Nobody asked where Dimitri had been.
That was the first rule of operating near a man whose silence had its own gravitational field: you did not ask questions that the silence was already answering, and the silence coming off Dimitri as he emerged from the tree line was answering several questions simultaneously, and none of them was comfortable.
He was wet from the stream, which was notable. His expression was the same as it always was, which was to say completely unreadable, which was also notable given that the last forty minutes had involved the systematic and thorough destruction of every hyena in the immediate vicinity and then a period of time in the undergrowth that nobody was going to mention.
He walked back into the clearing with the measured, unhurried stride of a man who had dealt with a situation and considered it dealt with, and Leaf Team, who had been waiting with the specific, careful patience of people who had learned not to hover, straightened without being told.
