Chapter 9 Mira
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Mira
The morning stretched on after breakfast.
Percival insisted on cleaning the kitchen himself, which meant a lot of clattering and water splashing in directions. Lucian stood by the door, pulling on his jacket, watching Percy’s chaos, a man who’d long ago accepted that some battles weren’t worth fighting.
“We’ll be back by six,” Lucian said. His eyes found mine across the room. “I’m meeting with the detective this afternoon. Should have updates on Hudson’s movements.”
I paused. “You’re telling me?”
“You asked to be kept informed.” His jaw tightened, just slightly. “So I’m informing you.”
Warmth uncurled in my chest. After yesterday’s argument in his office, and our moment on the porch, he was actually trying.
Lucian Valdris, Mr. Grumpy and lord of emotional unavailability, was meeting me halfway.
“Thank you,” I said. And meant it.
Percy bounded over, still drying his hands on a dish towel.
“Don’t have too much fun without us.” He winked at Solomon, who was leaning against the far wall with his arms crossed.
“Sol, don’t let her get bored. Play a board game or something.
Do you know any board games? Do we even own board games? ”
“Go to work, Percy.”
“I’m just saying you two can bond more.”
Lucian grabbed Percy’s collar and steered him toward the door. “We’re late.”
I watched them go. Percy’s easy laughter floating back through the open door, Lucian’s low voice responding. They moved together with an ease that spoke of years of knowing exactly where the other would be.
The door closed behind them and the cabin went quiet.
A strange feeling washed over me.
There was a flash at the edge of my vision, gone before I could grab it. The ghost of a morning just like this one. Coffee steam and easy laughter and the particular way Lucian’s shoulders relaxed when he thought no one was watching.
It feels as if I’d seen this before or lived it. Some sort of déjà vu. The certainty settled into my bones even as my mind insisted it was impossible.
Percy was easy to read. Open book, heart on his sleeve, emotions written across his face in letters a mile high. Solomon was quieter but honest, he was surprisingly direct. The silences said as much as the words.
But Lucian.
Lucian was a fortress. Walls within walls, gates that only opened on his terms. I’d spent a week in this cabin and barely scratched the surface.
Except yesterday, in his office, he’d let me in. Just a crack. Enough to see that the man behind the scowl was carrying something heavier than secrets.
And last night, on the porch, when my hand brushed his and he went completely still. When he looked at me with those storm gray eyes.
I was starting to see him. The real him.
Solomon pushed off the wall. “More coffee?”
“Please.”
He moved toward the kitchen, and I settled onto the couch. The cabin felt different without Percy’s chaos filling the silence. Smaller, somehow. More intimate.
Twenty minutes later, Solomon reappeared in the living room doorway.
He was carefully carrying an object wrapped in cloth, held with both hands. His expression gave away nothing, as usual.
“I found this at the construction site,” he said and set it on the coffee table between us. “There was a debris pile and a shelf probably fell on top of it during the fire. Kept it mostly protected.”
I unwrapped the cloth.
A journal.
Leather-bound, smoke-stained, the corners curled from heat exposure. The pages were wrinkled but mostly intact.
My journal. The one I kept behind the register at the shop.
I’d written in it during slow afternoons when the store was quiet and my thoughts needed somewhere to go. I thought I’d lost it along with my false beginning and everything else in the fire.
My throat tightened.
“The pages were wet,” Solomon continued. “Smoke and water damage. I dried them. Pressed each one so the ink wouldn’t bleed.”
He dried them.
Took my ruined journal home and spent days carefully pressing each page between books, preserving my words.
Nobody had ever done anything like that for me.
Nope. No, I wasn’t doing this. I wasn’t going to cry in front of a man who’d just casually wrecked me with thoughtfulness and was now standing there looking very casual about it.
Still, my body moved before my brain could intervene.
I launched myself at him, a grin splitting my face. My arms wrapped around his neck, face pressed against his chest, and I held on with a ferocity that surprised us both.
Solomon was solid and warm, warmer than he should have been, his body radiating heat through the thin fabric of his shirt. He smelled of winter mornings on a mountain.
“Thank you,” I whispered into his chest. The words came out cracked. “Thank you.”
Solomon went rigid.
Utterly still. For three full seconds, he didn’t move, didn’t breathe or do anything with the frozen posture of a man who’d read about physical affection in a textbook and never expected to encounter it.
Then his hand came up, landed on my back. One palm, tentative, barely making contact. The warmth of them seeped through my sweater into my skin.
A feeling bubbled up in my chest. Unfamiliar and dangerously close to joy.
I pulled back just enough to see his face and rose on my toes before I could talk myself out of it.
My lips pressed against his cheek. A thank you that words couldn’t carry.
Solomon stopped breathing.
I dropped back to my heels, grinning up at him. His expression nearly sent me into hysterics.
He was blushing.
Solomon. The man with the scar and the pale silver eyes that could freeze a room. He was blushing. A dull flush spreading across his high cheekbones, his gaze cutting sideways, refusing to meet mine.
My heart did a dangerous little flip.
God, he was adorable. This giant, terrifying guy who could probably kill someone with his pinky finger, completely undone by a kiss on the cheek.
He cleared his throat and removed his hand from my back before taking a step backward. But his foot caught on the coffee table leg.
Then he stumbled.
Which was funny because a man who mostly moved in deadly silence, who appeared and disappeared from rooms without a sound, had just stumbled over furniture. His arm came up, covering the lower half of his face as he turned away.
“T-the pages should be legible.” His voice came out rough, rambling. “Most of them. I… I’ll just go for a run. In the forests. Just… around the corner. Briefly.”
Solomon was already retreating toward the back of the cabin. Walking too fast without looking back. The sliding door to the back porch opened and closed, and I was alone in the living room, holding my smoke-stained journal, biting my lip to contain the smile threatening to split my face.
Making Solomon blush might be my new favorite hobby.
***
The afternoon light shifted through the windows as I curled up on the couch with the journal.
Most of the entries were mundane. Inventory orders or book recommendations for regulars. My chest ached at the reminder that the shop was everything I’d built from nothing but now it was truly gone.
I turned the pages carefully, mindful of Solomon’s restoration work. The warped paper still held its shape, the ink legible despite the smoke damage. He’d done an incredible job. More care than I’d shown most things in my life.
Toward the back, the handwriting changed.
Still mine, but rushed. Excited. The pen pressed harder, letters colliding. These entries were from I think just weeks ago but I couldn’t remember writing them.
Worse, most of it was illegible. Water and smoke turned the ink into abstract smears. But fragments survived.
“...told me about the bond...”
“...going insane. I can’t believe this is real...”
“...eyes are unique but not like mine, they were...”
The last entry was the clearest. Written in a steadier hand, as if I’d taken my time.
“I believe them now after seeing it with my own eyes and I-”
It stopped mid-sentence. The pen had dragged across the page, leaving a long streak of ink that trailed off the edge. The pieces fell into place in my mind that I sat up straighter, heart thumping.
I’d been writing this entry when the tea hit. Just before the fire started.
Suddenly, pain lanced through my skull.
And the living room disappeared into a new vision.
The forest at night. Rain hammering through the canopy, wind screaming through the trees. I was kneeling on the ground and blood covered my hands, warm and red, but fear wasn’t the emotion tearing through my chest.
Desperation was.
A wolf lay in front of me. Massive with obsidian black fur. There was a wound along its flank soaking the fur with crimson. The wolf’s eyes were storm gray shot through with gold.
Almost the same with… Lucian’s eyes.
My hands pressed against the wound. The wolf whined, a low sound that carved through me. “Stay with me,” I whispered. “You’re gonna be alright.”
Moonlight broke through the clouds, pale light spilling across the wolf’s body.
The wolf shuddered. A sound reached my ears, wet and impossible. Bones cracking. Shifting. The fur beneath my palms rippled, and the wolf’s spine arched at an angle that shouldn’t be possible.
A change was happening. A… transformation?
I leaned closer, trying to see, trying to understand what my hands were feeling beneath the blood and the fur and the…
Knocking.
Loud, insistent, pulling me back.
I blinked. The living room returned.
My knees had given out at some point. The journal lay on the floor beside me, pages bent. My heart slammed against my ribs and my hands still felt the phantom warmth of blood.
The knocking continued. There was someone at the front door.
I forced myself upright on shaking legs and crossed the room. My mind was still half-trapped in that vision. Wolf, blood, bones cracking.
I pulled open the door.
Cateline stood on the porch, arms crossed with a grating smile on her face.
“So it’s true.” Her gaze swept past me into the cabin. “You really are living with them.”