For a long time, the pain dominated Jack"s life. He closed his eyes and fought the scream that he wanted to emit, but knew he could not. All his life, he had been trained to control his emotions, as a British gentleman should. His mother – or the cold-eyed woman he had thought of as his mother – had taught him never to react to pain by inflicting more of the same, which was a lesson reinforced at the boarding school where he had suffered his childhood and youthful years.
Jack dragged back these lessons now and put the pain into perspective. There was more than one pain; there was the overall mental pain of defeat, and there was the single sharp agony in his left thigh. It was that latter pain that he found hard to control – it was that pain he had to identify and ease, or at least underst
