Chapter 59 Percival
— · —
Percival
Three days in, and the alliance looked exactly as chaotic as expected.
Lycans and humans shared a camp the way cats and dogs shared a veterinary waiting room. Technically in the same space. Spiritually at war.
The converted hunters didn’t live at camp. Disappearing from the compound permanently would trigger alarms Mira’s cover couldn’t survive. Instead they rotated to train, plan, and share intel before heading back inside.
Solomon handled logistics. Lucian handled command. And I handled the part neither of them could, which was making humans stop looking at us as if we were about to eat them.
Reese was the easiest. She laughed at my jokes, which was either genuine appreciation for my humor or a survival response.
Either way, it broke the ice.
When she laughed, Damon relaxed. When Damon relaxed, the unnamed converts beside him unclenched their jaws by a fraction.
Kaia remained immune to charm. Respected that, honestly.
“You’re doing it again,” Solomon said from behind me, quiet enough that only wolf ears caught it.
“Doing what?”
“Performing.”
“It’s not a performance if it works.”
His silence was the specific brand that meant he agreed but would rather swallow his own tongue than say so. I took the win.
Mira had gone back to the compound yesterday. The rotation demanded it, and the security grid still needed mapping from the inside. Every hour she spent behind those walls tightened a knot in my chest that no amount of charm could untangle.
The bond pulsed between us, muted but present. Her frequency running beneath everything, steady, a thread I followed in my sleep.
I was carving a practice stake by the fire pit when Wyatt dropped onto the log beside me. Closer than a man usually sat next to another man whose mate he spent weeks training alone with.
“She’s strong,” Wyatt said. No greeting, no lead-in. Just the statement, delivered with the quiet certainty of someone who’d watched Mira work up close.
“I know.”
“Stronger than when she arrived at the compound. Whatever the bond does to her, it’s accelerating.”
“I know that too.”
“She swept me last week. Full leg sweep, put me on my back on the mat.” A half-smile crossed his face. The kind of smile a man wore when remembering a woman who’d surprised him. “Nobody’s done that to me since advanced training.”
My hand paused on the stake. The carving knife pressed a little harder than necessary into the wood.
“Sounds painful,” I said.
“Mostly humbling.” The half-smile widened. “She’s a fast learner.”
“She’s a lot of things.”
The edge in my voice wasn’t subtle. Wyatt caught it. His gaze shifted to me, reading the subtext with a soldier’s precision, and for a second the two of us sat on that log and acknowledged what neither of us was going to say out loud.
He didn’t have a chance. He knew it and I knew it and the bond ensured it wasn’t even a competition.
But knowing you couldn’t have someone didn’t kill the wanting, and the wanting was there in the way he said her name and the way his eyes tracked her when she moved through camp.
“I dare you to a round,” I said. Changed the subject by making it physical. Worked for lycans, probably worked for hunters too. “Hand to hand. No weapons, no shifting. Just skill.”
“A dare.” Wyatt raised an eyebrow. “From an old supernatural wolf.”
“Scared?”
“Pragmatic. You could bench-press me without breaking a sweat.”
“I’ll dial it back. Human speed, human strength. Promise.”
The competitive spark caught. The soldier in him overriding the pragmatist because ego was a universal language.
“Fine,” he said. “One round.”
We cleared space near the eastern tree line.
Word traveled fast in a small camp and within minutes we had an audience. Reese and two of the newer converts perched on supply crates. Damon leaned against a tree with his arms crossed. Kaia watched from a distance with the expression of a woman cataloging weaknesses.
On the lycan side, Solomon observed from the map table without pretending he wasn’t. Lucian stood at the command post, arms folded, the eyebrow already raised in that specific arch that said he was tolerating this.
Wyatt stripped to his undershirt. He rolled his shoulders and settled into a combat stance that was textbook precise.
I mirrored him. Loose, easy, the stance Solomon had drilled into me two centuries ago but worn down to instinct.
The first exchange was fast. Wyatt jabbed, I slipped left, caught his wrist, redirected. He recovered and swept at my lead leg. I hopped it and countered with a palm strike he blocked with his forearm.
“Not bad,” I said.
“Patronizing a human in front of his colleagues.” Wyatt circled. “Bold move.”
“I prefer confident.”
He came in harder on the second exchange. Combination punches, tight form, no wasted movement. One caught my shoulder and the impact was real even at human-calibrated strength. Reese whistled. The newer converts cheered.
I grinned. Shifted my weight and answered with a three-hit sequence that backed him up four steps before he found his footing.
The third round was where Wyatt adapted. He’d been reading my patterns and on the next engagement he feinted left, shot for my waist, and got me into a clinch.
For a human, the man was phenomenal. My wolf respected it but also wanted to establish dominance over any male within a hundred yards of Mira.
I broke the clinch, swept his ankle, and put him on his back in the dirt. The camp went quiet for half a second before Reese started clapping.
Wyatt stared up at me from the ground. “You said human strength.”
“That was human strength,” I offered my hand. “Mostly.”
He took it with a grudging laugh and pulled himself up. His eyes caught a figure over my shoulder and the laugh softened into an expression I recognized because I wore it myself every time she entered a room.
I turned.
Mira stood at the clearing. She must have come through the drainage route while we were sparring because her boots were caked with tunnel mud and her jacket was zipped over the bump she’d stopped being able to hide.
She was watching me.
And the look on her face was the one she kept locked behind walls and armor.
Then she caught me looking and the walls slammed back. She crossed the clearing toward Farmon’s station, asking about medicine schedules, all business.
But I’d seen it.
I found her an hour later at the stream. Alone. Sitting on the same fallen log where she’d scratched behind my ears in wolf form and told me she’d missed me.
The echo of that moment lived in the bark, in the water, in the space between us that had been shrinking for days.
“Hey,” she said without turning. She always knew when it was me. The bond or the scent or the fact that I was constitutionally incapable of approaching anyone quietly.
“Hey yourself.” I sat beside her. Close enough that my thigh pressed against hers. “You watched me fight.”
“You were showing off. There’s a difference.”
“You had a look on your face.”
“I had a normal face on my face.”
“Love.” The endearment landed between us with its full history. “You had the look.”
Her jaw tightened. The precursor to vulnerability she was trying to suppress.
“I’m scared,” she said. Quiet enough that the stream almost swallowed it.
“Of what?”
“Of letting you back. All the way.” Her hands pressed flat against her knees. “The rejection broke a part of me that I didn’t know could still break. I thought Hudson had already shattered every piece worth shattering and then you three found new ones.”
She paused. Her fingers curled against her kneecaps.
“And then the other night at the fire, when you said what you said about hunters.” She didn’t finish the sentence. “You showed up the next morning and you were different. You made Reese laugh, you sat next to Damon. You did exactly what you promised.”
A breath.
“That scared me more than the rejection did. Because it means you can change. And if you can change, then I have to decide whether to trust it.”
The honesty of it sat in my chest and burned.
“I followed Lucian and Solomon because that’s what I’d always done,” I said. “For two hundred years, they decided and I followed. And when the council demanded the rejection, I stood there and let it happen because fighting felt pointless against centuries of habit.”
My hand found hers on her knee. She didn’t pull away.
“But the regret hit immediately. It’s why I went back. Not because Lucian ordered it or Solomon planned it. Because I chose you.”
“Percy...”
“And three nights ago I sat at that fire and let the grief turn me cruel. I said things about your blood that I’ll carry for the rest of my life.
But you told me you needed your best friend back, and that woke me up.
” My thumb traced her knuckles. “I’m choosing you again.
Every morning. Even the mornings after I get it wrong. ”
Her chin trembled. The armor cracking at the seams.
“I will never follow anyone’s lead when it comes to you again. Not Lucian’s or Solomon’s. Not even yours, if what you’re choosing is to keep me at arm’s length because you’re afraid.”
“You’re annoyingly good at this,” she whispered.
“I’ve had hundreds of years of practice.”
A laugh escaped her. She turned her hand under mine and laced our fingers together.
“I forgive you, Percy.”
Four words. The bond channel between us cracked open and warmth flooded through, a rush of connection that made my vision blur and my pulse slam against my ribs. Her frequency roared to life, no longer muted.
Just Mira. Bright, consuming, mine.
“There’s my girl,” I breathed.
Her eyes glistened. She squeezed my hand hard enough to hurt and I squeezed back harder.
“If you make me cry again, I swear to God...”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” I pulled her onto my lap. Her legs straddled mine on the log, belly pressing between us, and my hands settled on her hips. “I have a much better idea.”
“Percy, we’re in the middle of camp.”
“We’re at the stream. Forty feet from camp.”