Chapter 305: Bushy paths
Liam and Wrath left the compound before the sun had properly committed to the day.
Wrath was already at the car when Liam came out, standing beside the passenger door with his hands behind his back and his expression carrying the specific patience of someone who had been ready for twenty minutes and had spent those twenty minutes being fine about it.
Liam came down the steps still pulling his jacket on and looked at the car and then at Wrath.
"Where are we going," he said.
"Somewhere nice sir," Wrath said.
They drove for forty minutes, the city thinning out around them gradually, the buildings giving way to smaller ones and then to nothing much at all, the road narrowing as it pushed further out from the center of things.
Wrath drove the way he did everything, without wasted movement, his hands at a position on the wheel that suggested someone had told him the correct position once and he had kept it ever since.
Liam watched the city disappear through the window and said nothing.
Eventually the road became less of a road and more of a suggestion, the tarmac giving way to packed dirt that the trees on either side had been slowly reclaiming at the edges for years.
Wrath followed it without any sign that it concerned him.
He parked where the track ended.
They got out.
In front of them was bush, proper bush, the kind that had no interest in making itself accessible.
Their journey out into the dense brush was slow, marked by the constant rustle of overgrown leaves and the damp, heavy scent of wild earth.
Tall, ancient trees stretched upward until their thick foliage blocked out most of the sky, casting long, cool shadows across the uneven forest floor.
Spacing between the trunks was wide enough for two men to move through, but the undergrowth was relentless, reaching for ankles and snagging on dark fabric.
Wrath set a steady pace at the front, his massive frame pushing aside heavy branches with minimal effort. Liam followed close behind, his boots sinking slightly into the soft dirt with every step.
Liam ducked his head low as a massive fallen oak log blocked their path. The wood was slick with rot and dark moss.
Liam crouched into a low squat, sliding under the midsection of the fallen trunk while Wrath simply stepped over a thicker section beside him, his long legs clearing the barrier without breaking stride.
"We will both be here for today," Wrath said, his voice deep and calm as he paused to let Liam catch up. "And we will only be going back tomorrow."
Liam adjusted the heavy strap of his pack, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead as he straightened up.
He looked around at the towering greenery, the complete absence of city noise making the woods feel unnaturally quiet. "Why not home and here? Why are we sleeping out in the middle of nowhere?"
Wrath slowed his steps slightly, though he did not turn around. Up ahead, a thick tangle of thorny wild vines hung suspended between two sweetgum trees.
Wrath reached out with one broad hand, catching the vines by their main stem and lifting them high into the air, creating a clear arc for Liam to pass beneath.
Liam dipped his shoulder and stepped through the opening before Wrath let the thorny heavy branches drop back into place.
"Before I ever became a top seven family fighter," Wrath said, his tone carrying a reflective weight, "I was always uncontrollable, rough, and angry. I did not listen to anyone. Every other family looked at me and turned away. They did not want me. Except for one."
Liam raised an eyebrow, keeping his eyes on the narrow path. "Mr. Ashford?"
"Mr. Ashford," Wrath confirmed with a slow nod. "Miss Elena’s father. He picked me to be their new fighter after their last one died in the ring. I was sitting in a dark cell when he walked in, looking at me like I was a human being instead of a wild beast. I was surprised someone was dumb enough to do that."
A faint, genuine smile touched the corner of Wrath’s lips as he spoke the words.
Liam let out a sudden, bright laugh. Hearing Wrath speak about the late patriarch with such coarse affection brought back a wave of warm memories. Liam could almost see the old man standing there, stubborn and unbothered by the danger right in front of his face.
"At first," Wrath continued, stepping carefully down a steep, muddy embankment where a shallow stream carved through the dirt, "he brought me home in my cage and all that. I was shackled hand and foot with a heavy shocking collar locked tight around my neck."
Liam planted his foot on a flat, dry rock to cross the mud, hopping slightly to reach the solid bank on the other side. He turned his head to listen as Wrath went on.
"Then one morning," Wrath said, leaning his hands on his hips and widening his eyes slightly, deepening his tone to mimic a monster in an old storybook, "he walked right up to the iron bars, looked at his family standing behind him, and told them that he would be taking me out with him. All by himself. Wooooo."
"I see why that would sound scary," Liam said, shaking his head with a light nod of disappointment at the sheer recklessness of it. "That sounds like a complete disaster waiting to happen."
Wrath chuckled, the low sound vibrating in his broad chest. He gestured toward a thick, low-hanging willow branch that dipped right into their faces. Wrath raised his left forearm to lift the heavy green screen upward, holding it steady while Liam bent his knees and ducked beneath the leaves, stepping onto a patch of dry pine needles.
"You know what was even scarier?" Wrath asked, dropping the branch once Liam was clear. "He told the household guards that he wanted just the both of us out there. No escorts. No back-up. No weapons on his belt."
Liam stopped in his tracks for a fraction of a second, his eyes wide as he looked at the massive fighter. "Was he crazy or something?"
Wrath broke into a loud, booming laugh that echoed off the high tree trunks. "I thought the exact same thing! Me and him, out somewhere completely quiet, miles away from the public eye. No reasonable person, even one without a brain, would choose to do that with a man in chains who wanted to break everything he touched."
Liam smiled again, the picture of Elena’s father becoming clearer with every sentence. "Her dad really was a character. Elena definitely got that trait straight from her father."
"She is the total incarnation of her dad," Wrath agreed smoothly. "Every single bit of his stubbornness lives inside her."
Liam laughed softly, and Wrath joined in, the shared laughter easing the tension of the dense woods.
"At least," Wrath added, his voice lowering as the trees grew even thicker ahead, "that was what I thought. I thought he was an idiot who was going to get himself killed. Until he took me to the exact place where I am taking you right now."
Liam ducked under a low pine limb, brushing dry needles from his shoulders. "A place changed you?"
Wrath turned his head slightly, a quiet smile on his rugged face. "Please do not judge until you get there, young sir."
He reached forward with both hands and spread the bush apart.
The sound reached Liam first.
Water. Moving water, the continuous sound of something falling from a height and hitting a surface below, present and real and entirely unexpected in the middle of all this.
Then he saw it.
A natural waterfall, not enormous but proper, the water coming down over a rock face that had been here since before anyone had a reason to name it, falling maybe four meters into a pool below that had been carved by years of the same water hitting the same place. A large flat rock sat in the center of the pool, splitting the water on either side as it fell, the flow on the left heavier than the right but both of them continuous and white and catching whatever light came through the canopy above in small broken pieces.
Around the pool the trees stood close and old, their roots running into the water at the edges, everything green and specifically present in the way that places were present when they had been undisturbed long enough to find their own arrangement.
Liam stood at the edge of the opening and looked at it.
He looked at the water and the rock and the way the light moved through the canopy and across the surface of the pool. He looked at the roots of the trees at the water’s edge and at the moss on the rock face above the falls and at the specific quality of the air in this space which was different from the air in the bush outside it.
He said nothing for a moment.
"I felt the same way," Wrath said, standing beside him.
"I see why this helped you," Liam said.
"Yes," Wrath said. "But we will come back to that." He looked at Liam. "First let me show you something."
He turned and moved along the edge of the clearing, following the tree line rather than going toward the water, and Liam followed him around to the far side where the trees were oldest, their trunks widest, the ones that had been here the longest.
Wrath stopped in front of one of them.
It was enormous.
The trunk wider than both of them standing side by side, the bark thick and ridged, the tree old enough that it had stopped competing with anything around it simply by virtue of having been here longer than everything else.
But that was not what Liam was looking at.
The trunk was marked. Not by weather or by time.
By impact. Specific, deliberate impact, the bark gone in places and the wood beneath compressed and split, the shapes of the marks a size that Liam recognized immediately because he had seen the hands that made them.
Five marks. Maybe six. Each one the size of Wrath’s fist.
Each one deep enough that the shape of the wood around them had changed, the fiber of the trunk compressing inward and staying there, the marks not surface level but structural, the tree itself having been rearranged by what had hit it.
Liam looked at the marks.
Then at Wrath.
Then at the marks again.
"Holy shit," he said.