The man hovering over Elian was the same giant who had marked his face earlier, out by the gate.
Up close, he was even bigger than Elian remembered, all shoulders and knuckles, the kind of build that made violence feel less like a threat and more like an inevitability.
Elian swallowed hard. Without being told, he knew he was in hot soup.
The man was talking. His mouth kept moving but Elian couldn't catch a single word of it. The ringing in his ear had swallowed everything else whole, turning the man's voice into a dull hum buried somewhere under static.
Elian just stared up at him, his lips moving and moving with nothing coming through, and he felt something cold settle low in his stomach.
Then the man tilted his head, just slightly, toward the two men standing behind him. He didn't say anything Elian could hear, but he didn't need to. It was an order, plain as anything, and Elian understood it the way an animal understands a raised hand.
