"Well, well. Isn't that something." Ronan's voice came from behind him.
He stopped.
Had he caught it? He thought to himself.
He ran back through the moment. His heartbeat when he spoke. His breathing. The careful, measured delivery of the lie. He had held everything down, kept it even and flat.
He turned.
Iphe stood where he had left her, her eyes fixed on him. Her gaze. Direct and searching and entirely unguarded. The kind that didn't look at a person so much as look into them, feeling for something she hadn't been given a name for yet.
And then it hit him.
Her body. The slight elevation in her breathing. The change in her pulse, barely perceptible, the kind of thing that would have been invisible to anyone not built to hear it. It had shifted the moment Jax spoke. Something in the sound her body was making had changed.
And Ronan had heard everything.
"Our bag boy," Ronan's voice came again, warm and pleasant, like he was sharing an amusing story, "is now a man of his own." He clapped. He had a smile on his face that held no malice. The one that was worse for exactly that reason.
"Walking out on the Alpha without an acknowledgement of his correction." He tilted his head. "Bold."
The clearing had gone quiet. The drills had stopped without an order to stop them. Every man stood exactly where they were, and all eyes settled on him.
"The Primordial Codes are clear on this." His tone remained conversational. "Walking out on the Alpha before dismissal is insubordination."
The clearing held its silence.
"The prescribed punishment is forty lashes of the silver-shrapnel whip." He paused. "To be shared with a family member of the Alpha's choosing, of course."
Alaric's wolf went very still.
Silver-shrapnel wounds didn't close. The metal kept eating long after the lash landed, burning through flesh and tissue until it was treated. Forty lashes could slowly kill a werewolf. And Jax got to choose which member of his family shared them.
He did not think. He did not calculate. He moved.
His knees hit the packed earth of the training ground and he bowed his head until it touched the ground, the sack dropping from his shoulder beside him.
"Alpha." Alaric's voice came out emptied of everything. "The fault is mine and mine alone. Whatever punishment you see fit, please let it fall on me alone. Forty lashes. Fifty. Whatever satisfies the Rites and pleases you." He paused. "Spare my family."
Silence.
"I don't expect my corrections to reach you from across the training ground." Jax stretched out his hand and one of the men placed a whip in it with his head bowed . "Come closer."
Alaric lifted his head and his eyes found Iphe before he could stop them. She held her clipboard against her chest, her face stripped of its professional composure, replaced by open, unguarded shock. And he wished suddenly, with a ferocity that surprised him, that she was not here for this.
He got to his feet and started forward.
"Crawl."
The word landed without heat. The cruelty in it heavier than it sounded.
Alaric lowered himself back to the earth.
And crawled.
He kept his eyes down and his face blank and went somewhere in his head he always went for moments like this. The place behind everything. Where sound became distant and sensation ceased to exist and he became small enough to survive whatever was happening around him.
But he couldn't get there.
She was watching.
He had never cared about being watched before. He had endured things in front of crowds and felt nothing beyond the mechanical discipline of getting through it. But her eyes on him now were a different weight entirely. He kept his breathing even and felt every inch of the ground under his hands and knees with a clarity that had everything to do with the fact that she was still standing at the gap in the pines and had not looked away.
He reached Jax's feet and stopped.
Jax looked down at him for a moment. Then he lifted his foot and pressed it to Alaric's head, pushing his face toward the ground and forcing it deeper into the earth.
He stayed in his body just enough to endure it, kept trying to get to that place in his head and kept failing. Because somewhere behind him, her pulse had changed again.
He felt it the way he felt everything about her now. Without trying. Without wanting to.
The first lash landed and his wolf thrashed. The second pulled a howl out of the wolf in his head. By the third the silver tore through his skin, burning at the edges in a way that ordinary pain could not.
"Ronan." Jax stretched the whip out to him and held out two fingers.
"As you wish, Alpha." Ronan's smile widened.
The fourth lash was different. It took longer to hit, and was much more precise, like a man who had done this before and found it interesting. The fifth landed in the same place as the fourth, deepening the wound. Alaric pressed his face into the earth and released a muffled groan.
Then Jax's voice rang out, "Each man will take one lash in turn. If you don't hit the way I like, you're getting twenty from me."
The sixth was neither like Jax's or Ronan's, but it tore his skin upon contact and blood dripped from his sides.
Seven. Eight. Nine.
He told himself not to count. He had learned long ago that counting made it worse, turned each lash into a number that had to be anticipated and survived. But she was there and he just couldn't make himself stop. He kept his head in the earth and breathed through each one, hard and slow, holding in the urge to scream out loud.
He counted fifty-nine by the time it was done.
He lay still. His breath faint and low.
"Ms. Caelora."
Ronan's voice came from somewhere behind him.
"I believe the head cook is still waiting," he said, like he was doing her a favour. "And those orders won't sign themselves."
A pause. He heard her breathing. Heard the unsteadiness in it that she was working to control.
Then the sound of her footsteps leaving the training grounds.
Then the others. Footsteps dispersing. The quiet sounds of the training ground resuming its ordinary shape around his bloodied body.
Then nothing.
The sun moved. The ground scorched beneath him. At some point the sounds of the estate faded into a general distance and then into silence and then into something that wasn't silence so much as absence, and he let himself go then.
Let the darkness that had been waiting at the edges of his vision come forward and take what it wanted.
He stopped fighting it.