Chapter 58 Percival
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Percival
The fire divided the clearing into two and Mira sat on the wrong side of it.
Hunters to the north. Lycans to the south. My mate on a log beside the man who’d been training her for weeks, their shoulders close enough that I could count the inches from across the flames.
Mira clapped her hands once.
“Introductions. You’re going to need names or this will be a long night.” She pointed at the three unfamiliar faces. “Reese.” The freckled one lifted a hand. “Damon.” Broad, wary, arms still crossed. “Kaia.” Dark-haired, already calculating exits, didn’t acknowledge the introduction at all.
“And Wyatt, you already know,” Mira added.
Unfortunately.
The man who’d been training my mate for weeks. Whose name Solomon spat between clenched teeth and Lucian couldn’t hear without his eye twitching. Granted he helped Mira survive the compound and converted hunters to our cause but my so-called maturity lately backtracked at this moment.
So fuck Wyatt anyway.
“Solomon, Lucian, Percival,” Mira said, gesturing at our side. A pause. “My… mates.”
Damon’s face went through a journey. “All three?”
“All three,” Lucian said. The royal finality shut the topic down.
“I have questions,” Reese said.
“No you don’t,” Wyatt cut in.
Mira looked at me. The nudge was clear.
‘Your turn. Bridge this. Do the thing you do.’
I opened my mouth.
Wyatt’s hand brushed Mira’s on the map between them. It wasn’t lingering. Just the kind of incidental contact that happened between people who shared space without thinking about it.
Still, the gold of my eyes pressed in.
A wash at the edges, the hazel going warm and then hot, my wolf surging forward with a focus that incinerated the joke I’d been building. The charm evaporated. The grin died before it reached my face.
“So,” I managed. “Reese. You said you had questions?”
Flat. The warmth arriving three beats late. Reese’s eager expression wavered and Mira’s eyes cut to me with a crease between her brows.
I should have recovered. Should have leaned into the bit, flexed, cracked a joke about being the handsome one.
Two hundred years of social instinct and I couldn’t access any of it because Wyatt had shifted on the log and his thigh was touching Mira’s now and my vision kept narrowing to that single point of contact.
Oh, hell.
His casual proximity is grating my nerves. And the way he existed next to her without understanding what that cost the three men across the fire.
I knew it was petty but I couldn’t control myself tonight. I rather keep my mouth shut than say my unfounded hatred out loud and destroy this alliance.
Mira took over. Walked the group through logistics, rotation schedules, compound intel. Her voice carried the clearing while I sat on my log and carved a stake into a weapon and contributed nothing.
She kept glancing at me. Each look carried more concern than the last.
The camp wound down. Hunters drifted toward the sleeping area Solomon had designated. Reese yawned. Kaia was already gone. Damon waited for Wyatt because Damon didn’t go anywhere without Wyatt yet.
Mira caught my arm at the edge of the clearing.
“Talk to me.” Low. The one she’d used when I was curled around her legs in wolf form and the silence was eating me alive. But underneath it, a tightness. Frustration held on a leash.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You sat at that fire for two hours and gave me nothing. I needed you tonight, Percy. I was standing between two groups ready to kill each other and you were carving stakes.”
“I tried.”
“You managed one sentence before you checked out.” Her grip on my arm softened but her jaw didn’t. “What happened?”
The honest answer sat in my throat. The ugly, irrational, unfair answer that had nothing to do with the alliance and everything to do with four inches of log space and a hunter’s thigh against my mate’s.
Damn it, Percival. Get your shit together.
But I still failed.
“Maybe next time your training partner could sit somewhere that isn’t directly on top of you.”
The words came out colder than I intended. Charged. The jealousy I’d been swallowing all night finally finding a crack to escape through.
Mira went still.
“Excuse me?”
“His hand was on the map. His shoulder was on yours. His leg was against yours for the last hour. I’m surprised he didn’t climb into your lap for the logistics briefing.”
“Are you serious right now?”
“I’m stating facts.”
“You’re jealous.” Her voice dropped and the frustration cracked through. “Wyatt is building this alliance with me. His intel is keeping everyone in this camp alive. And you’re upset about where he sat on a log?”
“I’m upset that the man who represents everything that destroyed my family had his hands all over you while I sat ten feet away and pretended it didn’t gut me.”
The silence after that held weight.
“Okay,” Mira said. Controlled, trying. “That is real. I hear that. But Percy, they turned against the Order. They lost people too. Reese lost a sister. Damon’s been questioning for years. They’re here because they chose the right side.”
“They chose the right side after spending years on the wrong one.”
“So did Wyatt. And Wyatt is the reason we have an alliance at all.”
“Wyatt again. He didn’t have to sit on top of my pregnant mate, getting way too comfortable as a hunter of his caliber.”
“He wasn’t on top of me, Percy. We were sharing a map.”
“From where I sat, the difference was not much.”
She exhaled. Patience thinning but still intact. “I need you to work through this. The alliance depends on both sides trusting each other and they can’t trust us if one of our alphas looks at them and sees the enemy.”
“Maybe that’s because they are the enemy.”
The words came out quiet, cold. Not a yell but worse than one.
“Every hunter in this camp was trained to kill us. They carried those weapons for years. They followed those orders. And now they sit at our fire and we’re supposed to forget that.”
The vault had opened all the way. The cold rage pouring out in sentences that sounded rational and felt poisonous and I couldn’t stop them.
“They can turn their coats and share our food and sleep thirty feet from our fire but they’re still hunters, Mira.
They still carry the training, the instincts.
And I don’t trust a single one of them near you or our children.
Not one. I don’t care what side they claim to be on now. Once a hunter, always a hunter.”
The silence after was the worst kind. The kind where you hear your own words played back and the echo is uglier than the original.
Mira’s face had gone still. Still, in the way water goes still before it freezes.
“I have hunter blood too, Percy.”
Four words. Quiet enough that the dying fire almost swallowed them.
The cold rage shattered.
Every poisonous sentence I’d just spoken reassembled in my mind with Mira at the center of them.
Hunter blood. Hunter training. The daughter of the man who ran the Order.
The woman carrying my children belongs to the bloodline I’d just condemned, and I’d stood three feet from her and called it the enemy.
“Mira...”
“My father runs that organization. My mother died because of it. I’m dismantling it from the inside and I’m standing in front of you with hunter blood in my veins and in our children’s veins.
” Her voice didn’t crack or waver. “So when you say you don’t trust a single hunter near me or our children, you might want to think about what that includes. ”
My lungs emptied.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“It’s what you said.”
She turned toward the sleeping area.
I moved before the decision formed.
My arms came around her from behind. Desperate. The kind of despair that happens when you hear your own cruelty played back in the voice of the woman you love and realize the wolf you’ve been blaming isn’t the problem.
You are.
“I’m sorry.” Into her hair. My lips pressed against the crown of her head and stayed there. “I’m sorry. That was cruel and wrong and none of it applies to you.”
She didn’t tense or pull away. But she didn’t lean back either.
“You’re the exception, Mira. You’ve always been the exception. I can’t get angry at you. I tried once and it doesn’t take.” My mouth moved to her shoulder. A kiss pressed against the fabric, gentle, the contrast to everything I’d been tonight.
“But I wasn’t as okay as I thought I was. I shouldn’t have lashed it out on you. I let it turn me into someone who hurts the people he loves. That’s on me.”
Her hands found my forearms. Gripped. But her body stayed rigid, the commander holding ground even while the woman underneath registered the warmth.
“Five minutes,” I said. “Just let me hold you for five minutes.”
“You can’t promise that it will fix anything.”
“I can promise I’ll try. That’s all I’ve got right now.”
A breath. Then another.
She leaned back. Just a fraction. Enough that my chest took some of her weight and the three heartbeats pressed closer to my palms.
“Maybe it’s selfish to ask this of you right now. After everything you just discovered about yourself.” A pause. The admission cost her and the price showed. “But I need you, Percy. Not just the jokes or the charm. You. And I can’t bridge that gap alone.”
The words landed in the space where my cruelty had been and filled it with the weight of trust I didn’t deserve. She hated admitting need. Every man she’d ever needed had used it against her. Hudson. Thiago. Even us, when the council’s ultimatum turned need into a weapon.
And she was handing it to me anyway, minutes after I’d reminded her that her blood was the enemy’s blood.
“I need you to meet me half-way because… I really need my best friend back right now.”
Best friend. The word hit me square in the chest. Not mate or alpha. Not the father of her children. Best friend. The thing I’d been before everything else.
She was reaching for me. After everything we’d done.
After we’d ripped her heart out and told her to leave. She should hate me. Should make me crawl and beg and bleed for what we’d put her through. Instead, she was standing here, still hurting, still carrying the weight of our rejection and this entire situation, trying to understand my grief anyway.
I was such a fucking asshole.
My pain was real. But Mira was in pain too.
A mother she’d never known. A father who was a monster.
Hunter blood running through veins that now carried lycan children.
Opposing parts of her identity yet she’d infiltrated that compound alone, smiled through Thiago’s lies, and never once sat around drowning in self-pity.
She’d sacrificed everything and still found room to comfort me. The least I could do was pull my head out of my ass.
Her body softened against mine until her fingers traced lazy circles on my forearms.
Neither of us counted.
“Time’s up,” she whispered.
“I miscounted.”
The sound she made lived between a laugh and a cry. She let it exist for one beat before the armor reassembled.
I let go and stepped back. The cold rushed in but I let it because the cold was what I deserved tonight, and the warmth was what I needed to earn tomorrow.
The realization settled through me. Slow, burning, necessary. This woman had carried my grief. She’d been patient and soft and present through every stage of my breaking and I’d repaid her tonight by calling her blood the enemy.
I had so much to make up. Not just the rejection. Tonight. The cruelty. The jealousy I’d dressed up as grief. She’d been understanding beyond what any reasonable person would offer three men who’d shattered her, and I was wasting that grace on a tantrum at a campfire.
Enough.
I caught her hand before she could walk away. Brought it to my mouth. Pressed my lips against her knuckles the way a knight would. My eyes lifted to meet hers and held.
“I’ll be the man you need me to be. Not because you asked. Because you shouldn’t have to.”
Her expression softened without the armor. Just Mira, looking down at a man holding her hand to his lips with a promise in his eyes.
She had the smallest smile, barely there. Gone before it fully formed.
But I caught it.
She pulled her hand free. Walked to the sleeping area without looking back.
At the entrance she paused, pulled Solomon’s jacket tighter. The collar lifted to her face. One inhale. Quick, private.
“Good night, Percy.”
“Night, love.”
My wolf’s night vision caught every frame.
She disappeared inside.
I pressed the locket against my chest and sat at the dead fire until dawn.