one the moment he had on her on her back at last. He held his breath, held himself at the ready, and waited.

Kenna scowled. “Fine. It doesn’t matter. You won’t get it.”

He could have laughed. Could have rattled her nerve by telling her how wrong she was, how glad he was that she was wrong about this, but that would be unfair to her, and he didn’t want to be more unfair than he had to. So he let her circle him, marking how she tried not to favour her left leg. He watched her watching him for openings, taking genuine pleasure in her persistence even as he prepared to thwart it.

He allowed her to see his feint to the right, trusting she would know the movement for false, then gathered himself as if to rush her. Mistaking this for the real thing, she danced backward to evade him. He kicked the ottoman forward, catching her in the knees, and he had her.

Her left leg buckled. She would have gone down but he was already there, catching her first by the arm, then the neck. He pulled her tight against him, arm across her throat, and dragged her back to the battered leather sofa where he’d meant to lay her out the first time she rushed him that night.

Where he’d meant to lay her out ever since the first day he’d pinned her to the mat, lithe and writhing, and realized the impossible thing he would have to name, to make a fully-acknowledged part of himself, if he didn’t want to repress it to the point of it becoming his own undoing.

He wasn’t sure he’d made enough progress on that front for this to be a safe choice, but he was so fucking done with waiting to find out.

“Kenna,” he soothed, jiggling her gently against him, waiting for her to tire; for her understanding to win out over instinct. “Kenna, enough now. It’s over, honey. It’s all over.”

She thrashed once more, just to show him she could, then slumped in his grip. He eased her around to face him, preparatory to laying her down on the couch, and for one quiet moment he admired the entirety of her surrender. Then, with a gasp, she went panicked and board-stiff, eyes flashing from one side to the other, and he guessed she’d just recalled the training forfeit he’d promised to claim.

He pushed her back so that her knees buckled against the edge of the couch cushion, and laid her down as gently as he could. One hand was sufficient to pinion both wrists above her head, and he applied only as much strength as was strictly necessary to secure them there. He levered himself up off her, careful not to demand she bear his full weight, and gave her a minute to understand the situation. As she settled into uneasy, unwilling repose, he nodded encouragement.

“There’s my girl.” His voice was rough, choked with the gravel of gratification long-delayed, but the free hand he used to frame the curve of her cheek was purely gentle. “I know. But it’s time, Kenna. It’s just . . . time.”

Then, to stifle any further opposition she might have tried to make, and he might have been tempted to listen to, he lowered his head and covered her mouth with his.

Kenna had never been scared of John.

She had been brought to the facility when her knees and elbows were the widest part of the limbs they belonged to, lured off the streets with the promise of a hot meal and held for assessment, told if she was a very good girl they might let her stay. In those days Kenna had been scared of almost everything, but never John.

He’d not been as warm and kind as the other trainers, but that didn’t bother her. When intake was done, the girls were put through entry training and promised that the best of them could stay longer than all the rest. Kenna got used to eating regular meals, and resolved to be somebody they wanted to keep. When the large, stony-faced men who had finished training their last girls came to look over the new ones on exhibition days, John had been among them. He hadn’t approached the girls like the other men did; he stood back and simply watched. That, Kenna knew, bothered some of the girls, but she didn’t understand why. She had liked it.

“Hello,” she’d said, small and brazen, on the second exhibition day. She had just knocked Paige down, with considerable effort, and she felt equal to moving a mountain. The man looked down at her from a lofty height, as solemn and inscrutable as granite, and at last he nodded back.

He didn’t say hello, but he didn’t have to. The nod was hello. Kenna understood that. She stood beside him, the wall at her back, and faced out into the room of clumsily-sparring gangly girls, long limbs contorting under the crushing weight of their own will to survive.

John didn’t speak to her that day, nor the next, nor even the one after that, but Kenna didn’t mind. She went to stand beside him at the end of her exhibitions and he didn’t send her away. She didn’t care if he wanted to chat her up or not; what really mattered was John was not prone to that confusing habit of smiling just before he punished you for losing to another girl on the mat, so that you could never be sure if you were actually in trouble or he simply enjoyed seeing you hurt. He was exactly what he seemed to be, and Kenna liked that.

On the fourth day, she lost her exhibition match and all the other girls got to stand around and kick her for it. She promised herself she would not cry because they all said Mr. Angelman liked you better if you didn’t, but she broke her promise near the end, and when she at last got to stumble away to stand beside John and remaster control of herself, with effort and hiccups and heaving, wet sobs, he waited until she was almost normal again before he spoke.

“That girl was a full head taller than you.”

His voice was even, set deep and steady in the cavern of his chest. She was surprised how much she liked the sound of it—almost as surprised as she’d been to hear it. She looked up at him in open betrayal of both emotions, and he looked back.

“When they’re bigger than you,” he said, “you have to be faster than them. Smarter. You need to be able to catch them off guard. Otherwise they’ll win.”

She managed a nod, not trusting herself to speak with tears still clogging her throat, and stored the information away. The next time they put her on the mat, she had been faster. Not good, but fast, and she stayed away long enough for the other girl to get clumsy and confused. When Hildy was clumsy she made mistakes, and it was easier to beat her after that. When Kenna rejoined John on the wall she had trembled with the exhilaration of her own pride, at having done what he’d told her and found that it worked. She wondered, half desperately, if he would say something to her about it, then wondered why it mattered.

“Better,” he said, and the word broke her chest open, hot and heaving, so that suddenly she didn’t care why it mattered. She simply knew it was life and death and breath to her if only she could make John speak to her again.

It didn’t seem likely he would get much chance. Exhibition period lasted a month only, and then the girls were chosen. Kenna knew perfectly well she wasn’t among the most promising recruits, nor probably even the second-most promising, but she also knew Mr. Angelman had stopped twice to speak with her on the days he came to observe, and the other girls seemed to think that counted for something.

“Maybe they’ll keep you as a reserve,” Mia had suggested. “In case something happens to one of us.”

That, Kenna thought, had seemed like a reasonable expectation. She dared to hope. What she had not dared to hope for was the thing that came to pass, on the final day of exhibitions when she managed to scrape a bloody victory against Willa only to be pummelled to the mat by Surani in the next round, and took the ritual round-kicking before retreating to her accustomed wall once more. She watched through stinging, saltwater-flooded eyes as the blurry figure of the man coaching Surani advanced to congratulate her, and gradually became aware that other trainers seemed to be doing the same to the girls who had won their favour.

Kenna had half wondered what was about to happen to the girls who were not chosen—she supposed she would not have to wonder much longer—when she became aware of John’s posture having shifted beside her.

She looked up to find him staring down at her, his expression thoughtful. Not angry, she thought; not even disappointed. Just thoughtful.

“I think Oren will ask you to train under him,” he said. “But I’m asking first.”

The oddity of the word tickled her earlobes. Ask. Nothing about her new life felt like something she could be asked; she had thought the trainer would simply tell you, and you didn’t want to be thrown away so you’d go along with it. But it seemed maybe you could really be asked.

Which meant she needed to answer.

“Oh,” she said. “Yes.”

She found out later some of the girls had choked on their own replies, relief suffocating sound, the fear of being cast out overpowering even their own gratitude at having been chosen. But Kenna had been unflinching. John made her fearless, even in those earliest days when he stood silent and inscrutable at her side before he picked her as his own recruit out of all girls he’d had to choose from—and he’d had all the girls to choose from.

“That can’t be right,” she’d protested feebly, when Zoe told her. But Zoe was adamant. John got first pick.

Kenna thought Zoe must have misunderstood, only she was one of the big girls who’d done this a while and knew how decisions were made higher up. Zoe said John got first pick of the recruits, so it had to be true, though Kenna could not imagine why anybody with first pick would have chosen her. The disbelief had intensified the first day she trained under him, when he faced her across the mat and said, “I already know you know how to fall. You won’t believe me, and you won’t enjoy the learning of it, but everything else is easy after that.”

Then he’d set out to prove himself an honest man, and she had learned what it meant to hate him, to sweat and bleed and toil under him, to bend her will in service of his demands and despair of ever living up to his expectation of her excellence, all while knowing she would die gladly in pursuit of that end.

But she had never learned to fear him. Not once had he made her afraid. Annoyed, yes. Resentful, bitter, irritated beyond all reason when he would tell her you can do better. Again, but never scared.

When her training advanced and Mr. Angelman deemed her a promising recruit, Kenna understood this reflected well on them both. It meant security for Kenna, for her place in the program, and prestige for John, to have chosen so well from raw, untried goods. Being a credit to John made Kenna pleased and proud, and all the more determined to live up to his expectations of her.

In consequence she listened critically to the way the other girls spoke of him, with hushed tones and thin, high notes of terror colouring their whispers in the dormitory after dark. They shared lurid tales gleaned from their trainers of what John was like; the things they knew he could do. Kenna, listening, thought maybe that was why John had chosen her; the other girls were so silly, believing their trainers’ jealousy to be rooted in fact. She knew better than to be scared.

John was stern and reserved, sometimes almost unreasonably strict and demanding, but he would never hurt her. Not like she would have been hurt if she’d stayed on the streets. Not even like some of the other trainers, the nice-faced ones who smiled and joked and slipped you little candies here and there, were rumoured to hurt their own girls when they lost especially badly on the mat.

“Trainer’s forfeit,” the big girls called it, like that was no big deal, a man doing things to you like that, all because you hadn’t quite been good enough to beat him at something he’d been doing so much longer than you.

John scolded and pressured and punished, but only in the sense that Kenna had to endure a lecture or run extra laps or put in more hours doing things that would make her better in all the ways she wasn’t good enough yet. It was never the kind of peculiar invasive punishment that older girls described suffering at the hands—and other appendages—of the men who ran them.

“He will, though,” Zoe predicted, when Kenna ventured to point this out. “You’re not quite big enough yet, but once you’ve had your implant there’ll be no reason for him to hold back.”

Kenna didn’t think this could be quite right, because other girls hadn’t had their implants yet and their trainers still found lots of ways to claim special forfeits that didn’t seem to violate the facility’s strict rules about such things. But she kept that observation to herself, because Zoe had been here longer and she was so much older that Kenna thought surely she must know more.

It was John himself who proved Zoe wrong.

Kenna’s implant came earlier than expected, the night she fell from her top bunk and landed all wrong. Through the haze of pain and panic that followed, with the little girls screaming, the house warden appearing out of the gloom to bark questions and bite off orders, the hasty rush through the halls to the sick bay and the snatches of conversation that came to her through the fog, Kenna understood that they considered this as good a time as any to see to multiple of her physical needs, and put her under.

She floated back to consciousness an untold length of time later to discover she now sported a full leg cast and a low, dull ache in her abdomen. Before she could wonder too much about that second development, she looked up to find John standing by her new single-level bunk, staring down at her with an unusually hard expression, even for him.

“H’lo,” she’d slurred, still pleasantly loopy from whatever lovely thing they had given her to put her under. She put her hand out to catch his, supremely unselfconscious, puzzled by the way his muscles locked up at her touch. “Were you waiting very long for me?”

He had not even finished clearing his throat to answer before she slipped away again, sinking into the welcome fog of oblivion and rest.

It was the rest that was the strangest part of those weeks. Kenna’s recovery had necessarily delayed her training, the enforced inactivity an almost unheard of indulgence. She was vaguely aware of John remaining nearby, an unusual addition to the dorms, where trainers were not typically allowed: a constant satellite in the outer orbit of her convalescence. His was a hard and angry presence, more irascible than she’d realized he could be, wont to snap at the staff and lecture faceless people just beyond her earshot.

She thought probably he was angry that they kept her so long from her duty, and sympathized with his impatience. Naturally he wanted her back on the mat, training as she should be. She worried for a time that he might tire of waiting and choose another recruit, one who was not careless enough to fall from her bed at night, but her fears proved unfounded. When she returned to the mat he was waiting, ready to wipe the floor with her, knocking her from one end of the gym to the other so hard that she saw stars.

Lying on her back, waiting for the world to settle around her, Kenna recalled Zoe’s prediction of old. She knew that she’d got her implant now, and there was no longer any reason for John not to pin her and claim his due forfeit. A thrill of panic shot through her, cold and tingling. Her fear was not so much of John himself as it was the almost-adult experience of forfeit being visited on her at last. For a moment she trembled, unworthy in the face of the unknown, but she fought the emotion down in reckless defiance of John’s own training.

It’s not fair, she scolded herself, to be scared of giving him forfeit. John had been so patient, waiting for her to get better and not trading her for a healthy recruit. She would show him he’d made the right choice to wait: she would pay the forfeit and make him proud.

So Kenna had lain there on the edge of the mat, braced to accept her inevitable penalty. But John had only crossed the mat with long, angry strides, hauled her back up by the scruff of the neck, given her a shake and pointed her back to the starting mark.

“I see we’ll have to make up for lost time,” he said grimly, and had made her do so. But he had not claimed forfeit, on that or any other day.

Kenna trained. She improved, though not as quickly as the rest. Zoe left the house, going on to whatever employment arrangement the facility would make for her, and the other big girls left too, one after another until Kenna and her intake year—what was left of it—found they were the big girls, now, and the new girls looked to them for guidance.

This was an unpleasant way to discover that the big girls Kenna had imagined were a source of such wisdom had probably not known any better than she did now. Their learning was little more than rumours and survival tips designed to help you keep your head down, keep your trainer in good standing with Mr. Angelman, and get you through. Though Kenna thought probably you shouldn’t promise somebody you would get them through a thing when you didn’t even know what was waiting on the other side.

She’d ventured to ask John about that, one day when she had done better than expected and he seemed in an unusually generous mood, going so far as to say he was pleased with her. She basked in the compliment, and wondered aloud what else she could do to make him proud.

“When we leave here, I mean,” she added. “What will I do then? What do we do when all this is done?”

He went more than usually still beside her, but he did not say he was angry, so she knew she had not done wrong to ask. Maybe she’d simply been unclear.

“I mean,” she pressed, “for a job, or whatever it is. Do we become trainers, too? There aren’t many women trainers, but Mia has one, and so does Paige. Is it very competitive? Or are there other jobs we’re meant to do?”

John had taken his time, appearing to weigh each word before he finally told her, quiet and brief, what sort of work lay in store when she left him. Kenna was pleased to know; to be trusted with this knowledge. Of course it made perfect sense that they would be sent out into the world like that; to track people down, learn them, sometimes end them, and just generally make things right. Balance the scales, as Mr. Angelman was wont to say in his rambling, genial speeches during assemblies. What a very sensible thing to be able to do, and how lucky Kenna was to have a chance to be part of it.

Everything had made such perfect, complete sense after that, her place in the world so clear and assured, so comfortingly defined for her, that she had not imagined anything could happen to spoil it.

Until the day John went away.

She’d had no warning. Everything seemed to be advancing as necessary for her to progress to the final training stage—Endurance Phase, they called it, because they liked to give things cheerful names like that—and she’d been told she was ready to pass her excursion.

“Just one night,” John explained, when she went to him for her briefing. “Get you back out in the world to see the place; assess your capacity to adjust.”

Kenna nodded, trying to appear as if he were teaching her something; as if all the girls hadn’t been talking about their excursions for months. She knew that sometimes you went to a restaurant, or dancing, or for a walk through a museum. Your trainer assessed your ability to adapt to the world around you, and your performance would inform what kind of work you went on to do for Mr. Angelman after your training was complete.

Kenna hoped John would take her to a museum; maybe the symphony. Definitely not dancing. John had been three months trying to teach her to dance, and they were both beginning to despair of her ever learning how. When she mentioned this to him, he gave her a rare chuckle and shook his head.

“Won’t be a museum. I drew an evening slot. Dinner, maybe.” He smiled at her expression of open pleasure. “You’d like that?”

She loved it. First the idea of it, and then, when the night came, the impossibly perfect reality. There was magic in the shimmering cling of the dress they’d picked out for her, the peculiar grooming processes that removed hair she hadn’t known she wasn’t supposed to keep and styled the hair that remained in a kind of effortless cloud of tied-up, tumbled-down waves and loose curls.

She’d been enchanted by the sight of her own face in the glass, a rare indulgence of vanity in a space ordinarily fixated on performance. She’d explored all the changes in her features that she hadn’t been able to properly evaluate in the half-glimpses offered by unmirrored glass and the metal surface of a faucet. Her nose, lightly dusted with freckles, had a kind of impudent tilt to it. The rosy stuff they’d smeared on her mouth accentuated the way the larger top lip stood up, full and saucy, and the bottom one jutted out with minimal provocation into a startling pout.

The dress itself had been a deepish, darkish blue that made her eyes look a deeper, darker blue in turn. The silvery circlet they fit around her neck, heavy and cold, made her look important and elegant in a way she’d never even known enough to want, much less thought possible. Overall she considered that the excursion version of herself was actually very interesting to look at, and she wondered how much different she was now from her everyday self.

When John met her in the breezeway, preparatory to escorting her to the car, she saw the answer in his face.

He didn’t look as different to her as she knew she must to him. The suit he wore was a change, but it fit him as comfortably and naturally as the things he wore everyday. He was a little cleaner and smoother too; the bristle of hair on his chin and cheeks was gone, and there was a smell about him that was foreign and pleasant, like something added, in a good way. But otherwise he was exactly the same, except that when he took her hand, laid it on his arm and led her out to a car driven by one of the other trainers, he stared down at her in a way he’d never done before. It took him a worryingly long time to find his smile, but when he did, that was like she’d never seen it before too, and it made her feel warm and strange in the lowest part of her stomach.

“It’s a restaurant,” he confided, as he handed her into the car. “Mostly. Sorry. You’ll see.”

She did not have time to fear the obscure apology because he joined her in the back seat and, as the car slipped away from the solid block of the compound, the distant lights of the city beckoned.

John let her watch it rise up around them, the place she’d been taken from as a small girl in a form she had never seen it, from a place of warmth and safety and satiation. The lights washed into the car in waves of amber, gold and orange, splashing over the stuff of her dress, the starchy bleached brilliance of his shirt, and the dark blue jewels that winked at the wrists of his suit.

“Like mine,” she observed, putting a fingertip to the circlet around her neck. John’s eyes tracked the movement, and flashed darker at the sight.

“Collared you up, did they?” he said lightly, which attracted the attention of their driver. Oren, thought Kenna. Oren had been Willa’s trainer, before Willa had proved a disappointment and been cycled out.

“Did you think they wouldn’t?” Oren asked. There was a tone in his voice Kenna couldn’t name. Something seemed to flash back and forth between him and John, quick and unspoken, and John was the first to look away.

“She’s not the running type,” he said, and Oren shrugged.

“We’ve thought that before, and you know how it went. No worries, though. I’ve got the button myself. She makes a break for it, you only need to signal, and . . .” He flashed Kenna a look in the rear view mirror that made the circlet sit heavy and cold around her neck.

John’s face went cold and shuttered too, and Kenna saw he didn’t like whatever it was Oren had said any more than she did. There was a peculiar comfort in that; likewise in the hand he settled on top of hers, engulfing it in a strangely gentle squeeze.

“You wouldn’t run out on me, would you Kenna?” he asked lightly, in a voice that did not match his face. It was a cue. She responded in kind.

“Of course not!” Her laugh wasn’t note perfect, but she thought she delivered it pretty well. John confirmed this with a smile.

“That’s my girl.” This time his voice mightn’t have matched his face, but it matched his hand, warm and firm around her own. She had been so buoyed by the praise that she almost failed to mark the way Oren glowered at them both. Certainly, she forgot to ask John about it until he’d escorted her into the restaurant, led her to the table held for them, and saw her settled in the plush seat the way they had been practising in the training room for weeks.

He ordered for her, as he’d promised he would, because she still didn’t trust her own ability to read the fancy script on the printed menu. Kenna had not been literate when she arrived at the facility and even the best efforts of the intake-year instructors had produced only modest progress. After their menus were whisked away, without something concrete to focus on she was belatedly aware of how many bodies were in the restaurant. How many strange people, seated and eating—the smell of their food and drink was incredible. Intoxicating —and . . . oh, no. She stared. There, on an expanse of lower floor not populated by tables, people were dancing.

“That,” said John, “was why I apologized.”

“Oh,” Kenna said faintly. “Will . . . will we have to . . .”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

Kenna looked down to find her hands trembling in her lap. John, though he could not have seen them from the other side of the table, must have seen something because his voice cut through her rising panic with calm authority.

“Kenna, look at me.”

She obeyed without a second thought, and found he was smiling at her. John had a smile even more intoxicating than the heady aroma of the restaurant’s fare. It was rich and warm, crinkling the corners of his eyes, and even though Kenna knew she pleased him more often these days than she used to, it was still comparatively rare for him to smile at her this much. She flushed, pleased, under the weight of it.

“I—” she stopped. Tried to remember what she’d even been worried about. “What was Oren talking about? The button. For my . . .” She faltered, putting a hand up to touch it. “Collar.”

John’s smile disappeared behind a quick, brow-furrowed cloud.

“I shouldn’t have called it that.”

“But what did he—”

“Don’t.” He shook his head. “Don’t, please. This is supposed to be a pleasant evening. You are learning how to have a pleasant evening, and look like you’re having a pleasant evening, and if you fail at that, I’ll need to report you for it.”

The hard edge to his tone made Kenna feel small and shamed all over. She looked down.

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, for god’s—no, don’t shrink like that, you look like a scolded child. You’re supposed to be my date. We’re—shit.” He stopped, and put his hand over his mouth, pulling at his cheeks in a fury of self reproach. He was still reclaiming his temper when the opening notes of the next song arrested his notice. She would not have known it from any other, but it seemed to call his name.

“Get up.” He put his hand out, which she took because it was John and that was all there was to it. “We’re going to dance.”

“We’re wh— oh.”

He didn’t pull her, exactly, but he held her hand so that it was clear she could not draw back. Instead she let him draw her forward, down the three low steps to the gleaming parquet littered with a dozen other couples, all equally glittering and fine.

John’s hand at the small of her back was an accustomed thing, from the throws and blows of earlier years to the more complex manoeuvres and varied activities of recent training. Yet the way it fit against her now, pulling her to him with a stern command that felt very different in a public space than the familiar comfort of the private ones, woke every inch of her skin with a rush of gooseflesh and heat. She had only time to look up, startled, into the fine remoteness of his face before he drew her away into the practised steps and she found it was easy, really easy, dancing with John when everyone else could see them but he was still only looking at her.

She flushed with pleasure at the discovery, and smiled. He’d looked startled, and then . . . something. Some expression she’d never seen on his face before had tightened his jaw and darkened his eyes, and she’d sucked in her breath in a kind of quick surprise at the sight, which only made him look more like that, the way she’d never seen him look before, but found, somehow, she liked the look of very much.

“John?”

He was still leading her, but not in the usual way of the dance. A forceful pressure on her waist, turning her farther off course, pulling her away from the floor into the shadows of a doorway, down a corridor, toward a door marked with a placard that—

He saw her confusion, and at once looked assailed by doubt. He stopped, and dropped his hand from her waist.

“God, no,” he muttered. “Not here. Not for your first . . .” He stopped himself with perceptible effort and looked down at her in a way that made her want to ask if she had done something wrong, either on the floor or here in the hallway, to make him change so much, so quickly. But before she could ask the question, he answered her earlier one.

“It’s a failsafe.” His hand brushed over the curve of her throat. “Explosive lined. In case you run.” He stared down into her face, reading her shock and discomfiture, quickly smoothed over. He sighed.

“Tonight is not for running.” He touched the necklace again—no. He’d fit his hand around the back of her neck, anchoring her gently in place as he bent his head and brushed his lips lightly across her forehead. “Tonight is for practice, and planning, and then . . . we’ll see.” His hand dropped to encircle hers, warm, commanding, firm.

“Let’s go back.”

He had led her, not back to the dance floor, but their table. He had settled her gently across from him once more, and he’d been his own familiar self for the rest of the night, only better. He’d talked to her, frank and friendly. He’d told her about his home, indicated its general direction across the skyline and described features of its layout, the objects he kept there and their varied purposes. They had shared the most sumptuous meal she’d ever eaten, a tender cut of meat and a rich assortment of perfectly roasted root vegetables, swimming in a salty decadence of butter, and Oren had driven them home.

At least, she supposed he had; she’d fallen asleep on John’s shoulder halfway there, and when she woke she was back in her own dormitory bed, with no memory of how she got there.

That morning she’d dressed for training as usual, her skin humming with ghosts of the evening before, but training had not happened. Instead Mr. Angelman had called her to his office and she’d stood small and lost on the rich, deep carpet in the beautiful room, staring across the heavy desk to where he sat, smiling at her.

She knew that was supposed to mean she wasn’t in trouble, but Kenna had learned long ago you could not trust that what a man’s face said was the same as his thoughts—only John seemed to be able to make those two match—and she did not feel calm.

He had next beckoned her to come around to join him behind the desk, which she did, because no was not something you said to trainers or Mr. Angelman. He took both her hands (cold, small) in both of his (large, warm) and told her something she could not entirely understand, could not even now fully remember, possibly because she’d realized almost at once that she did not want to hear or understand and so had worked desperately to focus anywhere else, on anything else, instead.

She’d settled on his hands.

“ . . . a complete betrayal of our cause . . .”

He held her hands gently; kindly. She was acutely aware of how small her own were, held as they were between his great big ones.

“ . . . cruel abandonment of his loyal little recruit . . .”

His fingers were a little shorter than John’s, but his knuckles wider, the hands broader overall. Thick. The grip would be strong, if he chose to make it so.

“ . . . always have a place here with us, of course . . .”

He wore a ring. The flat gold shield winked dully on the third finger of his left hand, its symbol partially obliterated by the trials of time and friction. So it must be very old.

“ . . . and never fear, Kenna, we will give you a chance to make this right.”

She had not grasped what he meant by that, but she’d recognized a cue, and smiled accordingly.

“Thank you, Mr. Angelman. I would like that very much.”

He sent her away after that. Told her she was ready to leave the house and enter the barrack, “as has always been the plan.”

The barrack was an in-between place where the women trained in small groups. You were not assigned a particular trainer, but learned at different times from several, and you stayed there learning from people until they figured out exactly what you were good for. Some only stayed a week or two, while others had been there for years. She saw a few of her old housemates still in residence, older and battle-hardened, and was made keenly aware of her relative immaturity in comparison with their experience and strength.

“Half-ripe!” Zoe said, disgusted, the first day she and Kenna were put in a training group together. “But I guess they know what they’re doing, sending you here.”

It would have been disloyal to suggest otherwise, but Kenna privately thought Zoe could be forgiven some doubt on that point. Because she really did not feel ready, especially compared to her fellow trainees, and whatever damage John’s own reservations about her readiness might have done to her pride was nothing next to the reality that was quickly visited on her in that place. She seemed only to suffer, and fail, and fall farther and farther behind. The old injury to her leg became the hindrance John had predicted it would, and it was a good day that she could best even two of the five women they were paired with to try their skills.

This was what made it so particularly confusing when they told her she’d be moving on.

“To another barrack?” she had wondered, and they seemed to find that funny. No, they told her, not another barrack. Her mission.

When they told her what her mission was, she didn’t handle it as well as she should have. In fact, she’d given them a great deal of concern by her first reaction, and they promptly sent for Mr. Angelman. To her surprise, he actually came. Not sent for her to visit him, but came himself to stand in the barrack, wearing his nice dark suit, and smile kindly down at where she sat on her bunk.

He asked if she would come walk with him a little while, so he could maybe explain things more clearly.

“I blame myself,” he confessed, setting a pace she worked to match without appearing to actually do so. “I thought I made it clear on the day I sent you here what you would one day be given the chance to do. But of course I had not allowed for your youth, and your confusion and grief. You were trained exclusively by the man, and he would have made sure to cultivate your favour using every means at his disposal.”

He gave her a conspiratorial little twinkle. “We arrange these little matters with a view to the greater good. When a trainer is given free rein to discipline a girl, she learns loyalty and the value of obedience, and the trainer gains a certain, ah, personal satisfaction from seeing her thoroughly instructed. And of course, some of those techniques are a very effective means of cementing the mutual bond.”

He frowned.

“Normally this is to our benefit, but in your case it presents a complication. You developed deep loyalty to the man whose business it was to ensure that you did so. Not your fault; all part of the program. I should have allowed for that when I met with you, and I think if I had done so, we would not be seeing this concerning response from you now.”

Kenna processed this series of indirect revelations with considerable confusion. Mr. Angelman was under a misapprehension about something John had done, or not done, to her. He was willing to blame the thing he thought had happened for why she hadn’t wanted to kill John. But if he knew otherwise . . .

Every survival instinct Kenna had honed before she came to this place—the same instincts John had cultivated from the first day he threw her down on the mat and made it clear what her odds would be, without his help—blared a Klaxon warning. These people would not hesitate to make an end of her if she could not be of use to them. To survive such ruthless efficiency, she would need to be as useful as possible, and she would need to make her usefulness, or at least her potential to be useful, immediately apparent.

“I’m very sorry to have caused anybody concern,” she said softly, infusing every word with breathless, almost genuine sincerity. “Of course I understand that he . . .” She faltered artistically. “I understand that. I only wish he hadn’t done it: betrayed us all. I wish I could have stopped him, and made him see the good we do here.” Her voice thickened with regret, and the hint of tears. Mr. Angelman patted her shoulder.

“There, now,” he tutted. “You cannot be held accountable for the betrayal of a grown man. As for your own unreadiness, I really do feel the fault is mine. I did not account for your loyalty, and the effect his betrayal would have. But we can remedy all of that, of course, if only we find you otherwise willing.”

He drew her to a halt with the hand that rested on her shoulder. He searched her face and she looked back, eyes wide. Whatever he saw seemed to satisfy him, for he smiled broadly and gave her shoulder a squeeze.

“Ahh,” he cried, “that’s all right, then. I am sure we have nothing to worry about.”

To ensure he would continue believing that and never pause to doubt, Kenna made herself believe it, too. She whispered the truth of John’s betrayal to herself in the dark, she spoke her faith in the rightness of the facility’s mission aloud to her final trainers and examiners, and she lived, breathed and bent herself in service of the conviction that if she could only do this thing, end it as they would have her do, she would then be free to move on to whatever stage of life awaited her next.

The illusion she cultivated survived purely due to the ferocity with which she shielded it. She cradled it warm and living against her as she accepted Angelman’s congratulations and activation order. She nurtured it as she went out into a world she’d been kept from for years, using what little they could tell her and her own memories of John to piece together a direction he might have taken.

She kept her illusion flickering small and bright as she found the cabin, entered undetected, and stripped off her outer layers before stretching out across one of the wide, old rafters that spanned the ceiling.

If she’d been given time to choose, she would have tried to unburden herself of the fantasy on her own terms, but she did not see disillusionment coming. The death of her belief that she could see this through to the conclusion they desired was as unceremonious as the thing that killed it: the familiar footfall of her former mentor as he came down the stairs from the second storey and crossed to the bar to pour himself a drink.

Oh, god.

What had she been thinking? She couldn’t kill him. She couldn’t even tell herself with any certainty that he would feel similarly unable to kill her. She could only admit that her failure to fear John for all these years was probably what would get her killed tonight. Then she dropped from the beam and skimmed across the wide-plank floors, futile, fatalistic, to find out if she was right.

John had seen Kenna in as many different moods and states of being as she had probably ever experienced.

He’d seen her grubby and wild-eyed, hauled in with the usual truckload of other kids, most of whom would not make it past the initial intake meal and the series of tests that accompanied it. He had seen her washed and brushed to painful rawness in the grey-blue overall of the first year recruit, watching warily as his more personable colleagues won the affections of less canny candidates. She had gravitated to him before he’d even thought about turning on the charm; she told him later that she liked not having to wonder if the smile was real or pretend, and he had in turn ensured that with him, she didn’t need to try.

He’d watched her stretch up and fill out, gawky immaturity softening and swelling with the quiet promise of subtle curves. Just as his colleagues had started to hint that he might want to do something about that—sort her out, the trainers called it; correcting a student in that particular intimate way—or else they would be tempted to remind him how it was handled, she’d had her fall.

He’d looked down in dull, distant horror at Kenna in her recovery bed, pale and prostrated with her leg set and elevated. The place where she touched his hand had burned like bright longing, and he had fled in a tempest of misdirected rage, unable to keep her safe but resolved he would correct the error. He’d used the delay of her recovery to indulge in the breadth and depth of his anger, first fighting to keep her under his tutelage at all—Angelman’s bewilderment had been a rare prize. He’d thought his offer of a fresh recruit a mark of esteem for his top trainer, and John’s unfiltered response had been borderline insubordinate—and then fighting to see her properly treated. But the necessary surgery had been deemed an imprudent allocation of resources, and the leg had never fully recovered.

Now, with Kenna pinned beneath him on the couch, he ran his hand down that same leg he’d fought and failed to protect, and studied her face in the firelight. She flinched, anticipating cruelty, and John grimaced at his own thoughtlessness.

“Kenna,” he soothed. He waited, patient. “Honey.” She lifted her gaze to his, and he fought, as he long had done, against the tidal force of those deep blue eyes; against what felt like the gravitational pull of every star in the galaxy. “I don’t know for sure what they told you about what this would be like, but I promise: it doesn’t have to hurt.”

Her lips parted, perfect, round. A silent oh of acceptance, confusion, and god he couldn’t believe he had waited as long as he did.

They’d expected him to take the usual step after she was safe, as they termed it; after she got her implant. Oren had been especially pushy about John getting on with it, still bitter about the loss of his entitlement. He’d reminded John of the maxims the trainers liked to live by. These girls need to know what it’s like. Before they get out there and some mark shows ‘em the hard way. You get in there, you get her used to it, and she’ll have a much easier time of it later on.

He’d made all the right noises and they’d left him alone; had assumed he’d gone ahead and done it. But the sight of her lying on the mat that day, so meekly surrendered to the inevitable, had stuck in his belly. He couldn’t follow through. Taking Kenna when she was at her lowest wasn’t how it was supposed to go. If he claimed forfeit from Kenna, he’d want it to be Kenna underneath him, fighting him the whole way, eyes fierce and flashing until he brought her over the edge and showed her how good it could feel to let him have his own way. So he had hauled her up and put her back in training, just as he’d always done, and had started to plan for a future that he had been just idiotic enough to believe they might ever give him without a fight.

He supposed Kenna might have told someone the truth; Angelman, maybe, even if nobody else. If she had told Angelman John had never touched her like that, John knew there was no way the man wouldn’t have capitalized on the opportunity. But Kenna would have needed a very good reason to share something like that with anyone. And if she hadn’t . . .

He spread his hand across her stomach, measuring the meagre breadth of her with the splay of his own fingers; weighing her every breath with the rise and fall of his palm.

“I don’t want to scare you. Enough about this will be new and frightening without you thinking I mean it only to hurt you.” He searched her face, more than half disbelieving, but wholly consumed by his own hope. “Have you really never . . ?”

Indignation flashed across her face.

“You know I haven’t!”

He hadn’t, though. Not for sure. Not until this moment. He suppressed the urge to gloat, and spoke more gently still.

“I know we haven’t. But I wasn’t sure of you. Didn’t your next trainer ever claim forfeit?” He struggled to imagine anybody refraining from the chance to sort Kenna out if accorded the privilege, but he supposed it could be true. She might have been seen as tainted by his betrayal. An especially old school type might have disdained to touch her.

For her part, Kenna looked torn between denying him the pleasure of an answer and the need to declare herself not so disloyal as all that. In the end, loyalty edged with pride won out.

“I didn’t have another trainer. They sent me straight to the barrack when you left.”

A startled hiss, almost of anger, escaped him. He saw her mark his emotion for what it was and shift uneasily beneath him. He’d forgotten how well she read him, even when he didn’t want her to. He strove to channel his frustration appropriately.

“I’m sorry. They shouldn’t have. That was years ahead of schedule for you. The barracks . . . shit, Kenna.” He did not stint the truth of his remorse; he hoped she could hear every note and undertone of his sincerity. His sympathy. “That must have been a lot.”

She glanced away, seeming to collect herself before returning to hold his gaze.

“I’m still here, aren’t I?”

He smiled gently down at her.

“Of course you are. My girl’s a survivor. But that doesn’t mean they should have . . .” He trailed off. Tracked the way the muscles in her face had relaxed, ever so slightly, since he’d first pinned her to the couch. Felt the rise and fall of the taut, smooth stomach beneath his hand come slower; more steady.

“You deserved better.”

She frowned. “You should have stayed to make sure I got it.”

“I would have, if they’d let me. They forced me out.”

She stiffened beneath him, shock and indignation warring with disbelief.

“They didn’t! They told me you left. You wanted to set up a rival foundation and take out Mr. Angelman’s.”

John raised an eyebrow, gently incredulous.

“Kenna, that sounds like an awful lot of work.”

She blinked. This rebuttal clearly had not occurred to her before. He watched her trying to calculate whether or not he really was so ambitious that he’d take on an assassination start-up at his stage of life, then cut in gently with a more accurate recount of what had taken place.

“I told them I didn’t think you were ready. I asked them to delay your ascension, or consider cycling you out altogether. To me,” he added hastily, knowing how the words would land. “Most girls who cycle out get put into other kinds of, uh, work. But I wanted them to give you into my custody.

“It’s not something they do a lot, but I’d given them fucking decades of service and I’d asked very little of them in return. I thought they might agree to it, but I didn’t figure on Angelman. He’d taken a liking to you the second day he came to watch; you remember that? After you took down Hildy. Sheer fucking luck on your part, she’d been a favourite til then, but you got in there quick and you made it count. It made him notice you. After that, you were going to be kept in no matter what. Oren was told to train you, but I had the first pick, and . . . well. I picked you.”

He watched recognition flash across her face, the dawning light of belated comprehension as she re-processed parts of her life that she hadn’t properly grasped before now. He sighed.

“Angelman had picked you first, though, and he wasn’t going to give you up. So he told me my judgment was clouded, that you were finishing material no matter what I said, and he wouldn’t cycle you out. He cycled me instead. Or, tried to. But you know how that went, don’t you?”

As Kenna struggled to assimilate this information, John moved on to her clothes.

Though her professional wardrobe lacked the user-friendly ease of access built into trainee uniforms, there was a certain appeal in the way the dark, close-fitting knit top rode up above her belly button with only minimal disarrangement. He didn’t mind the minor obstacle of a waistline button and zipper, either, especially when they paired so deliciously with the slow reveal of her undergarments. Dainty little scraps of cotton, unadorned but briefly-cut, form-fitting, and well suited to his own understanding of her innocence.

He traced the line of her waistband until she registered the touch; stared up at him with renewed quickening of breath, but not, he thought, quite the same degree of panic as before. Though maybe that was a touch of self delusion on his part.

“What about Angelman?”

Kenna’s confusion was immediate; unfeigned.

“What do you mean?”

His fingertips traced lower by just an inch. He watched her experience the sensation of his touch, savouring the rapid flicker of each separate emotion that chased across her face.

“You say you didn’t have another trainer. But what about Angelman? Did he ever . . . claim your forfeit?”

She was truly bewildered. “How could he? He didn’t train me.”

Something about the impossible contrast of her training, her ostensibly lethal intent in entering his cabin tonight, coupled with the pristine innocence of this response proved more than he could bear. It went right to his cock, and John struggled against his first, second and third worst impulses, clutching her wrists just a second to rein himself in, then managing to smile and nod like he understood; like he had even expected her to say that.

“I see. All right, then.” He was newly hungry for her to a degree he honestly could not have anticipated, even when he’d resolved that this was how things would end tonight. “So it’s going to be me.”

There was no use pretending that a very large—an increasingly large—part of him didn’t want to just go about it the regular way. Hold her down, force it in and make her learn from it. That was customary forfeit protocol, and he suspected she would not even have fought him too hard on it past the initial saving-face. But he had not waited this long to waste the opportunity by doing something he could have done to her, without repercussion, any time after her accident. Hell, he could have done quite a bit to her even before that; long tenure came with hefty privileges, and just because he’d never indulged before, didn’t mean they would have done anything but cluck and scold if Kenna was the reason he finally succumbed.

But he’d chosen to wait. First because he hadn’t liked the way the fire had gone out of her that day on the mat. Then, later, he’d held back because he saw how badly the leg healed, and he’d become increasingly worried about her prospects in the long run. He hadn’t fully let himself anticipate a day they might actually let him keep her until the actual moment he dared ask Angelman for the privilege, but he’d had time enough since he left to acknowledge that his inclination had been bent in that direction for longer than he’d even been fully aware of it.

And he’d been aware of it for a damn long time.

Now, feasting on the sight of her pinned beneath him, all the fire and confusion lighting up her face, he knew this was what he’d waited for. He wanted to do it right. But to do that . . .

“I’m going to let go of your hands, Kenna. You’re to use them to take your clothes off. Nothing else. Understand?”

She blinked. Hesitated. Nodded.

He saw the plan forming as clearly as if she’d voiced it aloud, but he decided to let it play out. He wanted to watch her improvise. So he released her wrists, and gave them a gentle rub for good measure. She flexed her fingers, watching him warily, then slowly moved to sit up.

He let her, his weight still pinning her knees to the couch, curious to see which weapon she’d go for. There was a kerosene lamp on the table by her head, which he thought the likeliest choice given the dual functionality of the glass shade and the oil held in the lamp itself. But maybe she’d prefer the small rock that pinned down a stack of old magazines on the coffee table, or possibly—

Kenna hooked her fingers under the hem of her shirt, and pulled it up.

As the expanse of her bare skin increased, as the curve of a small, well-formed bust appeared, John could no longer remember what else he’d been waiting to see. He tracked the rise of her hem, the revelation of her modest cleavage, of—

He’d guessed right: she went for the kerosene lamp. And he honest to fucking god did not catch it until after it had left her hand, flying right for his calf-eyed, fuckwitted face. Serve him right if he’d caught it with his face, letting himself get caught out like that, acting the adolescent idiot at the sight of Kenna’s belly and breasts. Kenna. Jesus, she was something else.

He exulted in her quickness, her cleverness, even as she twisted and squirmed half out from under him; even as he wrapped his arm around her waist and hoisted her in the air, lamp held in the other hand. He crooned meaningless, gushing praise as he carried her, kicking and squirming, across the floor to the bar, where he set the lamp safely out of reach and returned to sweep all surfaces bare of similar weapons.

He stripped her of her sweater with his free hand, then used his belt to bind her wrists above her head. The loop of the belt he passed through an iron bolt in the support post beside the arm of the couch. Prize secured, he sat back to beam down into her flushed, angry, defiant face with nothing but genuine pride.

“You’re a wonder,” he sighed, bending to kiss each of her cheeks. “A goddamn treasure. Do you know how long it’s been since someone got the drop on me?”

“Fifteen minutes ago?” she muttered. He tweaked her nose.

“Cheeky. Let’s show you what I do to cheeky girls when I’m not eaten up with worry about them graduating from the program.”

So saying, he nudged her legs far enough apart to give him a good landing surface, and without further warning brought his palm down between her legs with a satisfying, if slightly muffled, thwap. She yelped and bucked under his hand, and though John doubted she’d felt much more than surprise in the moment, he still appreciated the aesthetics of her response. Another five slaps brought him to a half dozen, and Kenna to a kind of pink-cheeked, panting confusion that deepened the ache in his groin.

“How’s that feel?” he murmured. She looked up at him in beautiful bewilderment, like she knew the answer was supposed to be bad but she also realized if she said that, it would be a lie.

Gorgeous.

Deciding he’d made his point, John returned to the pleasurable pastime of sliding her trousers down the full length of her legs, leaving her bared to him with nothing but a modest cotton undergarment in the way.

“No layers?” he chided. “It’s fucking cold out, honey. Didn’t they give you an equipment allowance?”

She frowned, and he loved that. Loved that she was still trying to think it though and answer his questions, instead of instructing him to go to hell. God damn, he was never going to let her go after this.

“They didn’t think it would take me this long. They sent me to your apartment, and when you weren’t there—”

He frowned.

“They told you not to come back?”

“No! No, they told me to wait there until they traced you. Only I figured it out on my own, so I disabled the failsafe on my collar, and came here and—”

“What the hell do you mean?”

She scowled, resenting the interruption, but also clearly longing to display her cleverness for his approval. “I disabled the failsafe. You told me at dinner what you kept in your apartment that could do that.”

“I know that; I did it on purpose. But what do you mean, figured it out on your own?”

Kenna blinked, like she couldn’t believe this was the part of her story he didn’t understand.

“Your tire chains were gone.”

He took longer to parse this statement than he cared to acknowledge, tracing her reasoning through a dozen fragments of conversation over almost as many years. The tire chains he’d purchased, the place he kept them, the property he required them to access, a handful of disconnected scraps of reference he might have made to this general region . . .

His breath went out of him in a long whoosh.

“Oh, you clever girl,” he breathed. Ignoring her startled squeal, he pushed her legs apart and dove to wrap his lips around the soft, swollen mound, shielded by thinnest cotton.

She squirmed so ineffectively that he couldn’t even kid himself she meant it. If he had to guess—he certainly wasn’t about to lift his face from his feast long enough to verify for himself—she was more bewildered by the novelty of the act itself than really bothered by the feel of his mouth on her. Certainly he thought she couldn’t like it less than she had his hand.

She writhed a little more energetically whenever his teeth, cushioned protectively behind his lips, danced a percussive initiation across the highest point of her proffered flesh, but even those gyrations had the questioning agitation of a foreigner in the land of her own pleasure, and he did not let it distract him from the errand of her reward. By god, she had earned this. Putting together his entire location from nothing but a set of missing chains and a tattered collection of stray comments remembered from their meetings through the years? His fucking gem of a girl. She was going to take her pleasure from him, and no two ways about it.

He lapped and luxuriated in the dampening fabric, the way it darkened beneath his tongue and lost its veil of modesty the longer he worked at it, details like curves and curls and the dark red flush of arousal becoming more prominent the longer he laboured over her. The first gasp he wrung from her was the sweetest sound she’d ever made. He lifted his face, eyes twinkling, to mark the startled stare she gave in return.

Her colour was gorgeous, all pink undertones and red high notes on the apples of her cheeks. The haze of surprise and confusion that clouded those midnight-sky eyes made her look lost and lovely and newly grown up.

“You’re going to have your first with me like this,” he said gently. “Just like this. Okay? Next one, next dozen, all of those can be when I’m inside you. But the first you have from me will be like this.”

She mustered a tiny frown, more confusion than disapprobation, and asked, “First what?”

Jesus fuck.

He did not permit himself to be distracted by the possibility that she had never even felt this before. If he did, he was seriously worried he might go all the way back on his word and have her ride his already aching-hard cock to the promised completion instead. But that was not what he wanted for her yet, so he marshalled every scrap of resolve, freed her from the soaking scrap of underwear that still clung to every curve, crease and dimple of her perfectly plumped-up cunt, and returned to complete the final stage of his first devotions, resolving that even absent the capacity to anticipate it, she would be given no choice but to remember it for every day thereafter.

Kenna had never dreamed it was possible to cycle so rapidly from anger to pride to resentment to pure pleasure.

In fact, she was not altogether sure that pure pleasure was what she felt just now, but it was certainly predominantly pleasure, and the most aggravating thing about it was how quickly it made her forget everything she had felt before. Minutes ago she’d been eager to smash that lamp across John’s altogether too self-satisfied face and extricate her slightly-stripped self from his clutches, his cabin, and his life. Now, wrists bound over her head with a strap of warm, soft leather, body bare from the waist down, legs splayed wantonly for John to access everything that lay between them, she could barely remember even wanting to leave.

“Unngh,” she gasped, as another of those strange little seizures lanced like a cramp below her belly button, a tightening of something so swollen and wet and wanting that she hardly knew how to describe the need, let alone comprehend its origin. “No, it—John wait, I—”

He must have heard, but he didn’t seem to care what portion of the alphabet her throat would strangle next. All she could think of were his lips, his tongue, and the way they were on her now. She couldn’t properly comprehend the way her skin was wet and bared for him, how he was parting her flesh with his, and the thing he was still doing with his teeth—but not his teeth—but also yes it was definitely his teeth only his mouth was in it too, somehow, so whenever she was about to worry it would hurt, when it got a little too bitter-bright for comfort, the broad wet flat of his tongue would chase the pain, soothing it down to slick, sluggish neediness all over again.

The pain was almost good, Kenna thought, dizzied by her own discovery and John’s ministrations. At least, it seemed to offset the pleasure in a way that made the good parts feel so much better, and stopped them being almost too good for her to make sense of them.

As if there were any making sense of this.

She remembered only very vaguely that she had once wanted him to stop. She hadn’t wanted him to touch her, to claim his forfeit, the way he said he would.

Only she didn’t think that was entirely true, not just because of the way she now knew it felt, but also because of the way her belly had curled when he said it, all ready, hot and tight. It had scared her, feeling so strongly about the thought of him claiming her flesh. Scared her to think she might want him, a traitor, more than she wanted to prove her loyalty to Mr. Angelman and earn the promise of whatever future he imagined for her.

So she had fought against the feeling his threat gave as much as she had fought John himself. She’d struck him, fought the arm he flung around her, and then sagged in surrender to her own utter self-loathing as she discovered, when he bound her wrists, that she was simply glad.

Glad of the excuse to stop saying no, refuse to fight him, and open her legs in obedience to his touch so he could finally have his way and do . . . this.

Kenna did not have a name for any of this, but she had sounds enough that she thought a name could probably be fashioned from them, if a person were patient and creative. Blinking down at the dark, silver-streaked crown of John’s head, bowed between her legs, she decided he was probably both patient and creative enough to rise to that occasion. The things he was doing with his tongue alone . . .

She got lost halfway to completing the thought.

At first she expected this seizure would be like the others, a little aching flutter of pleasure that lit her up pure and simple from the inside of her belly out. But as John’s tongue worked at her, as his lips firmed and pursed around something she suddenly became keenly, achingly aware of just at the apex of her thighs, she understood her error. This was neither pure nor simple. It started in the core of her, bubbling up molten-bright, and summoned from the cold-and-hot washed soles of her feet an answering roll of something, oh god, what was it that could make her body light up like that, could sing sweet hell into the coil and clench of her muscles, the way her thighs clung in pathetic desperation to the sides of John’s head, the way she arched to meet him, pressing his prize, his feast, against the unrelenting pulse of his tongue as everything within her pulsed and writhed to match him.

She was not conscious of the high, broken cry that filled the cabin being something that belonged to her until it thinned and died to silence, and she felt the throb of her own throat die with it.

John rose over her long before she could regain mastery of her muscles, staring down with agonizing, terrifying tenderness at what must have looked to him nothing more than a limp and useless sprawl of sweat-sheened, sated limbs. Kenna whimpered, just once, and could manage nothing more.

But John did not seem to mind. To the contrary, he was delighted; gentle and gushing and proud, like she had passed a lifetime’s worth of tests he’d set her all at once.

“Sweetheart. You did beautifully.” His kisses fluttered soft and tender over her lips, her chin, her eyes, and lips again. She tasted something mysterious on his mouth, salty-sweet. She closed her eyes for the next kisses brushed across her lids, and mustered the very softest sigh in answer.

“There’s my girl.” His hand smoothed over the flat of her tummy, as it had done earlier. The same butterflies she’d felt at the time swirled under his palm once more, but quieter this time; sated, and weary. She sighed again, a little deeper now, and found she could move a little after all. John, though, seemed disinclined to release her just yet, which she supposed she could understand. She had tried to hit him with an oil lamp, after all.

She tried to tell him she wouldn’t do it again, that she’d be good, but it turned out coherent speech was a beyond her just yet, so she only watched as he stood up, bathed in the lowered glow of his fire, and removed his own clothes: the soft, well-worn sweater, the faded jeans and the brief pair of shorts he wore beneath them.

Some part of her must have marked the difference—that part of him, standing out so hard and strong, ready for something she wasn’t quite brave enough to contemplate just yet—but mostly she watched his face, and the way his eyes never left hers even as he climbed back on top of her, so utterly familiar even though his every action was perplexingly new, and bent to kiss her face.

She sighed her welcome, and tipped her chin up to match his kiss. She delighted in the pleasure this clearly gave him; he smiled and pressed a kiss to the side of her neck. Suckled at the skin there until she squirmed, not unhappily, and he reached down to touch her where she was still aching and swollen and tender.

“This is going to be different,” he said, and though she didn’t fully grasp what “this” entailed, she liked the way he talked about it, as though it were a new training exercise he expected her to try. Nothing to be scared of, nothing she couldn’t handle, but maybe a challenge all the same. She nodded to show that she was ready.

“There’s my brave girl,” he murmured. Her answering flush of pleasure was still warming her from the inside out as the warm, blunt pressure—the pressure she’d thought was from his fingers—increased; deepened. She squirmed a little, unthinking, then quickly got herself under control again, ashamed to have given way even to momentary weakness. But John just smiled, eyes crinkling at the corners the way they did when she completed a complicated take down or twisted out of his grip exactly like he’d taught her, so she knew it was okay.

The pressure deepened further, and she got the very clear sense that this was what she’d been aching for earlier. All the empty wanting parts of her, though they were more sensitive and not as greedy as they had been when he had his mouth on her, were still there, still needing to be filled. No sooner had she thought of them like that—like something that needed him there, inside her body, filling her up—than did the appetite itself come roaring back, deeper and more clamouring than ever.

“Unnh,” she whined, arching a little the way she had before, bucking her hips up to meet him. “Fffnng . . .”

John sucked his breath between his teeth, sharp and kind of frantic, like he was at the edge of a thing he could no longer control.

“Christ.” His voice was drawn tight as barbed wire, all twisted and raw and scraping nicely up and down her overheated skin. “Jesus fucking—okay, kiddo. Easy now. You want it? Little girl wants to take a big—yes, there you go. Now let’s see if you can take it.”

She groaned in gut-deep gratification as the deepening pressure became a punishing push forward, inward, splitting those swollen aching parts and making her impossibly full. She almost whined and squirmed in protest at the speed of the advance, but caught herself just in time. He didn’t deserve to put up with her ingratitude, not after she’d basically just begged him to hurry up and put it in there, and he’d only done as she asked. That wouldn’t be fair at all.

Instead she focused, almost rapturously, on the sensation of him pressing further inside her, opening her up to breadth and depth unimaginable. Her muscles clenched in a contradictory dance, the instinct to repulse and repel surging at painful odds with the desire to have him keep going, to advance to whatever depth he desired, to whatever depth she could take him, and then . . .

Kenna’s understanding stumbled over this roadblock of ignorance, but she did not let it bother her. John would know. Whatever he had to do, whatever was necessary, she trusted him to look after it. And she wouldn’t give him any trouble over any of it.

She squirmed beneath him, achingly content, and blinked up to find him staring down at her exactly as he had done that first day in the exhibition room, intimate and remote and impossible to know. Her chest caught around that look, and she felt small and vulnerable in a way that being merely tossed through the air had never made her do.

“Wh—” She swallowed her first, broken whisper. Tried again. “What is it?”

“Just . . .” John shook his head, incredulous. “You.”

He stooped to press another kiss to her mouth. She arched to return it, hands tugging at the belt tether, the restriction only feeding the bubbling pool of pleasure that warmed her from the inside out, spreading out from somewhere just north of where that part of him ended inside her.

God, she felt so full.

John shifted his weight to the shoulder he’d wedged against the back of the couch and used his other hand to lift her breasts free of her bra. Hands braced on the couch once more, he ducked his head to kiss and gently nip each curve of pink-tipped flesh, so that the pool of heat spread, warming her, tickling her nerve endings to a fizzing bright hum.

She was writhing in response to the almost unbearable pleasure as John drew back his hips, emptying her, then thrust in hot and hard, jolting her up against the arm of the couch. She yelped, not displeased exactly; mostly just startled. She saw him watching her carefully as he withdrew again, and smiled to show him she was okay, that whatever he did she could take it. Reassured, he snapped his hips forward again and this time her yelp ended in a croon, low and sweet.

He must have liked that, because he picked up speed, each thrust pushing her deep into the warm hide of the couch, the rhythm accelerating until she felt there was nothing for it but to lie there and take it, delighting in the undeniable power of him, the strength she’d already seen manifest a hundred different ways revealed to her in a new one entirely, the drive of his body into the core of hers, so that she could hardly bear it, could barely stand it, could not imagine wanting him to ever do anything else to her but this, only this, for as long as he wanted to forever after.

The blurry, bewildering contradiction, the overwhelming all-consuming possession of her flesh, worked the new magic on her once more. This one came faster than the first, the pleasure deeper, but not nearly as gentle. It was as if he had first tickled her pleasure into her from the surface but this time it was beaten into the molten core of her by the punishing length of his flesh, marking her from the inside out like a brand until tears were streaming and little cries of purest desperate nonsense spilled from her lips and her body could only convulse in surrender to his demand.

She didn’t register the change in him until his head came down beside her shoulder. She thought for a moment she would feel his teeth again, but he wasn’t biting her, not really, only grinding his face deep and urgent into the soft place where her shoulder joined her neck as his every muscle contorted and a deep, urgent guttural spilled from his throat as something surged and leaped and spilled, hot and heavy, into the core of her.

She was still clutching faintly at the length of him with her weary, well-pummelled lower parts as he slumped to the couch behind and beside and kind of also on top of her. He pressed his face to that join of her neck and shoulder, where he’d worked so hard not to sink his teeth into her skin, and kissed her instead.

Kenna’s tears were still drying on her cheeks, but she found they were not proof against a fresh flood as she turned her face to rest against his, and cried.

Kenna wept while John held her. He watched her navigate the steep descent from the precipice of raw emotion he’d ridden her to, and cuddled and petted and kissed her as he’d never allowed himself to do the entire time he’d known her, honed her, forged her. He swiped at her tears with the pad of his thumb, told her how brave she’d been, how good and strong.

“You took it so well, Kenna,” he murmured, knowing performance was probably not her most present preoccupation but taking pleasure in extending the compliment all the same. “You came right on my cock, sweet as anything. I’m so proud of you. You did everything just right.”

The approval was exactly what she needed, though he doubted she knew why. She glowed pink under the caress of unstinting praise, and settled in under the blanket he drew over them both.

“That’s right,” he soothed, pressing a kiss to her earlobe just to see the effect it had on her smile. “Rest.”

He waited another a minute while her breathing slowed, then reached up to free her hands from the belt, gently chafe the bloodflow back to full force and draw them under the blanket. He knew his girl; none better. She wasn’t going anywhere.

John settled his head on one hand and kept the other beneath the blanket, his palm curved around the soft flesh of Kenna’s breast. He played with the peak of one berry-bright nipple, pinching and rolling it between his thumb and forefinger while mulling over the turn his plans had taken.

Letting her go back was not an option. Kenna was his to keep, and Angelman could go to hell. But there was no use pretending this wouldn’t shorten his timeline. With two of them to feed, he figured it would be ten, maybe twelve days at most before he would have to go for supplies; before they would have to decide on next steps, and take them.

Once they surfaced, they would need to keep moving until he could present the likelihood of their shared demise in such a way that even Angelman would believe it and, if not exactly stop looking, at least look a little less. It would take planning, resources, some connections he would have to tap into, but it was probably doable. John was no amateur; for that matter, neither was Kenna. She would understand the truth of what he told her, the necessity of selling the story, and he was confident his final pupil would be an eager partner in the planning of all that was to come.

Among other things.

He looked down at the golden, firelit profile of the girl who slept beside him, and smiled.

There’d be time enough tomorrow for that.

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