Chapter 15 Lucian
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Lucian
I fucking hated it when Solomon was right.
He was right about most things. But being right about my avoidance of Mira was a particular brand of correctness that made my jaw ache from clenching.
I wasn’t afraid of facing her.
That was an absurd accusation from a man who communicated primarily through silence and meaningful stares. I was being strategic. Giving her space to process the lycan revelation, the mate bond, the fact that her life had become a supernatural disaster in under two weeks.
Or so I tell myself.
The fact that today I was the one assigned to guard duty, courtesy of a schedule change that had Solomon’s fingerprints all over it, was not lost on me.
A sudden tap against the window caught my attention. I turned from my desk and glared.
The raven sat on the windowsill with its chest puffed and its head cocked. Its eyes pulsed with a faint amber glow, the mark of a Veyndral messenger.
This one has been showing up lately. My mother’s doing.
I stood, crossed to the window, and didn’t open it.
The raven tapped again. Its amber eyes blinked at me through the glass.
I bared my canines. The raven’s feathers ruffled.
“Here’s my reply.” My voice came out low, dangerous. “Tell them that the next time they send you here, I will rip your wings off and roast you by the fire before I eat you.”
The raven squawked. Its eyes flared, recording the words the way it was bred to, and launched itself off the sill in a flurry of black feathers.
Perhaps a death threat would buy me another week before the next message about succession, heirs, and my mother’s increasingly creative guilt.
Everything tested my temper lately. I need to breathe.
I crossed to the office door, pulled it open, and was surprised by Mira standing on the other side.
She smiled at me. Sweet, bright. The kind of smile that made her mismatched eyes crinkle at the corners and punched a hole through every defense I’d constructed over five centuries.
My heart stuttered. Fucking traitor.
Then I registered the particular angle of her head, the calculated innocence in her expression, and every alarm in my body went off at once.
She was up to something.
I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned against the door frame. “What do you need?”
“Is it me or do you look extra handsome today?”
I did my best to glare at her. “What do you need, Mira?”
She tilted her head, blinking at me with her fake innocence. “Can’t I just praise you?”
Oh she thought acting cute would work.
Well, it would.
But she didn’t need to know that.
I’d carved out an entire personality around not giving people leverage, and I was not about to hand this woman the keys to my complete undoing over a compliment and a flutter of eyelashes.
I flicked her forehead gently.
“I know you’re up to something. What is it?”
Mira frowned, rubbing her forehead. The innocence dissolved into the defiance I’d come to recognize as her default setting.
“Fine.” Her hands planted on her hips, looking up at me. It would have been intimidating if she weren’t a foot shorter. “I want to go to the upcoming town dance. Founder’s Day.”
I smiled at her. Matched the sweetness she’d given me, degree for degree.
Then I said, “No.”
I walked past her toward the staircase. Her footsteps hammered behind me, and I pressed my lips together to contain the smile threatening to destroy my credibility.
Here it comes. The tantrum.
“You can’t hold me captive here!”
I descended the stairs, eyes forward. “You’re not a captive.”
She pointed a finger at my back. I felt it without turning. “But you never let me go out.”
I glanced over my shoulder with a raised brow. “You join Percy on his morning jogs outside.”
“That’s just around the woods and this cabin! I want to go to town!”
We crossed the living room. I continued toward the kitchen. She followed, her footsteps angry enough to register on seismic equipment.
“You go out to town for groceries with Solomon.”
“That is NOT the same!”
I waved a hand at her over my shoulder and reached for the kettle. “But it proves you’re not a captive.”
The groan that tore out of her was theatrical. I kept my back to her and filled the kettle, allowing myself exactly one second of amusement before reassembling my expression.
I felt her aim a throw pillow at the back of my head.
My hand came up and caught it without turning around.
Then I turned. Crossed the distance between us in an instant, a blur of motion that stopped inches from her face. She gasped, eyes wide, and I held the pillow between us.
“Lycan, remember?” I let the smirk surface. Let my eyes hold a glint golden. “You’ll have to do better than home furnishings.”
She glared at me with a ferocity that riled me up.
Mira looked goddamn hot when she was angry.
And if there’s one thing about her, she may have been just as stubborn as me.
Or worse.
The rest of the morning, she was relentless about her request.
Her first attempt happened when I was reviewing fire station reports at the kitchen table.
A mist hit the back of my neck. Cold, wet, and smelling of herbs I hadn’t encountered since my last visit to a human pharmacy.
I turned slowly.
Mira stood behind me holding a spray bottle, finger still on the trigger, her expression caught somewhere between scientific curiosity and guilty anticipation.
“What,” I said, “are you doing?”
“The internet says wolfsbane repels wolves.” She sprayed me again. Directly in the face this time. “I figured if I made your life miserable enough, you’d let me out just to get rid of me.”
I wiped the mist off my cheek with two fingers and sniffed them. Diluted lavender, a trace of dried herb that was probably picked from the woods nearby, and tap water.
She’d made a wolf repellent from an online recipe.
I held up a finger. “Wolfsbane will not affect me that much unless ingested. Even if it worked, this is lavender and dirt. Not wolfsbane.”
Mira pumped the trigger three more times in rapid succession, hitting my chest, my jaw, and the reports I’d been reading.
“At least I can spray your stupid face.”
I took the bottle from her hand.
My fingers closed around hers on the trigger, and the contact froze both of us. Her knuckles were warm beneath my grip. Small bones, stubborn grip, skin soft enough that I became aware of every callus on my own palm.
She didn’t pull away. I held on a beat longer than necessary.
Then she broke the contact by hastily stepping away and running from the kitchen.
I stood there biting my own tongue from holding back.
Attempt two happened an hour later.
I returned to my study after a perimeter check and stopped in the doorway.
My bookshelf was wrong.
The collection I’d curated, organized by era, language, then subject, had been completely rearranged. Wedged between two volumes of Veyndral legislation, positioned with deliberate precision, was one of her romance novels.
The one with the shirtless man and the title “Captured by the Beast.”
I pulled it from the shelf and stared at the cover. The illustrated man bore a passing resemblance to me, if I squinted and ignored the scandalous pose.
“Creative,” I called toward the hallway.
Her voice drifted back from somewhere near the kitchen. “I thought you needed better taste in literature.”
“You moved every book I own.”
“Consider it motivation. Let me go to the dance and I’ll put them all back.”
“You don’t know my system.”
“Then I guess your shelf stays chaotic. Must be terrible for a control freak.”
I stared at the ruined shelf. She’d taken the time to reverse every single spine. She’d spent an hour handling my personal collection with the specific intent of making my eye twitch.
Instead of pissing me off, I was actually turned on by her challenge.
For attempt three, she tried being sweet again.
Mira brought me a mug while I was reading on the sofa. “Chocolate milk for you.”
I looked at her over the page. Then at the mug. Then back at her face, where a smile sat.
“I hate sweets,” I said just to annoy her more.
Her smile curdled into a sarcastic grin. She stepped closer, trying to shove the mug against my chest. “I say you let me out while I’m still making you chocolate drink and not poison.”
I stood from the sofa. She held her ground, the mug pressed between her palm and my sternum, and I could feel the warmth of the ceramic through my shirt. I wrapped my hand around the rim above her fingers, leaned down until my face was level with hers, and held her gaze.
Then I drank from it slowly. The sudden proximity made her breath hitch and her fingers trembled from her hand that was still on the mug, my mouth on the rim inches from it.
The chocolate was too sweet and slightly burnt. I didn’t care.
I straightened. A drop escaped the corner of my mouth and I caught it with my tongue, dragging it slow across my lower lip. Her eyes tracked the movement. Followed my tongue, making my blood run hot and my cock twitch against my zipper.
My eyes flashed gold. Just for a second. A pulse of the wolf that I couldn’t contain because she was staring at my mouth and every predatory instinct I possessed screamed to close the distance and give her a reason to keep staring.
Red flooded her cheeks. Mira whipped her head around, flipped me off over her shoulder, and marched out of the room as fast as she could.
Fuck, I want her so bad.
I chuckled.
The sound came from somewhere dark and satisfied, and I took another sip of the terrible chocolate milk because her hands had been on the mug and that was reason enough to finish it.
However, the cabin went quiet after that. Too quiet.
Mira’s silence was never peaceful.
I found myself outside her bedroom door before I could construct a logical excuse for being there. I was not checking on her because I missed the noise. I was performing a security sweep. That was all.
The door stood open. She sat cross-legged on the bed, scribbling in the new journal Solomon had bought her.