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A laugh barked out of him with a force he couldn’t fight. Their prisoner looked between them, eyes narrowed and face pinched. Thank hells for Red. She knew what game he played.

“You jest,” the elf said slowly. “Your mage is missing and you laugh?”

Missing, not dead. Well, that was something.

Fenrir swallowed a different kind of laugh and shook his head. “It’s called gallows humor. Cheaper than therapy.” He leaned in towards Red who was muttering, what’s therapy? And whispered, “I read that in a book.”

“You’re insane,” the elf observed, like Fenrir didn’t already know that. “Don’t you care?”

“Course I care about Fifi, but threatening you isn’t gonna get me any closer to him, is it?”

The elf said nothing. She stared him down from where she sat, nostrils flaring with each perfectly timed breath, like she was trying to figure out what he was after but couldn’t even find his edge let alone his angle.

“Right, so, you know what I want. Now to figure out what you want—really want, because as wicked a hunter as you may be, I don’t think you came here looking for a fight.” Fenrir barely resisted grinning when the elf bristled. “Here’s what I know: you didn’t come here from Hell, you didn’t come here for me, and Orpheus is alive.”

The elf shifted in her binds, chin lifting in defiance while her lip lifted in a sneer.

“Here’s what I think I know: You need help, and Orpheus is the key to whatever shape that help takes, which means you need him for his magic.” No change, the elf remained silent, but in that silence, Fenrir found confirmation he was close enough to the truth she feared revealing more. “What would you say, though, if I told you Orpheus no longer has access to his magic?”

Whatever spell the elf was under, it abruptly shattered. “Lies!” She snarled, golden eyes flaring, teeth bared to reveal those sharp little fangs. “All you Empire scum do is lie!”

“Except I’m not. Orpheus doesn’t have magic. Not anymore.”

Time slowed, the space between him and the elf distending, like a rubber band about to snap.

“Explain,” she finally said, and Fenrir smiled.

“So…” Fenrir leaned forward, one arm resting on his knee, and stared her in the eye. “When Orpheus closed the chasm, he also closed every crack into Hell that existed in our world, including the one inside himself. The one that gave him access to his magic.” The elf’s eyes remained locked on his, but her whole body was shaking, a subtle vibration Fenrir recognized as panic. “He’s been unable to cast ever since. Not so much as a spark of Netherflame.” Fenrir gestured with his remaining hand, a lazy wave in the heavy air. “Simple as nothin’.”

“No,” the elf hissed, hands fisting in their binds. “He has to, because if not, I can’t—they won’t” —The elf cut off with a snarl, eyes frozen on Fenrir’s before she turned her head to the side to stare at the far wall.

She’d revealed something, just then. Something important.

But what she said next made Fenrir’s blood go cold.

“If he doesn’t have magic then your mage is as good as dead.”

All mirth, false or otherwise, bled away.

Fenrir’s face went stony, his eyes hard. “Listen, it’s obvious that the situation which brought you out here is dire. You need help, and rather than asking for it, you thought your only option was to take it. And I’m gonna blame Lore for that. But she’s gone now” —Fenrir did not miss how the elf’s breath hitched— “And whoever you think we are, you’re dead wrong about us.”

“I know exactly who you are.” Fire in her eyes, muscles straining beneath her tattered white cloak as she tried to reach him, the elf hissed, “Do you know what we called you, General Rawkner? Monster of the Rim. Worse than the innocents you slaughtered. Because you are no hunter, you are a murderer, and I won’t listen to your lies because I know exactly where they lead!”

If someone told him all the air had been sucked from the room, Fenrir would have believed them. He leaned back, breath hitching in his chest loudly enough Vera went stiff behind him. His mother didn’t need to speak for him to hear her ask: Monster of the Rim?

It wasn’t as if he didn’t deserve the name. His reputation had been preceded only by Orpheus’. Lore may have been the mastermind of their operation, but Fenrir was no innocent. He’d followed her commands, did her dirty work. Seen to it that, in the end, the results she sought were brought to fruition. Just because he’d tried to mitigate some of the damage along the way didn’t wash his hands clean of years of bloodied service.

He shoved the feeling aside, leveling his attention on what mattered: this hells-damned elf. Because this was another reveal. One more important than any yet.

Fenrir knew, suddenly, exactly where Orpheus had been taken.

“You’re from the other side of the chasm, aren’t you?”

Beside him, Red went rigid while Vera made a quiet sound at his back.

Across from him, the elf bared her teeth, bruised face lifting into the sickly light of the single overhead fixture. She didn’t grace him with an answer, but Fenrir didn’t need it to know the truth.

“That’s where you’ve taken Orpheus. To a place somewhere beyond the Rim.”