Chapter 75 Wrestle For Power
A table had been dragged to the centre of the open ground between the buildings, and half the camp had arranged itself around it.
It started the way these things always started. Someone showed off, someone else took it as a challenge, and the natural energy of a crowd that had been eating and drinking for two hours handled the rest. The feast had loosened the tension from the earlier standoff in the clearing, and arm wrestling needed no shared language. Everyone understood it, and everyone watching had a stake in who won.
Khan's people chose their champion without discussion. Khan stood, rolled his sleeve to the elbow, and sat across the table with the calm of a man who considered the outcome already settled. He was quiet about it, which was more intimidating.
The rogues took longer to produce their own. After a brief internal negotiation that nobody was supposed to notice but everyone did, Dario stepped forward.
He was the rogue king's right hand, lean and dark-haired with a face that defaulted to mild contempt, and a position in camp that everyone understood and worked around accordingly. He sat across from Khan and rolled his sleeve, he stared Khan down with a confidence that it would be an easy win.
His composure and confidence lasted less than a minute.
Khan's arm went down once without touching the flat surface of the table, it came back, and then Dario's went down and stayed there. The roar from Khan's side was immediate and genuine, the kind of celebration that had nothing forced about it. These were people who had spent months in a prison with almost nothing to celebrate, and the clean simplicity of winning something small landed with a weight the moment didn't technically deserve. Everyone from that side understood it without needing it explained.
The woman in her twenties gave a slight grin before tossing a whole chicken leg into her mouth.
Khan rose from his seat and beat his chest twice with a closed fist. The sound of it was solid, and his people answered it with noise that filled the open ground and rose up into the night sky above the camp.
Dario sat on the other side of the table and stared at his own hand.
Most of the rogues around him absorbed the celebration well enough. Dario did not.
He stood up, looked across the table at Khan, and said one word. "Savage."
The celebration went quiet.
Khan's arms came down. His people went still around him. The air between the two sides changed quality and it changed fast.
Khan looked at Dario and said nothing. His hands were loose at his sides, which on a man his size was more concerning than clenched fists would have been.
Maddox was on his feet before he finished deciding to stand.
He immediately moved into the space between them. He looked at Dario first, the look was brief but it communicated clearly that the next thirty seconds required a specific kind of cooperation. Then he looked at Khan.
Khan was still watching Dario. His jaw was set and his eyes had gone very still.
"Next round of food is coming in," Maddox said. He kept his voice even and practical, speaking to both of them and the ring of people around them at the same time. "I can smell it from here. Let's not ruin it."
A beat passed.
Khan looked at Maddox. He held the look, weighing something internally. Then he said a few words in his own language and backed away, his people began moving back toward the tables.
The woman in her twenties, Silena, sat on a table, a leg outstretched and the other bent with her right arm against it. She had chicken in her mouth and a silver knife in her left hand that she deftly snuck back in her shoe.
Dario turned and walked away without another word.
Maddox watched him go and noted the set of his shoulders, the way he moved through his own people, the particular quality of the humiliation he was carrying. He filed it away.
Khan appeared at his elbow. "They call us savages," he said.
"I heard," Maddox said.
"We not savages." The words came out flat and factual, not heated. "We Islanders. And we do not appreciate that word."
Maddox looked at him. "You're right."
Khan watched the crowd resettle around the tables for a moment. Then he said, "Our island. That is what we fight for. It was taken from us, not lost nor abandoned. Taken by people we trust, they come with guns." His voice didn't rise. It carried the particular weight of something said many times in private and rarely out loud. "We take it back. Soon."
Maddox said nothing and let him continue.
"Those who came from prison with Khan," Khan said, nodding toward the freed wolves settling at the long tables, "many with nowhere to go. No pack, no home, and nothing wait for them." He looked at Maddox directly. "When we reclaim our island, space everywhere for them. Our people have agreed on this. Everyone who fights for it earns a place on it."
Maddox considered that. It was a clean arrangement, cleaner than most of what he'd seen. Not charity but a shared stake, something earned rather than given.
"That's a good offer," he said.
Khan made a sound of agreement and moved back toward the table.
Maddox stood for a moment in the space where the confrontation had been and looked at the camp around him. Two groups sharing a space and a fire and a meal, with friction distributed throughout and no pretence that it wasn't there. It was imperfect. It was going to stay imperfect for a while. But it was there, and it was holding, and that was more than it had been three hours ago.
He went back to his seat.
From the far end of the camp, on the natural rise that gave a clear view over the main gathering area, the rogue king, Elijah, watched.
He had a cup in his hand that he wasn't drinking from. He stood with his weight settled and his eyes moving across the feast below with the unhurried attention of someone in no rush to finish his assessment. The torchlight from the perimeter reached him dimly up here, catching the angles of his face, and he looked like a man who had watched a great many situations from a distance and had learned to read them accurately.
Two of his men stood nearby, they had been waiting for the right moment and had decided it had arrived.
"He has all of them," the first one said. He wasn't being accusatory, just precise, which was sometimes more uncomfortable. "Every person who came out of that prison follows him. Not you, not the cause. Him personally."
Elijah said nothing.
"That is not a small number," the second one said. "A hundred plus wolves who would follow Maddox's instruction before they followed yours. We think it's worth reconsidering."
"Do you," Elijah said.
"We think it could become a problem," the first one continued. "A man with that kind of loyalty starts to look like a king whether he calls himself one or not. And his people already use that word."
“And what would you have me do?” He raised a brow.
His underlying lifted his thumb and performed a slitting gesture over his throat.