# Chapter 28
Drogo trained alone most mornings, before the villa woke, in a courtyard walled high enough that no one from the road below could see what a rebel "hope" actually looked like when no one important was watching.
He didn't use a blade. He'd tried them all, in the early years — swords, spears, the twin daggers half the assassin trainees favored — and found every one of them fighting against something in him rather than working with it, like trying to write with the wrong hand. What worked, in the end, was nothing at all. Just his own two fists, wrapped in plain leather, and whatever it was that lived underneath his skin and had never once needed a weapon to be dangerous.
He opened with **Fault Line** — a technique of his own naming, born from years of simply hitting things until he understood exactly how they broke. A single grounded strike, driven not for the target directly in front of him but through it, into the earth beneath, so that the shockwave arrived a half-beat after the fist did and finished what the fist had merely started. The training dummy across the courtyard didn't so much shatter as detonate, splinters arcing outward in a wide, contained ring, the packed dirt beneath it cratering in a shallow bowl that hadn't been there a heartbeat before.
He didn't pause to admire it. He never did. Admiring his own strength felt, to Drogo, uncomfortably close to trusting it, and trust was a thing he'd learned early to portion out carefully.
**Ruin's Embrace** came next — closer work, the kind meant for an opponent who'd already closed distance and expected a grapple to be a place of safety. Drogo demonstrated it against nothing but air, the motion itself unmistakable even without a body to complete it on: both hands seizing an imagined collar, a controlled pivot that turned an opponent's own momentum into the engine of their fall, and a final downward drive that would, against something solid, have driven a body through whatever the ground beneath it happened to be made of. It wasn't elegant. It wasn't meant to be. It was the kind of technique built by someone who'd learned, the hard way, that elegance was a luxury afforded to people who didn't need to end a fight in a single exchange.
Last was the one he practiced least, because it frightened him more than he ever admitted to anyone, Caesar included. He called it, when he called it anything at all, **the Undertow** — not a strike so much as a release, a moment where he stopped holding back whatever sat coiled beneath his ordinary strength and let a fraction of it loose into a single blow. He'd only ever thrown it twice at anything living. Both times, Caesar had been the one to stop him going further, and both times, neither of them had spoken about it again afterward.
This morning, he didn't throw it at all. He simply stood in the ruined courtyard, breathing hard, wrists aching pleasantly from work well done, and let the quiet settle back over the estate before anyone else woke to ask what he'd broken this time.
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Caesar found him there an hour later, toweling sweat from his neck, surveying the cratered dirt with the mild, unbothered expression of someone who'd long since stopped being surprised by his own mess.
"You'll want to fill that in before the staff sees it," Caesar said, though there was no real reprimand in it.
"I always do." Drogo tossed the towel aside. "You didn't come out here to talk about the courtyard."
"No." Caesar's expression settled into something more careful, the particular stillness he wore whenever a conversation mattered more than his face wanted to admit. "We have a guest arriving today. He'll be staying at the villa with you, effective immediately."
Drogo raised an eyebrow. "You've never billeted anyone with me before. Two years, and I've had this place to myself."
"This isn't an ordinary guest." Caesar chose the words with visible care, the way a man walks across ice he isn't entirely certain will hold his weight. "His name is Kumo. He arrived six days ago, defected out of the Empire's own Institute, and Bruno confirms he carries something significant in his blood — significant enough that the council spent half of last night trying to understand how it's possible at all, and came away with more questions than answers."
"Significant like me."
"Different," Caesar said, and something in the single word carried more weight than the sentence around it. "I won't pretend otherwise to you, and I won't hand you half a truth dressed up as the whole of one. What he carries, we don't fully understand yet. What we do know is that it matters to this war, and that he's going to need someone his own age who isn't going to treat him like a weapon or a mystery to be solved before treating him like a person first."
"You think that's me."
"I think you've spent your whole life being handled carefully by people who needed something from you," Caesar said, quieter now. "I think you know exactly what it looks like when someone's being seen for what they can do instead of who they are, because you've lived it since before you could name it. And I think, whatever's happened to this boy to bring him here, he could use someone who recognizes that particular kind of tired on sight."
Drogo was quiet a moment, turning that over. It wasn't often Caesar spoke to him like this — not as a commander addressing an asset, but as something closer to what Drogo had never quite let himself call it out loud, not even privately.
"You care about him already," Drogo said. "And you only met him last night."
Something flickered behind Caesar's eyes, gone before Drogo could properly name it — not quite guilt, not quite grief, some third thing that didn't have an easy word attached to it. "I care about what's right, when I can tell what that is," Caesar said, which wasn't quite an answer, though Drogo let it pass without pushing, the way he'd learned to let certain things pass with Caesar over the years, trusting that whatever sat behind the deflection would surface eventually, on its own schedule, the way most true things did if given enough patience.
"Fine," Drogo said. "I'll be decent to him. I make no promises about being gentle."
"I wouldn't ask you to be." The corner of Caesar's mouth moved, not quite a smile. "Gentle isn't what he needs right now. Steady is."
Caesar left him there in the ruined courtyard not long after, and Drogo spent the remaining hour before the household properly woke doing exactly what he always did with a morning's worth of unspent energy and a mind too restless to sit still with it — cooking, because it was the one skill he'd built entirely for himself, owed to no one, expected of no one, and because it gave his hands something honest to do while the rest of him turned over everything Caesar had and hadn't said.
He was still turning it over when he heard the villa's old floorboards creak upstairs, careful and quiet in a way that told him, before he'd even looked up, that whoever had just woken was trying very hard not to be heard at all.
He smiled, faintly, and reached for a second plate.