Chapter 4 Solomon
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Solomon
I drove because neither of them could be trusted.
Lucian would have turned the car around by now, hunting Hudson through every back road until he found the bastard and peeled his skin off in strips. Percy would have talked until Mira jumped out of a moving vehicle just to escape the noise.
So I drove. Hands steady on the wheel, eyes fixed on the road, every other sense tuned to the woman in my backseat.
She’d curled herself knees to chest, arms wrapped tight, shoulders pressed against the door as if she was ready to bail at the first opportunity. My jacket still hung around her and the sight of her wrapped in my scent made my wolf pace restlessly beneath my skin.
My scent was already doing what I wouldn’t let my hands do. Seeping into the lining of that jacket and every minute she wore it, the transfer deepened. My wolf wanted her drenched in it. I could feel the pull in my chest, the instinct pushing my scent outward in waves.
Mine. Ours. Claim her. Keep her.
Her fingers found the jacket’s collar and tugged it higher, pressing her nose into the fabric. An unconscious gesture. She didn’t know what she was breathing in or why her body craved it.
But I knew.
I shoved the instinct down. She wasn’t ready for that.
Through the rearview mirror, I catalogued her.
The copper bleeding through her dark hair dye, bright against the morning light.
The way she kept her left eye angled away from me, probably self-conscious about her heterochromia.
The faint tremor in her hands that she tried to hide by tucking them under her arms.
The oversized hospital scrubs did nothing to hide the curve of her hips, the swell of her breasts beneath the thin fabric. My hands tightened on the steering wheel as I forced my gaze back to the road.
I noticed everything. It was what I did. What I’d always done.
The slight hitch in her breathing whenever Percy moved too fast in the passenger seat.
How her eyes cut to the side mirror every few minutes, watching the road to check if we were being followed.
I angled my rearview mirror wider so she could see the empty road behind us.
Her shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch.
Two years. That piece of shit had spent two years conditioning her to expect violence from anyone around her. Teaching her that hands were weapons and raised voices meant pain.
My grip tightened on the steering wheel until the leather creaked.
I wanted to find Hudson.
Wanted to drag him into the woods behind the cabin and take my time with him. Days, maybe. Weeks. However long it took to return everything he’d ever given her.
I knew exactly how to make it last. I’d done it before, for Lucian, when the kingdom required it. The enforcer’s work. The ugly things that kept a king’s hands clean.
But Hudson’s death would be personal.
Percy twisted around in the passenger seat for the third time in five minutes.
“You hungry? We could stop somewhere. There’s a diner on Route 7 that makes these pancakes. Or we could grab groceries. Do you like groceries? That’s a stupid question, everyone needs groceries. I meant do you have preferences? Allergies?”
Mira’s eyes flicked to him. “I’m fine.”
“Fine like actually fine, or fine like ‘please stop talking, strange man I just met’?”
“The second one.”
Percy grinned. “Noted. I’ll switch to comfortable silence mode.”
He lasted approximately twelve seconds.
“So the cabin’s nice. Rustic but not in a creepy way. There’s hot water and everything. Solomon built most of it himself, which sounds fake but isn’t. He’s weirdly good with his hands.”
“Percival.” My voice came out flat.
“Right. Silence mode. Activating now.”
In the rearview mirror, Lucian’s headlights followed at a constant distance. He’d insisted on driving separately. Said he needed to make some calls. What he actually needed was to hit something, and the steering wheel was a safer target than Percy’s face.
Through the pack bond, I felt his rage. A low, constant burn that hadn’t faded since we’d walked into that inn room and seen the destruction. Underneath the rage, fear. The kind that came from almost losing the one thing you couldn’t survive without.
I felt it too. But my fear was quieter, colder. It lived in the same place where I kept the memories of the forgotten week.
Her laughing at one of Percy’s terrible jokes while I watched from the corner of her shop. The weight of her head on my shoulder when she fell asleep during a movie, trusting me enough to be vulnerable.
The moment she’d looked at me and said my name for the first time.
“Solomon.”
No fear or flinch. Just recognition, warm with certainty.
Gone now. All of it.
She’d said my name at the fire scene too, pulled it from wherever the drug couldn’t reach, but there’d been confusion behind it. She didn’t know why she knew me. Didn’t remember the way she’d touched my scar, tracing the line from temple to jaw with gentle fingers.
“Does it hurt?” she’d asked.
“Not anymore.”
“Good.” And then she’d kissed my jaw, right where the scar ended. “I’m glad.”
I’d nearly come apart. She unraveled me with a single kiss that barely counted as a kiss at all.
Now she sat in my backseat, wrapped in my jacket, and looked at me with the wariness of prey watching a predator.
Percy’s guilt crashed through the bond in waves, battering against my awareness. He’d been on watch. He’d left for the fire call, radioed me to take over. But the gap between his departure and my arrival, those minutes when no one was watching her door, that was when Hudson struck.
He blamed himself. I’d deal with that later. Talk him down from the spiral, remind him that the blame belonged to one person who was going to die screaming.
For now, I focused on the road.
Anything except the way her scent filled the car, old books and honey and that maddening sweetness underneath that made my cock twitch against my zipper.
I shifted in my seat, grateful for the loose fit of my pants.
The rest of the drive passed in actual silence. Mira watched the trees grow denser outside the window, her reflection becoming more transparent as the morning light strengthened. By the time I turned onto the gravel drive that led to the cabin, sunlight was filtering through the canopy.
The cabin emerged from the tree line.
I’d spent a year building it. Lucian thought I was distracting myself from the boredom of the human world. Percy thought I was channeling excess energy into productivity.
Neither of them understood that I’d been following an instinct I couldn’t name, driving me to create a space that felt permanent. Important.
A home. I’d been building a home.
I hadn’t known why until the day we walked into her bookshop and her scent wrapped around me with the force of a fist to the chest.
Mate. That was why. I’d been building for her.
Mira leaned forward in her seat, her arms finally loosening from around her knees. “This is yours?”
The movement pulled the scrub top tight across her chest. I kept my eyes on the windshield through sheer force of will.
“Ours,” Percy said, twisting around again. “Yours too, if you want it.”
She didn’t respond to that. Just stared at the cabin, and for one unguarded moment, the wariness left her face. Then the walls came back up.
I pulled to a stop and cut the engine. Lucian’s car pulled in beside us a moment later.
“I’ll get your bags.” Percy winced. “Right. You don’t have bags. Sorry. I’ll just go inside and turn on lights. Make it less murder-cabin-in-the-woods vibes.”
He was out of the car before she could respond, practically sprinting toward the front door.
Mira watched him go. “Is he always like that?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a lot of energy.”
She glanced at me in the rearview mirror. Her mismatched eyes traced the scar running from my temple to my jaw, the one I’d earned from my duty.
Most people flinched when they noticed it. They look away, make assumptions about the kind of man who carried that kind of mark.
She didn’t.
Heat crawled up my spine and my breath came out slower than it should have. Controlled, deliberate, the way I breathed when I was trying not to let my body betray me. In the mirror, her eyes narrowed slightly.
My wolf pressed against my skin, wanting to be closer.
Wanting to climb into the backseat and cage her against the door, press my nose near her neck and breathe her in until her scent lived in my lungs.
I wanted to feel the flutter of her pulse beneath my lips, taste the salt of her skin, discover if she’d gasp or moan when I bit down on that soft spot where shoulder meets throat.
My hands curled into fists on my thighs.
“You don’t talk much,” she said.
“No.”
“Is that preference or personality?”
“Both.”
Her mouth twitched, almost smiling. “Fair enough.”
The sight of it hit me low in the gut, a punch of want so intense my breath stuttered.
Lucian appeared at her door and opened it, offering a hand to help her out. She hesitated for a long moment before taking it, and I watched something flash across his face when her fingers touched his palm.
She let go as soon as she was standing.
“Come on.” Lucian’s voice was rougher than usual. “I’ll show you around.”
I followed them inside, staying far enough back that she wouldn’t feel crowded. Far enough that I couldn’t reach out and touch the small of her back the way I wanted to. The way I had during the forgotten week, guiding her through doorways, my palm pressed to her curves.
The cabin looked different through her eyes. I watched her take in the high ceilings, the exposed beams, the stone fireplace that dominated the living room. Percy had turned on every lamp he could find, flooding the space with warm light.
The furniture was old. The kind of pieces that belonged in a different century, because they did. I’d brought most of it through the portal from Veyndral, unwilling to sit on the flimsy human approximations.
“This is beautiful,” she said quietly.