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Control

Kade

He told her it was control training, which was true enough to hold up under scrutiny and false enough to keep the real reason buried where it needed to stay.

"You flinch before contact happens," he said, the first morning he pulled her aside from the labor rotation to a quiet corner of the training yard, empty at that hour except for the two of them and the cold.

"That's going to get noticed eventually, if it hasn't already. I can teach you to control the reaction instead of just suppressing it."

She studied him with an expression he couldn't fully read. Suspicion, mostly, though something underneath it that might have been hope, carefully guarded. "Why would you help me with that?"

"Because the alternative is worse." He kept his voice even, professional, the way he'd practiced in his head a dozen times before approaching her.

"If the pack sees you flinching from every hand that comes near you, they'll draw their own conclusions. I'd rather you have some measure of control than none."

He didn't tell her the rest that he'd requested this specifically, that his father's deadline sat over both their heads like a blade neither of them could see clearly yet, that every lesson he gave her was as much for his own reconnaissance as for her protection. He told himself the omission was necessary. He was no longer entirely sure it was forgivable.

The first lesson was simple, almost insultingly so: breathing, stillness, learning to notice the moment before the flinch instead of only the flinch itself. She was better at it than he expected. Quick, focused, hungry in a way that suggested she'd been waiting for exactly this kind of structure without knowing it.

"You're good at this," he admitted, near the end of the session, and watched something in her expression soften slightly, just for a moment, before she caught herself and rebuilt the careful distance between them.

"I'm good at a lot of things no one's bothered to notice," she said, and there was an edge in it that he understood, uncomfortably, that he deserved.

He didn't correct her. He simply nodded, and set the time for their next session, and told himself that teaching her control was protection, not preparation for something he couldn't yet name even to himself.

He was lying. He was becoming quite good at it, and he hated himself a little more each time he did.