Chapter 44 Solomon
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Solomon
I woke to a ceiling I didn’t recognize.
Stone. Rough-hewn, curving overhead in an arch that suggested natural formation reinforced with manual labor. Roots threaded through cracks in the rock, and the light came from a pale luminescence that seemed to emanate from jars positioned along a shelf carved into the wall.
My body registered the damage before my mind finished analyzing the room. Both shoulders ached where the darts had entered and a residual numbness radiated down my arms into my fingertips.
I sat up. The motion cost me more than it should have.
Percival was on the floor three feet away, propped against the stone wall with his legs stretched out in front of him. His skin had gone gray beneath the stubble, and the dart wound on his neck was an angry red circle surrounded by spreading bruise.
Lucian was worse.
He lay on a low cot against the far wall, shirt stripped away, and the wound in his chest was a nightmare. The entry point had stopped bleeding but the tissue around it had darkened to a web of black veins that spread across his ribs and up toward his collarbone.
“Don’t move yet.”
The voice came from behind me. I turned, too fast, and the room tilted. A hand caught my shoulder and steadied me.
Father.
No longer just the ghost I’d been chasing for twenty-four years or the portrait that hung in the wall of our home. The man in front of me was real. Ruined but alive.
He held a small ceramic cup. “Drink this. Both of you.”
“What is it?”
“A counter-agent for the sedative compound. I’ve had years to study their formulations.” He pressed the cup into my hands. “It will help.”
I drank. The liquid was bitter, metallic, and it burned going down. Within seconds, the numbness in my arms began to recede. Father took the cup from me, refilled it from a clay vessel on the shelf, and crossed to Percival. He crouched beside him and held the cup to his mouth.
Percy drank. Coughed. Some color returned to his face.
“Where are we?” My voice came out rough.
“My home.” Father straightened. “For the past thirteen years, at least. Before that I moved every few months. This was the first location I found that their patrols couldn’t reach.”
I studied the space. A cave system, expanded by hand, shelving carved into the walls held supplies, jars, dried food, medical equipment that looked salvaged from multiple sources. A workstation in the corner was covered in documents and hand-drawn maps.
This wasn’t a hiding place.
This was an intelligence operation run by one man for over a decade.
My eyes tracked back to my father. He’d already tended to his own wounds. The graze on his shoulder was covered with a paste I didn’t recognize. Not lycan medicine. Not human either. A hybrid probably developed.
His hands were steady as he worked. The same hands I remembered from childhood, guiding mine through sword forms, pressing against the back of my neck when I was too young to understand that the gesture meant I’m proud of you.
“You’re staring,” he said without looking up.
“You’re alive.”
“Surprisingly.”
He finished with his shoulder and turned to me. His pale silver eyes, identical to mine, moved over my face. Observing lines that hadn’t been there before.
“You look tired, Solomon,” he said quietly.
“I’ve been looking for you.”
“I know.”
His hand came up. Hovered near my face without touching it, the way you’d approach a wound you weren’t sure had healed. Then he pressed his palm against my cheek.
My throat closed.
“Your king needs attention,” I said.
Father’s hand dropped. He nodded, understanding the deflection without resenting it.
He moved to Lucian’s cot and examined the wound. His fingers traced the edges without touching the darkened veins.
“The compound they used on the blade is a concentrated variant of their standard silver toxin. They’ve been refining it for years.” He straightened. “I have a treatment but it needs to be applied by someone with steady hands and medical training. I can stabilize him until then.”
He produced a different paste from his supplies, darker than the one he’d used on himself, and began applying it around the wound’s perimeter. Lucian didn’t stir.
“He was stabbed,” Percival said from the wall. His voice was steadier now, the counter-agent doing its work. “By Mira.”
Father’s hands didn’t pause. “I saw.”
“You were watching the whole time,” I said.
“I’ve been watching that compound for years, Solomon.
I watched you arrive five days ago. I watched you plan your approach.
” His jaw tightened. “And I watched your mate walk into that clearing with a blade and a performance that was either the best acting I’ve ever seen or the most effective conditioning. ”
The word landed in the room and sat there.
Conditioning.
“She didn’t hesitate,” I said. “She didn’t look at us after the darts hit. Didn’t flinch. The woman I knew would have broken.”
“Maybe she did break,” Percy said. “Maybe that’s what Thiago’s been doing for weeks. Breaking her down and building her back into what he needs.”
“She’s been there for weeks.” I forced myself to say it. “I was sure he’s been feeding her a version of history designed to make us the enemy. Add the rejection on top of it.”
Percy’s fist hit the stone floor. The sound echoed. “So we just accept that? We lost her?”
“Nobody said that.”
“You’re making the case.”
“I’m assessing the situation.”
“Enough.” Lucian’s voice. Barely above a whisper, rough with pain, but carrying authority. We both turned.
His eyes were open. Gold-rimmed, fever-bright, focused on the ceiling with the concentration of someone fighting to stay conscious.
“She didn’t twist the blade,” he said.
The room went quiet.
“The angle.” Lucian swallowed. The effort of speaking was visible in the tendons of his neck. “A wound that bleeds and burns and looks fatal from the outside.” His eyes moved to mine. “But misses every major organ. The silver compound will slow my healing for days. It won’t kill me.”
“That could be a miss,” I said. Testing it. Not believing it.
“I taught her where to aim.” Lucian’s mouth curved at one corner. Faint. Pained. “Throat or the inner thigh or inside of the arm. And I told her: don’t stab without twisting unless you want your enemy to live.”
The words echoed in the cave. I ran them against the evidence: the fact that a woman trained with a blade for weeks had driven it into a stationary target and somehow avoided every critical structure.
“Then it’s not a miss,” I said.
“No.” Lucian closed his eyes. “Mira doesn’t miss.”
Percy’s breath left him in a rush. He tipped his head back against the stone, and the relief that moved through his body was visible in every muscle that unclenched.
“She’s running an operation,” I said.
The pieces rearranged themselves behind my eyes. The flat expression. The refusal to make eye contact. The precision of the attack, designed to incapacitate without killing, timed so the hunters would fire on already-falling targets rather than standing ones.
“The trial earned her trust. Whatever she needs access to inside that compound, she just bought it with our blood.”
“Smart girl,” Father said quietly from the corner.
“We go back.” Percy was already pushing himself to his feet. The counter-agent had restored his color but his hands still trembled. “Right now. She’s in there alone, pregnant, surrounded by...”
“No.”
Father’s voice cut through the room with an authority that surprised all three of us. He stepped away from Lucian’s cot and faced Percival.
“You don’t understand what’s in that compound.
Not fully.” His silver eyes moved between us.
“I’ve been observing the Order for over a decade.
The captive wolves in the sublevels are not prisoners in the way you think.
They’re test subjects. The device they call the Purifier doesn’t merely restrain our kind.
It forces a feral reversion that strips the lycan consciousness entirely. What’s left is an animal. Permanently.”
“We know about the Purifier,” I said.
“You know its name. You don’t know its trajectory.”
Father crossed to his workstation and pulled a hand-drawn schematic from the pile.
“Three years ago, the Purifier was a stationary device. Required physical contact with the subject. Two years ago, they developed a proximity variant. Effective range of ten meters.” He laid the schematic on the table.
“Six months ago, I intercepted documents referencing an aerosol deployment system. Airborne. Dispersal radius of half a kilometer.”
The numbers settled in my chest.
“If you rush that compound and fail,” Father continued, “Thiago deploys the aerosol variant. Not against the captives. Against any lycan within range. Against you and even your mate, who carries lycan children.” He let that land. “Against the children themselves.”
Percival sat back down.
“She bought you time with that performance,” Father said. “Don’t waste it by being reckless without a plan that accounts for what they’re actually building.”
The silence held. Lucian’s breathing filled the cave, shallow and labored.
“Then we plan,” Lucian rasped. “We can’t just leave her there after finding out she’s carrying our pups. Especially in a hunter’s compound that hates lycans.”
“We have to be careful in meeting her. The Order knows all our faces,” I said. “Thiago confirmed it. He’s been monitoring us since Ashvale.” I looked at Percy. “You’re the escaped wolf. Every guard in that compound will know you most.”
“I know the layout better than anyone.”
“From the outside. And that’s where you’re most useful.” I held his gaze. “You and Father run the exterior. Draw their patrols east. I go in from the west while they’re chasing you.”
Percy’s jaw worked. The soldier wrestling the man.
“I move without sound,” I said. “It’s what I do.”
“He’s right.” Lucian’s voice from the cot. “Solomon goes in. Percy runs the diversion. Farmon provides ground support.” A pause. “That’s the plan.”
Percival looked at me. At Lucian then at the cave ceiling. He finally nodded.
The sound of footsteps reached us from the tunnel entrance. Light, precise, the gait of someone tracking by scent through unfamiliar terrain. My hand formed claws before the scent registered.
Giselle stepped through the narrow opening. Her expression said she’d run the hunters in circles for the better part of an hour before doubling back.
“Best tracker Veyndral ever produced.” Father said it with the tone of a man confirming a memory. “I remember you. Dravon’s daughter. Eastern border patrol.”
Giselle assessed him in two seconds. The shelter, the supplies, the hand-drawn schematics. The fact that he was alive when everyone believed him dead.
“Lord Farmon,” she said.
“The king is poisoned.” Father gestured to a sealed jar on the shelf. “Apply it directly to the wound and the vein lines every four hours. It won’t close the wound, but it will pull the compound from his blood.”
Giselle was already at the shelf, examining the jars. “How long until he’s mobile?”
“Depends if the treatment holds.”
She looked at me. The question in her eyes was clear.
“You stay with him,” I said. “Nobody leaves this shelter until Lucian can stand.”
She didn’t argue. She uncapped the jar and went to work on Lucian’s chest.
I stood. My legs held. The counter-agent had burned through the last of the sedative, and my muscles responded. The medicine worked.
“Not now.” Father’s voice caught me before I reached the tunnel. “You go in daylight, you die. Their patrols are tripled after this morning. Give it until dark.”
“That’s hours.”
“Hours your body needs. Even Percival. I need to brief you on every corridor, every blind spot, every rotation gap that compound has.” His silver eyes held mine.
“You want to reach her, or you want to make a statement? Because one of those ends with you inside and the other ends with you dead at the perimeter.”
He was right. I hated it with every fiber that pulled toward the south, but he was right.
We used the day.
Father spread his hand-drawn schematics across the workstation.
Lucian slept. Giselle reapplied the treatment every four hours. By late afternoon, the black veining had stopped spreading.
When the sun dropped below the tree line, I geared up. Father watched every movement with an expression I hadn’t seen from him in twenty-four years.
Pride. And terror. At the same time.
“Solomon.”
Lucian’s voice. Rough, barely conscious, but his eyes were open.
“She’s carrying our children.” His voice held steady. “Make sure she’s okay.”
The cave narrowed to a tunnel that opened into the forest.
Night had settled over the trees. No moon. Percival and my father was already moving south toward the eastern perimeter, two shadows preparing to give the hunters exactly what they’d been looking for.
Within the hour, every patrol on that side of the compound would be chasing a ghost.
I went west. Alone. The enforcer, doing what enforcers did.
The ugly things. The necessary things.
This time for Mira.