He lets go. Steps back. Picks up his paddle.
"Three more."
My lower back burns where his hand was. An afterimage. A brand.
"Three more," I repeat.
We finish barrel seventeen as the sun drops below the garage door's frame. Orange light floods the concrete floor, catches the dust motes swirling between us, turns everything amber and gold. We're both wrecked. Filthy. Breathing hard. I'm leaning against barrel twelve and he's braced against the workbench and the space between us is maybe four feet and full of volcanicite dust and something else entirely.
Flynn clears his throat.
"Your technique improved significantly by barrel eleven."
A laugh rips out of me. Raw, breathless, aching. "Was that a compliment?"
His runes flicker. Just once.
"It was an observation."
I open my mouth to fire back something sharp—something about how his "observations" sound a lot like flirting in a language that forgot to include fun—but the words die on my tongue.
Because Flynn is rolling up the sleeves of his ruined shirt, methodical, precise, fold over fold, and the runes on his forearms are telling a story.
Not the glowing ones. The others.
Scars. Dozens of them. White-silver against moss-green, layered so thick in places they form ridges. Some are clean, surgical. Others are ragged, torn, healed wrong. They run underneath the runic tattoos like a palimpsest, the ink laid over damage so old the skin has forgotten its original texture. One scar wraps his left wrist entirely—a shackle mark, unmistakable, the kind that comes from metal worn too long against skin that was still growing.
He catches me looking. His hands stop mid-fold.
The garage goes quiet. No paddle strikes, no breathing. Just the hum of fluorescent tubes and the settling clicks of cooling soil.
"Warband."
One word. Dropped like a stone into still water.
"I was eleven when they conscripted my village." He doesn't look at me. His fingers resume folding the sleeve, mechanical now, precise the way a person is precise when precision is the only thing between them and something they'd rather not visit. "Eight years in the Khar'voth campaign. They didn't organize supply lines. Didn't maintain weapons. Didn't bury the dead in rows."
His hand closes around the workbench. The steel frame whines.
"Everything was chaos. No structure. No patterns. Just blood and mud and noise, and if you stopped moving, you stopped breathing."
The fluorescent light catches the shackle scar. Pale as bone.
"When I got out, I bought a lawn mower." A breath that's almost a laugh, if a laugh could be made of broken glass. "First thing. Before food. Before a bed. A lawn mower and a measuring tape and a bag of grass seed. Because if I could make one patch of ground stay exactly how I put it?—"
He stops.
His jaw locks. The rune over his sternum—the serpent and moon—has gone completely dark.
I don't say anything.
I don't say I'm sorry, because sorry is a bandage over a wound that needs air. I don't say I understand, because I don't. I've never been eleven in a warband. I've never needed a lawn mower to feel safe.
Instead I pick up the garden hose coiled on its labeled hook by the garage door.
"Give me your arm."
His head turns. Amber eyes narrow.
