Chapter 17 Lucian
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Lucian
Mira is taking too long.
I stared at the crowd between our table and the restrooms and counted the seconds. Four minutes had passed, and the unease I’d been ignoring all evening was impossible to ignore now.
“Maybe it’s a ladies’ emergency.” Percy tipped his chair back on two legs and popped another grape into his mouth. “Calm down.”
“She’s been gone for four minutes.”
“Some things take time, Lucian.” Percy chewed. “I don’t know the specifics but I’ve been told it’s rude to rush. Besides, we agreed not to suffocate her.”
Solomon leaned back in his chair, scanning the crowd. “She’s fine. The path is well-lit. There are people everywhere. Don’t pick a fight with her again.”
He might be right. It was just in my nature to be overbearing.
She’s fine.
My wolf disagreed.
It paced beneath my skin, agitated, pressing against my ribs. This wasn’t the usual restlessness of being separated from her. This was a specific, pointed wrongness, a sensation that lived in my chest rather than my senses.
The bond.
I straightened.
Percy’s chair came down on all four legs. He’d felt it too. The teasing drained from his face, replaced by an alertness that stripped away every ounce of his laid-back demeanor.
Solomon was already on his feet.
“That’s not us,” Percy said. His voice had dropped an octave. “That’s her. Through the bond.”
He was right.
The alarm wasn’t coming from our instincts. It was coming through the mate bond itself, a pulse of raw fear pushing through a connection that shouldn’t have been strong enough to transmit emotion.
The bond was incomplete, unclaimed, a thread where a rope should be.
And yet Mira’s terror was flooding through it with enough force to make my vision blur.
“Find her.”
We moved.
The crowd parted around us. People sensed the shift even if they couldn’t name it, stepping aside as three men cut through the dance floor. Right now, we didn’t care about blending in with humans.
I reached for her scent. Pine smoke, old books laced with honey. The trail should have been obvious, a beacon in a sea of human noise.
But there’s nothing.
I stopped. Inhaled again. Deeper, pulling the air across my tongue the way my wolf processed it.
Her scent was gone.
It wasn’t faded or masked by the crowd. Gone.
As if someone had taken an eraser to every molecule she’d left behind. The gravel path to the restrooms should have been saturated with her, but it smelled of dirt and pine and strangers and absolutely nothing else.
“I can’t find her scent.” Solomon’s voice was controlled. Barely. The tendons in his neck stood out and his hands had curled into fists at his sides.
Percy shook his head. “Same for me. It’s been wiped.”
Wiped. Scent trails didn’t get wiped. Not naturally or by accident.
This was deliberate, and it required knowledge that a human stalker shouldn’t possess.
The bond. It was all we had.
I closed my eyes. Reached past the panic hammering at my ribs and found the thread. Thin, wavering, but present. A line of fear and fury stretching away from the town square and into the dark.
“East.” I opened my eyes. “Into the woods.”
We ran.
The fairy lights ended at the tree line. The music faded behind us, replaced by the crunch of undergrowth and the rasp of our breathing. The bond pulled us deeper, a compass needle spinning toward her terror.
Solomon spotted it first. A mark on a birch tree, waist height. A gouge in the bark, deliberate, angled downward.
“Knife mark.” He traced the cut with his fingers. Fresh sap beaded at the edges. “She’s marking a trail.”
My chest seized.
The dagger. The Veyndral blade I’d given her during training. She was using it to carve a path for us through the dark.
Brilliant. Terrified and being dragged into the woods, and she was still thinking.
A second mark on an oak, ten feet ahead. A third on a pine, deeper, more frantic. The spacing between them grew wider. She was being moved faster.
Suddenly, we heard a scream.
The sound tore through the trees and hit my chest with the force of a physical blow. It wasn’t a cry for help but a scream of rage.
We broke through the tree line into a clearing and the scene arranged itself in front of me.
Hudson had her by the wrist. His other hand clamped around her throat, fingers digging into the skin beneath her jaw. She was pressed against a tree, her feet barely touching the ground, the blue dress Solomon had given her torn at the shoulder.
The dagger was in her hand.
Blood ran down Hudson’s forearm where she’d slashed him, a deep cut from elbow to wrist that dripped onto the leaves below.
She’d fought. She’d used the blade exactly the way I’d taught her, horizontal, controlled, aimed for soft tissue, and she’d nearly opened his arm to the bone.
But he was bigger.
He’d caught her wrist before she could finish it, and now the dagger was pinned between them, useless, her arm twisted at an angle that made my vision go red.
Hudson saw us first. His eyes, wild and blood-streaked, went wide.
“Three of you.” His voice cracked. Sweat ran down his temples and mixed with the blood on his arm. “Really, Mira? You’re whoring yourself out to these guys? Three freaks?”
I didn’t speak.
There was nothing to say to a dead man.
We moved. Percival reached her first, ripping Hudson’s hand from her throat with a force that sent the man stumbling backward. Mira collapsed against his chest, gasping, her fingers still locked around the dagger.
Percival wrapped his arms around her and pulled her away from the tree, his body angled between her and Hudson, shielding her with every inch of himself.
“I’ve got you.” His voice was low, steady, the voice he used when she flinched. “I’ve got you, Mira. Breathe.”
Solomon got to Hudson second.
One hand closed around Hudson’s collar, the other found his chest. Solomon planted his boot on the man’s sternum and pressed down, the crack of ribs breaking echoed through the clearing.
Hudson screamed. The sound choked off into a gurgle as blood filled his throat.
Solomon bared his canines. Long, curved, designed for tearing. His pale eyes burned gold in the dark, and the snarl that rolled out of his chest vibrated the ground beneath my feet.
Hudson’s eyes went wide with a new kind of terror. The fear of a prey animal realizing it was in the presence of a predator that had never been human.
I walked toward him.
My claws extended, sliding from my fingertips with the familiar burn of bone reshaping beneath skin. Centuries of restraint, discipline, and leashing the violence beneath the crown, and right now I felt none of it.
The only thought in my mind was the bruises already forming on Mira’s throat and the sound she’d made when she screamed.
Hudson looked up at me through blood-glazed eyes. My claws caught the moonlight.
Then a sound split the air.
A whistle. A projectile cutting through the dark from the tree line behind us.
“Solomon!” Percy’s voice cracked the night.
Percy moved. Faster than I could track, he released Mira and launched himself sideways, slamming into Solomon’s frame and driving them both to the ground. The projectile hit Percy in the shoulder with a wet thud.
It wasn’t a bullet but a dart. Black-feathered, the shaft buried two inches into the muscle above his collarbone.
Percy hit the dirt, rolled, and came up on one knee.
A growl ripped from his throat, guttural and inhuman.
His eyes blazed gold, his canines fully extended, and blood poured from the wound in a steady stream that soaked through his shirt.
He clamped one hand over the puncture and crouched low, every muscle locked.
“Percy!” Mira’s scream tore through the clearing. She lunged toward him, her hands finding his face, the dagger forgotten on the ground.
Solomon was already at his side. He pressed his palm over Percy’s hand on the wound, checking, assessing. “Stay down. Don’t pull it out.”
“Wasn’t planning on it,” Percy gritted through clenched teeth. The gold in his eyes pulsed, his wolf surging toward the surface. “Burns. Whatever’s on it burns.”
I realized right away, it was laced.
The dart was laced with a special substance. The same way her tea was drugged with a component that erased her memory. This one is not an ordinary substance either.
My blood went cold.
I let the wolf surge forward, felt my eyes flood gold as I scanned the tree line. Every shadow, every rustle of leaves. Searching for the presence my instincts insisted was there.
Solomon’s warning from days ago echoed in my skull. There were others that had been following her, watching her.
And they’d gotten close enough to take a shot.
“Someone else is here,” I said.
The words settled over the clearing. Percy bleeding, Solomon crouched with Mira on her knees beside them. And somewhere in the dark beyond the tree line, a shooter is targeting her.
A branch snapped to my left.
Hudson.
I turned.
He was running. Scrambling through the undergrowth on broken ribs, blood trailing behind him and gaining distance with the desperate speed of a man who sensed his only chance at survival.
I could chase him as a man. Cover the distance in seconds, bring him down, drag him back.
But the shooter was still out there. Mira was exposed, Percy was down. The human part of my brain that calculated odds and weighed risks screamed that I needed to end this now, in one motion, without a miss.
My eyes met Solomon’s and I ordered, “Stay with them. Don’t let her out of your sight.”
I stopped thinking.
My wolf didn’t tear out of me. I let it out.
In an instant, my bones crack, my spine elongate as my muscles reshape around a frame that was twice the mass of the man who’d been standing there a second ago. The shift ripped through me in a wave of heat and pain and savage, righteous fury.
Four legs hit the ground. Claws dug into the earth.
The world exploded into scent and sound and the copper tang of blood, and Hudson’s heartbeat thundered through the forest ahead of me, panicked, erratic, prey.
I howled and ran.
The distance dissolved. Thirty feet became twenty became ten became nothing. Hudson heard me coming, turned, and his face in that final second was the only thing I allowed myself to enjoy.
Pure, annihilating terror.
My jaws closed around his chest. I felt his ribs collapse, felt my teeth puncture through muscle and cartilage, felt the hot, wet resistance of his heart as I tore it free.
He didn’t scream. By the time my teeth reached the organ, there was nothing left of him that could.
His body crumpled. I stood over the remains, chest heaving, blood dripping from my muzzle and pooling in the leaves. The heart sat in the dirt at my paws, still warm.
Silence filled the clearing behind me.
The shooter had gone. The only sounds were Percy’s labored breathing, the drip of blood from my fur, and the ragged pulse of three heartbeats that belonged to me.
I turned.
Mira stood at the edge of the clearing.
Percy was on the ground behind her, propped against a tree, Solomon pressing cloth against his wound. But Mira wasn’t looking at them.
She was looking at me.
My wolf form. Massive, black-furred. Muzzle soaked in the blood of the man who’d tormented her for two years, standing over his torn-open body with his heart cooling in the dirt.
I waited for the scream. The horror or the revulsion that any sane human would feel watching a creature tear a man apart with its teeth.
Her eyes locked onto mine. Storm gray meeting hers.
Blood on my fur, blood on her hands.
Blood everywhere, and the distance between us vibrating with a bond that pulsed with her heartbeat.
She didn’t scream.
She didn’t run.
Mira stared at me, at the wolf, at the blood dripping from my jaw, and her eyes filled not with fear but with recognition. The same look she’d given me the forgotten night when she first saw me.
The look that said she’d seen this before, in a place she couldn’t remember, in a life someone had stolen.
Her lips moved. One word.
“Lucian.”