Chapter 37 Percival
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Percival
The rabbit was not cooperating.
It sat six feet from me in the underbrush, nose twitching, completely unbothered by the six-foot-two lycan crouched behind a rotting log. My wolf wanted to lunge. My stomach agreed. The rest of me couldn’t stop thinking about whether Mira had eaten dinner.
She’d left food at the pine again tonight. I’d waited until she was back inside before retrieving it, folding the napkin the way my wolf instincts apparently demanded. Corners tucked, edges neat. A thank-you note written in fabric.
The rabbit bolted. I let it go.
The compound sat a quarter mile south. Industrial, ugly, bristling with new security upgrades Thiago had installed after my escape. Doubled camera rotations, additional motion sensors, a second perimeter patrol on a staggered schedule that turned the old camera gaps into almost nothing.
If Mira gives me a chance again, this psycho becomes my father-in-law. Every fairy tale needs an evil stepmother. Ours just happens to be a homicidal hunter.
I’d mapped all of it anyway. Her window was on the second floor, east side. The camera on the east tower swept past it on a fixed arc, and I’d counted the interval so many times the numbers lived in my muscle memory.
A few seconds of blind spot between sweeps. The window she opened during some nights when the compound seemed to be too stale to breathe.
Tonight, she opened it again around 2 AM. Right on schedule.
Her light stayed off, but the curtain shifted. She was awake. I was sitting in the dirt, listening to her silence.
Don’t.
She told me to leave as this is dangerous. She was right. If Thiago caught me near the building, it wouldn’t be a cell this time. It’d be a body bag.
But she’d pressed her hand against the glass last night when she thought I couldn’t see. Palm flat, fingers spread, one second before the curtain fell.
I started walking.
Wolf form to the perimeter, moving between sensor zones. I shifted back at the base of the east wall and the cold hit every inch of bare skin. Right. Clothes don’t survive the shift. I’d known that, obviously, and had chosen not to think about it until this exact moment.
Too late to go back for the jeans I’d shredded somewhere near the tree line. The camera gap was now, not later.
Human form, fully naked, climbing a military compound. My life choices were outstanding.
The brick beneath the newer render was old, the mortar gaps wide enough for fingertips. I’d been a good climber since I was a kid, back when climbing was the fastest way out of whatever house I’d worn out my welcome in.
The window ledge materialized under my hands and I crouched on the narrow lip with the camera arc sweeping past two feet from my head and absolutely nothing between me and God.
Two taps, pause, one tap.
Nothing. I tapped again. Softer.
The curtain shifted. Her face appeared behind the glass, and my lungs forgot how to work, the wolf pressing against my ribs.
She looked exhausted. Hair loose, wearing a compound-issue sleep shirt that slipped off one shoulder, exposing the collarbone where her claiming mark hid beneath the neckline.
My wolf locked onto that strip of bare skin.
Even underfed with dark circles under her eyes, Mira Maxwell made my blood run south.
Fuck.
My fingers tightened on the mortar and I reminded myself I was two stories up on a military compound with a camera sweeping back in seconds.
Not the time.
Those mismatched eyes widened. Then dropped. Traveled the full length of my body and snapped back to my face with a flush creeping up her neck that she absolutely could not hide in the moonlight.
“Are you naked?”
“Technically, the wolf was clothed in fur. The man is a victim of logistics.”
“You climbed my building. Naked. In a military compound.”
“The mortar gaps are surprisingly accommodating. Even without pants.”
Her mouth opened and closed. The blush was furious now, staining her cheeks, and her eyes kept betraying her by dipping below my chin before she hauled them back up through what looked to be sheer force of will.
“Stop looking at me and let me in before the camera comes back.”
“I’m not looking at you.”
“Mira, you’ve looked at me three times in the last four seconds.”
“I’m assessing the threat.”
“So you say, love.”
A radio crackled from the corridor. Footsteps. The patrol check, early. Some overachiever guards running ahead of schedule.
My body made the decision before my brain.
I was through the window in a motion that should not have been physically possible for a man my size through a gap that small, but adrenaline and lycan flexibility had a strong working relationship.
I landed on her bedroom floor in a heap of bare limbs and barely suppressed panic.
Mira grabbed the blanket off her bed and threw it at my face. “Cover yourself.”
I wrapped the blanket around my waist. Her scent punched through me from the fabric. Concentrated, warm, old books and honey deepened by a new layer that made my wolf howl behind my ribs. Every nerve in my body lit up and the blanket did very little to hide what that did to me below the waist.
Her eyes dropped again. Snapped back up. The flush had reached her ears.
“Closet. Now.”
She shoved me sideways. Hard. I stumbled into a closet the size of a phone booth and folded myself inside with my knees against my chest, a winter coat draped over my head, and what I was fairly certain was a vacuum cleaner handle jammed into my kidney.
The footsteps stopped outside her door.
A knock. “Ms. Maxwell? Nightly check.”
Through the slats, Mira crossed the room and pulled the door open. “Yes?”
“Routine check. Everything in order?”
“Everything is in order. Same as it was at the last check. And the one before that.” Pure irritation, one guard regretting his career choices. “Can I go back to sleep?”
“Apologies, Ms. Maxwell.”
The door closed. Footsteps retreated. Mira waited, counted under her breath, then pulled the closet open and stared down at me.
Wedged between the winter coat and the vacuum cleaner. Hanger hooked in my hair. Blanket barely preserving what was left of my dignity.
“Hi,” I said.
“Get. Out.”
I extracted myself with the grace of a newborn deer. She pulled the hanger from my hair and threw it on the bed.
“In my defense...”
“There is no defense.” Low, controlled. “You scaled a military compound naked during a heightened security alert to knock on my window. After I told you not to.”
“Technically, you told me not to come back. This is the first time. Preemptive disobedience, not repeated.”
Her jaw tightened. I shut up.
The room was small. She was close. The blanket smelled of her and my body was reacting in ways I couldn’t stop myself, which she could clearly see despite my best efforts with the fabric, and the muted bond pulsed between us with an insistence that made breathing difficult.
“Mira.” The humor left my voice. “I came because I need to say this to your face and not from behind a tree.”
Her arms crossed, posture bracing for impact.
“I’m sor...”
“Stop.”
The word echoed between us with the force of a closed door. Her expression didn’t shift, didn’t crack, didn’t give me a single inch to work with.
“You don’t get to do that here. Not in this room. Not now.” Her voice was steady but her hands were white-knuckled on her own arms. “You want to apologize? Fine. But an apology without change is just noise, Percy. And right now, all I’ve seen is you showing up where I told you not to.”
“That’s not fair. I don’t want to leave you.”
“But you did leave. Yes, you came back but you left. None of this is fair.” Her chin lifted. “I was abandoned alone in a cabin with rejected bonds with barely an explanation. So you don’t get to climb through my window and fast-track this with a pretty speech in the dark.”
My throat closed. Every word I’d rehearsed in the tree line, every version of the apology I’d built and rebuilt over sleepless nights, none of it could survive the look on her face.
Not anger. Worse.
The tired, hollowed-out expression of a woman who’d already grieved me and wasn’t sure she had the energy to let me back.
“You need to eat more,” she said. Quieter now, changing the subject. Her eyes scanned my face, taking inventory. The weight I’d dropped, the shadows under my eyes, the beard. “When’s the last time you had a real meal?”
“Define real.”
“Percival.”
“Rabbits, mostly. And one fish that I caught and immediately felt guilty about.”
Her mouth trembled with the ghost of where a smile used to live.
Without seeming to realize it, her fingers moved to the edge of the blanket at my shoulder, adjusting it where it had slipped.
The touch was automatic, muscle memory from a life that used to include fixing my collar before I went to the station.
A thumb brushed the fabric. Then my collarbone beneath it. The bond ached, deep and structural. A foundation cracked but not collapsed.
She pulled her hand back. Caught herself.
“You can’t come here,” she said. Firm again. “The tree line is one thing. This is another. If I have to worry about you getting caught on top of everything else, I’ll break. And I can’t break right now.”
“I know.”
“So go. The camera resets soon.”
I moved toward the window. Stopped to turn back.
“The food at the pine. Can I keep...”
“Yes.” Too fast. She caught herself. “For operational purposes. You’re useless to anyone if you starve.”
“Operational purposes. Got it.”
I climbed onto the ledge. The camera arc was on its return sweep. I had seconds.
“For the record,” I said, “your hair looks nice down.”
“Get out.”
I dropped from the window, hit the grass, rolled into a crouch. Wolf form, low to the ground. Twenty meters past the perimeter before my heart rate settled.
From the tree line, I turned around.
Her window was dark. The curtain back in place. But before it fell, I’d caught it. Her hand pressed flat against the glass. Her palm opened, fingers spread for one second.
I pressed my paw against the ground. Same shape.
‘Don’t come to the window again, Percival.’
I settled into the pine needles and closed my eyes. Let her heartbeat count me into a version of rest.
She was right. Coming back was reckless and stupid and would get me killed.
But I was already calculating the next camera gap.