Chapter 54 Percival
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Percival
Running helped.
The thinking was still a disaster, a tangle of names and dates and a locket that used to be a mystery and was now an answer I hadn’t been ready for.
But the running, the four-legged, ears-back, muscle-burning sprint through the tree line at a pace that turned the forest into a blur of green and brown and cold morning breeze, that helped.
My wolf had taken the news better than the man. Animals don’t overthink grief. I’d been running the perimeter since before dawn, looping the safe zone Solomon had mapped, and every circuit burned off a fraction of the weight that had been sitting on my chest since Farmon said my parents’ names.
My legs pumped harder. The forest floor absorbed the impact of my paws and I let the rhythm replace the thoughts.
Run. Breathe. Turn. Run again.
On the fourth loop, I caught her scent.
Mira was sitting on a fallen log near the stream, wrapped in one of Solomon’s jackets, her tablet balanced on her knees.
She looked up when I broke through the tree line and her expression cycled through surprise, concern, and then a softness that made my wolf slow from a sprint to a trot without my permission.
“Hey,” she said.
I padded toward her. My wolf was massive, dark brown with hazel-gold eyes, and in this form the emotions simplified. No words to fumble, no conversations to navigate. Just the bond and the instinct and the woman who smelled more right than anything else in either world.
I stopped in front of her. She reached out and her fingers sank into the fur behind my ears.
Everything slowed.
Her touch was unhurried. Scratching gently, working through the dense coat at my neck, and the tension I’d been carrying for days began to unspool in a way that running hadn’t managed.
My wolf leaned into her hand, and the sound that came from my throat was closer to a purr than any noise a wolf should make.
“There you are,” she murmured. “I’ve been waiting for you to come back.”
Definitely not from the run but from my silence.
I lowered my head and pressed my muzzle against her stomach.
The three heartbeats accelerated at the contact, a tiny chorus responding to their father’s presence, and the bond pulsed with a warmth that filled every hollow space the grief had carved.
Mira’s hand moved to the top of my head, stroking gently, and I curled around her, my body wrapping the log until my head rested against her belly and her fingers traced slow patterns through my fur.
“I know,” she whispered. “Lucian told me about your parents.”
My body stiffened for half a second. Then relaxed, because of course he had. And because there was no version of this where she didn’t find out, and no version where the finding out changed how her hand moved through my fur.
She leaned down and pressed her lips to my forehead. A kiss so tender it nearly undid the last of my composure.
“I’m sorry, Percy.”
They settled into me with a weight of acknowledgment. I stayed curled against her stomach and let the heartbeats fill the silence, and for the first time in days, the silence didn’t hurt.
When I shifted, it happened without a decision.
One moment wolf, the next moment man, naked and kneeling in the dirt with my arms wrapped around her waist and my face pressed against her stomach. The tattoos on my arms stood out against her borrowed jacket and the morning cold bit at my bare skin but I didn’t move.
Mira didn’t flinch. Didn’t pull back. Her fingers found my hair, human hair now, curly and tangled from the shift, and she carded through it with the same gentle patience she’d used on my wolf.
“I’ve got you,” she said.
My shoulders shook. The release of holding myself rigid for days, the muscles finally unlocking, the jaw unclenching.
I buried my face deeper and breathed her in. The bond frequency between us wasn’t the roaring inferno it became during claiming or the desperate surge of reunion. It was low, steady, constant. A heartbeat beneath a heartbeat.
We stayed that way. I don’t know how long. Long enough for the sun to shift through the canopy and the stream to change its song twice.
When I finally lifted my head, she was watching in a way that made my chest ache in an entirely different way.
“I missed you,” she said. Just that. Sincere enough to bruise.
“I was right here.”
“No. You weren’t.” Her thumb traced my cheekbone. “The quiet version of you scares me more than anything Thiago could do.”
The honesty of it hit center mass. I turned my face into her palm and pressed my lips against it.
“I’m sorry I pushed you away,” she added. “Before. When everything fell apart. I should have...”
“Hey.” I caught her hand. Held it. “You were protecting yourself. I understand that better now than I did then.”
Her jaw trembled for a fraction of a second before she controlled it.
I stood. The cool air reminded me aggressively that I was naked, and the awareness hit us both at the same time. Mira’s gaze tracked down my chest, over the tattoos, caught itself at my hip bones, and snapped back up to my face with a speed that made her blush to her ears.
“You could put clothes on.”
“I could. But you blushing is doing wonders for my emotional recovery.”
“I’m not blushing. It’s cold.”
“It’s not cold. You’re staring at my tattoos.”
“I am not.”
“Love, your eyes were at my waistline three seconds ago.”
The blush deepened. She stood from the log and jabbed a finger at my chest. “Put. Clothes. On.”
Her fingertip landed on the tattoo below my collarbone. She didn’t pull back. Her finger traced the line of ink down toward my sternum, casual, almost absent, and the touch sent a current straight through my body that was not absent at all. My cock stirred and I had zero clothing to hide that fact.
Mira noticed. Her eyes went wide, then deliberately, infuriatingly, she smirked.
“Emotional recovery, huh?”
“That’s a different kind of recovery.”
She patted my chest twice, turned on her heel, and walked toward the stream with a sway in her hips that was absolutely intentional. I watched her go with my blood rerouting south and a grin splitting my face.
“There he is,” she called over her shoulder. “Welcome back.”
I pulled on the spare clothes stashed by the stream, the ones Solomon insisted we keep at every waypoint because “operational preparedness” was his love language.
Mira watched me dress with an attention she pretended was casual, and the normalcy of it, the easy push and pull between us, felt more restorative than a week of running.
Back at camp, Lucian sat against his tree with his shirt open, the scar from the silver compound a raised line across his chest. Healed but permanent, a reminder carved into his skin.
He looked better than he had in days. Color returned, posture straight, the king’s body finally catching up to his stubbornness.
Solomon sat across from him with maps spread between them, and Farmon occupied his usual spot by the fire, grinding medicine with his misaligned hands.
“Look who’s verbal again,” Solomon said without looking up.
“Don’t make a thing of it.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Lucian assessed me with quiet attention. Whatever he saw in my face satisfied him enough to nod once and return to the maps.
Mira settled beside me on a fallen log, the tablet open on her lap. She’d been compiling hunter personnel files from the compound’s archive, flagging names of recruits whose records showed cracks. Doubters. Conflicted. The ones who might listen if given a reason.
I leaned over her shoulder to look. Not because I expected to contribute. Because sitting next to her was better than sitting anywhere else, and because the data on the screen was starting to itch at a part of my brain that didn’t usually get much exercise.
“What’s that column?” I pointed at a series of dates in the recruitment records.
“Enlistment dates. When each hunter officially joined the Order.”
“And these?” A parallel column in a different file, one of the research logs she’d pulled from the sublevel archives.
“Purifier trial dates. When they tested each batch of the serum on captured lycans.”
I looked at both columns. Then I pulled the tablet toward me and scrolled through the recruitment records, cross-referencing the dates against the Purifier timelines. Mira let me take it without protest.
The pattern crept. A trial date in March, a cluster of enlistments in May. Another trial in August, another recruitment wave in October. The gap was consistent. Six to eight weeks between a Purifier test and a spike in new hunters joining the Order.
“Percy?” Mira was watching me.
“When they test the serum, what happens to the lycans?”
“They go feral. Mindless. Violent. No higher brain function.”
“And then what? They keep them locked up?”
She hesitated. “The reports mention ‘containment failures.’ Subjects that escaped during testing. It’s listed as a security issue.”
“How many containment failures?”
She scrolled through the research logs. “A lot. Dozens across the last twenty years.”
“One every six to eight weeks?”
Silence followed. The sound of two people arriving at the same conclusion from different directions.
“They’re not containment failures,” I said.
“They’re releases. The Order creates feral wolves from captured lycans and then lets them loose.
The wolves attack civilians. Survivors join the Order because they think lycans are monsters.
” I set the tablet down. “It’s a pipeline.
They manufacture the threat, then recruit from the wreckage. ”
Mira’s face went white.
“Percy.” Her voice was barely audible. “Wyatt’s parents.”
“What about them?”
“He joined the Order because his parents were killed by a rogue lycan. That’s his whole recruitment story. It’s why he’s there.” Her hand was on her stomach, pressing hard enough that her knuckles went pale. “The attack that killed his parents. The dates. The geography. They match.”
The weight of it settled between us.
“Wyatt’s parents were killed by a Purified lycan,” I said. “A wolf the Order created and released. And then the Order recruited their orphaned son to fight the very thing they manufactured.”
“If we can prove this to him...”
“We can have a converted ally. Same goes to other hunters who have the same situation.”
She stared at the tablet. The screen glowed with data that had been sitting in the compound’s own archives, evidence of a twenty-year recruitment scheme built on manufactured grief.
“Percy.” Solomon’s voice, from across the clearing. Measured but carrying a note of approval I rarely heard directed at me. “That was well done.”
“Don’t sound so surprised.”
“I’m not surprised. I’m impressed. Those are different.”
“Getting smarter every day.” I leaned back, and the grin that spread across my face was the first real one in a week. Dimples and all. “Give it time. I’ll be the brains of this operation.”
“Let’s not get carried away,” Lucian said. But his mouth twitched.
“I’m serious. I’ve matured. Growth arc. Character development.” I gestured at myself. “New Percy. Improved model.”
“The improved model is still not wearing shoes,” Mira pointed out.
I looked down. She was right. I’d forgotten them at the waypoint stash. Solomon pinched the bridge of his nose. Lucian closed his eyes. And Mira laughed, real and full, and the sound of it was worth every day of silence that had preceded it.
The mood shifted when I raised the question that had been circling since my morning run.
“Why haven’t they found us?”
Solomon looked up from the maps. Lucian’s eyes opened.
“We’re half a mile from a hunter compound,” I continued. “Solomon’s route discipline is good but it’s not invisible. We’ve got a fire going. Mira comes and goes through drainage tunnels every two days. Giselle runs perimeter in wolf form.”
“Lord Farmon grinds medicine that smells strong enough to track from a mile out. Sure, he hid here for years but he was alone then and didn’t have as much attention or crossfire unlike what we did recently.
” I spread my hands. “And in all this time, not one patrol has come close to this clearing. Not one drone. Not one scout.”
The silence was different this time. Loaded.
“I’ve been monitoring their patrol routes,” Solomon said slowly. “They give this quadrant a wide berth. I assumed it was a coverage gap.”
“It’s not a gap.” I looked at Lucian. “It’s a choice. Someone told those patrols to stay away from here.”
Lucian’s jaw clenched. The king’s mind, working behind those storm-gray eyes.
“Thiago,” Mira said quietly. “He knows we’re here.”
“Perhaps he suspects,” Solomon corrected. “If he knew for certain, he’d act.”
“Would he?” I held my brother’s gaze. “Or would he let us stay exactly where we are, right where he can predict our movements, because that serves him better than chasing us through the forest?”
No one answered.
Because the answer was the kind that rearranged everything you thought you knew about the board you were playing on.
That we weren’t hiding from Thiago.
We were sitting in the palm of his hand.
And I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was waiting for exactly the right moment to close his fist.