Chapter 35 Percival #2
She pulled back her sleeve. The skin beneath was mottled, veins visible where they shouldn’t be, a map of deterioration that the muted bond was carving into her body.
“This is what happens when three alpha lycans claim a human and then shut the bond down. It doesn’t just hurt, Percy. It’s killing me slowly. And none of you bothered to check.”
My vision went red at the edges. The silver restraints burned against my wrists, and my wolf surged so hard against my control that I tasted copper.
“Mira-”
“I’m getting you out of here.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and the vulnerability vanished. “Not because I forgive you. Because if my father finds out what you are to me, he’ll use you to get to the other two, and I won’t let that happen.”
“If he finds out you helped me escape...”
“Then I’ll deal with it. I’ve been dealing with things my whole life. I’m good at it.”
She came back at dawn with a keycard she’d taken. The sublevel door opened. She knelt beside me without a word and reached for the restraints.
Her hands were shaking.
The silver clasps stuck, and she had to work them loose one at a time, her fingers slipping on the metal while I held still and watched her face. When the first cuff came free, the skin beneath was raw, blistered, weeping where the silver had burned through to muscle.
Mira went very quiet.
“Is seeing me tortured still not enough proof they’re evil?” I kept my voice low. The question wasn’t a weapon. It was genuine.
Her jaw tightened. She pulled the second cuff off, and I bit down on the sound that tried to escape because the relief was physical enough to make my knees buckle.
“I’m not helping you because I think he’s evil.” She set the restraints on the concrete, careful, deliberate. Her eyes met mine. “I’m helping you because leaving a person in silver chains is wrong. That’s it. I’m choosing what’s right.”
I wanted to argue. But her hands were still trembling, and the look on her face wasn’t denial. It was a woman holding the center of her own moral compass while everyone around her tried to spin it.
So I kept my mouth shut. For once.
We moved through the compound in silence. She knew the layout better than I expected, guiding me through service corridors and storage rooms with the efficiency of someone who’d been mapping exit routes since she arrived. Which, knowing Mira, she probably had.
The eastern wall had a gap in camera coverage.
The tree line swallowed us in thirty seconds, and then we were running. Her hand in mine, her breathing ragged, the bond sparking with proximity after weeks. Every part of my body screamed to stay, to hold on, to pull her close and refuse to let go.
We stopped in a clearing half a mile from the perimeter. The distance already tugging at the connection, trying to drag it back to silence.
Mira turned to face me. Both of us breathing hard, the predawn air cold on our skin.
“Go,” she said.
“Come with me.”
“I can’t. If I run, he’ll hunt us both.”
I stepped closer. She didn’t step back. Her pulse was visible in her throat, jumping against the claiming marks that we put there and don’t deserve anymore. My hand came up and cupped her jaw, and the contact caused current through me so intense my fingers trembled.
“Maybe we’re not meant to be,” she said. “Too much history. Too much hurt.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I don’t know what I believe anymore.”
I kissed her.
The kind of kiss born from days of muted bonds and the specific agony of watching someone you’d die for tell you to leave. She kissed me back with the same desperate fury, her fists twisting in my shirt, pulling me down, and my arms locked around her waist.
There was a taste of salt falling from her silent tears, her hands ripping free of my grip to fist in my shirt. I grabbed her waist, lifting her.
Mira’s legs wrapped around me in the same instinct, except this time there was no laughter or playfulness. This was anger made physical, the muted bond cracking under the pressure of proximity, and the flood of sensation that poured through was brutal.
Her pain. Concentrated, slamming into me.
My guilt, answering it.
I carried her backward until her spine hit a tree trunk. She gasped against my mouth but didn’t stop, her hands yanking my shirt over my head while her legs locked tighter. My mouth found her jaw, her throat, the claiming mark.
“This doesn’t mean I forgive you,” she said, her voice wrecked, her fingers digging into the tattoo lines across my shoulders.
“I know.”
“Stop agreeing with me.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Her hands found my belt and answered without words.
I lowered us to the ground.
The forest floor was cold and I pulled my discarded shirt beneath her back before she registered the discomfort. She grabbed the collar of my undershirt and tore it. The sound of ripping cotton in the quiet woods sent a pulse through my body that was primal.
My hands peeled her jacket off. Then the shirt beneath it. The night breeze raised goosebumps across her skin and I chased them with my mouth, tracing the path from her collarbone to her stomach while she arched beneath me and wound her fingers into my hair.
The moonlight caught the deterioration on her forearm, the mottled veins carved into her body, that my mouth found. I pressed my lips against the damaged skin, kissing along every visible line.
“You don’t get to be gentle with me,” she said. “Not after what you did.”
I growled low in my throat, my wolf surging from her words as I pinned her wrists above her head with one hand, grip firm and unyielding.
“I shouldn’t be here,” I said against her stomach. “Tell me to stop. Any time. And I stop.”
“You shouldn’t have come.” A beat. Her fingers tightened in my hair. “Don’t you dare leave.”
My teeth grazed the skin above her waistband and she pulled my hair hard enough to send a bolt of heat from my scalp to my spine.
“I can’t fucking stay away from you, Mira,” I murmured against her skin, my lips brushing her ear. “I tried. But I can’t do it. I need you like this. Need to feel you.”
I released her wrists just long enough to yank her pants down her hips, exposing her bare thighs. My fingers hooked into her underwear next, tearing them aside with a sharp tug that made her gasp.
Her pussy was already slick, glistening in the faint moonlight filtering through the trees, and I spread her legs wide, positioning myself between them.
I dropped to my knees and buried my face between her thighs without warning.
Her back bowed off the ground and the cry that ripped from her throat echoed through the canopy.
“Percy, we don’t have time for...”
“I’ve been in silver chains for two days.” I dragged my tongue through her folds in one long, flat stroke and groaned against her cunt. “I’m taking what I want.”
I ate her out with starvation behind every stroke, my tongue plunging inside her, lapping at her walls, then pulling back to suck her clit between my lips and flick it until her thighs clamped around my head.
My silver-burned hands gripped her hips, the raw skin stinging against her body, and I held her pinned while I devoured her. She bucked and writhed, her fingers fisting in my hair, grinding my face harder against her pussy.
“Oh God, oh fuck, Percy...”
“That’s it, love. Ride my face.” I slid two fingers inside her and curled them forward, finding the spot that made her legs shake.
Her walls clenched around my knuckles, drenching my hand, and I pumped them in and out while my tongue worked her clit in merciless circles.
“So wet for a woman who hates me. Dripping all over my chin.”
“Shut up.”
“Make me.” I sucked harder and she held back a scream.
Her hand caught my wrist before I could add a third finger. Not stopping me but turning it over. The silver burns were raw. She stared at them in the moonlight, then brought my ruined wrist to her mouth and pressed her lips against the wound.
I pulled my fingers free, surged up her body, and kissed her with her own taste on my tongue. She moaned into my mouth, her hand reaching between us, wrapping around my cock, and the contact after weeks of nothing made my hips jerk forward involuntarily.
“Fuck, Mira.” My voice came out wrecked. She stroked my base to tip, her thumb spreading the pre-cum leaking from the head, her grip firm enough to make my jaw clench.
“Is that all you’ve got?” she said against my mouth. “The Percival I knew wasn’t this careful.”
I grabbed her wrist, pinned it above her head, and lined myself up. The head of my cock pressed against her entrance, slick with her arousal and my spit, and I held there, watching her face.
“Take it,” she demanded.
I slammed into her in one brutal stroke.
Her scream scattered birds from the canopy.
Her walls stretched around my cock, impossibly tight, clenching and pulling me deeper as her body fought to accommodate every inch.
The silver burns on my wrists screamed where they braced against the ground and I didn’t care.
“Shit, feels so fucking good.” I pulled back slow, watching my cock slide out coated in her juices, then drove back in hard enough to shift us both across the forest floor. “This tight little pussy missed me, didn’t it? Even if you won’t say it.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” But her voice shattered on the last word and her legs locked around my waist, heels digging into my ass, dragging me deeper.
I set a punishing rhythm. Each thrust bottomed out with a force that made her tits bounce and her nails gouge lines through the tattoos on my back.
The wet, obscene sounds of my cock pounding into her soaked pussy echoed off the trees, mixing with the slap of skin on skin and her moans that she’d stopped trying to muffle.
“Harder,” she said.
I grabbed her thigh and hitched her leg over my shoulder, changing the angle so I could drive into her cervix.
The shift made her eyes roll back and her mouth fall open in a silent scream.
I fucked her into the ground, my hips snapping with a ferocity that tore my silver burns open against the dirt, and the copper tang of blood mixed with the scent of sex and pine.
“Just like this?” I groaned, gripping her hip hard enough to bruise. “You want me to fuck you until you can’t walk back to that compound? Because I will. I’ll ruin you for anyone who isn’t me.”
“You already did that.” Her nails raked down my chest, following the ancient script tattooed across my ribs, the moonlight turning the ink silver. “Now stop talking and prove it.”
I grabbed both her wrists, pinned them above her head with one hand, and drove into her with everything I had. My free hand slid between us, thumb grinding her clit in rough circles while my cock slammed into her at an angle that made her walls clench and flutter with every stroke.
“Come for me,” I commanded, my mouth finding her ear. “Let me feel this pretty pussy shatter around my cock, Mira. Soak me. I want to feel you dripping down my balls.”
“P-percival... I’m...”
“I know you are. I can feel you clenching.” I fucked her faster, harder, the pressure between us building to a peak that was going to break us both. “Come for me, love. Now.”
Her orgasm hit as her walls spasmed wildly around me, clenching in rhythmic waves that milked my cock from base to tip. Mira came with her teeth in my shoulder, biting down to muffle the scream, her juices gushing around my shaft and soaking the shirt beneath us.
The contraction pulled me over the edge after her.
“That’s it, take all of it.” I buried myself to the hilt and came with a groan that carried through the trees, my cock throbbing as I pumped her full, each pulse sending aftershocks through her oversensitive walls that made her whimper and clench tighter. “Every fucking drop, love.”
My knot swelled and locked us together, trapping us chest to chest. She tensed at the stretch, breath catching, but she didn’t fight it. Her forehead dropped against my collarbone and she breathed through it with the practiced focus of a woman who’d learned to absorb what her body couldn’t explain.
I brushed the hair from her face. She let me. Eyes closed, breathing still ragged, tear tracks dried to salt on her cheeks. My silver-burned wrists rested against her bare shoulders, and she didn’t flinch from the ruined skin.
My arms were around her, my cheek on her hair, both of us still breathing in pieces.
“This didn’t happen,” she said.
“Whatever you need it to be.”
She pulled back. Straightened her clothes. Fixed her hair with hands that were still shaking.
“Don’t come back, Percival.”
“Mira...”
“I mean it.” Her voice steadied, and the walls were up again, and the woman standing in front of me was the same one who’d survived a lot of things. “Don’t come back. Don’t camp outside the walls. Don’t try to play the hero. Just go.”
She turned and walked toward the compound without looking back.
I stood in that clearing until I couldn’t see her anymore. Until the bond thinned back to static and the cold settled into the spaces where her warmth had been.
Then I picked a direction that wasn’t the compound and wasn’t the portal and started walking.
A rogue with no title, no pack, no plan, and nowhere in either realm to call home.
Solomon’s bruise was almost gone from my jaw. The locket I’d finally worn found along me when I was a foundling hung beneath my shirt, its engraved words pressing into my sternum.
You are loved. Find your way home.
I kept walking without a destination.