Chapter 60 Solomon
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Solomon
I reorganized her jacket pockets before dawn. Keycard moved to the right hip for faster extraction. Water repositioned closer. Blankets rebuilt because her body temperature had been climbing with the pregnancy.
“You’re nesting, Solomon,” Lucian said from the command area without looking up.
“It’s operational readiness.”
“At three in the morning?”
“Preparation doesn’t observe a schedule.”
Lucian sighed but I simply ignored him and he let me be in the end.
I couldn’t stay still, my body and instincts are screaming for me to move, to do anything that will keep me busy.
Percival’s bond channel had restored yesterday afternoon. The surge hit mid-patrol review, his frequency blazing open with a force that snapped the pen in my hand. Across the clearing, Lucian had gone rigid.
Neither of us spoke. We knew instantly.
One channel open. Two still closed.
The weight of it followed me into the morning.
Camp had resumed its routine. Hunters rotating through on their scheduled windows, Percival building camaraderie between the two sides with the social fluency that made him indispensable, Lucian reviewing compound schematics in the command area.
Mira sat at the supply station with the radio.
The device was her lifeline to the compound. Scheduled check-ins with Thiago disguised as patrol updates, feeding her father enough truth to keep his suspicions managed while withholding everything that mattered.
I was at the map table, twelve feet away, when the radio crackled.
“Morning check-in, little daughter. How’s the eastern perimeter looking?”
Thiago’s voice from the radio was warm, paternal. The voice of a horrible man wrapped in the language of a caring father.
Mira pressed the transmit button. “Quiet. No activity past the tree line. I walked the full route at oh-six-hundred.” She smiled while she said it. The practiced, perfect smile.
Her eyes found mine across the clearing.
“Good. Wyatt mentioned you’ve been improving on the hand-to-hand drills. Said you dropped him twice last session.”
“He’s being generous. Once and a half.”
“Don’t sell yourself short.” A pause. Pride in his voice, genuine and misplaced and nauseating. “I need you ready for the next rotation. We’re shifting the perimeter grid south and I want you running point on sector four.”
“I’ll study the new grid tonight.” Her gaze stayed locked on mine while she spoke to the man who’d destroyed my father’s hands. The man whose organization had driven a wedge through my bond and sent me into a rejection I’d spend the rest of my life atoning for.
She was looking at me and talking to him and the dual reality of it settled into my chest with a weight that recalibrated everything.
“That’s my girl. Stay alert out there, little bird.”
“Always, Dad.”
The radio went silent. Mira set it down and the smile collapsed. The muscles in her face simply released the performance, and what remained underneath was the exhaustion of a woman maintaining two identities while growing three children.
She caught me still watching.
“Stop looking at me with that expression.”
“What expression?”
“The one where you’re calculating how many bones you’d break in Thiago’s body if you were in the same room.”
“Two hundred and six. I’ve already decided the sequence.”
Her mouth moved to a smile. The real one, small and involuntary, the version she rationed because giving it freely still felt dangerous.
Training rotations began after breakfast. Wyatt ran the hunters through formations near the eastern tree line. Percival joined them, the rapport he’d built over the past days turning drills into collaborative exercises rather than hostile proximity tests.
Mira moved to the sparring area. Stretching, warming up, the combat fundamentals Wyatt had drilled into her at the compound now visible in the economy of her movements.
Giselle appeared at the edge of the clearing.
She’d been running perimeter for an hour. Her amber eyes tracked Mira’s warmup with a professional assessment that carried personal weight.
“Your guard drops on the left pivot,” Giselle said.
Mira glanced up. The two women regarded each other across ten feet of cleared ground with the particular attention of females who understood each other’s threat level without needing to discuss it.
“It does,” Mira agreed.
“Wyatt hasn’t corrected it because he compensates for you instead of forcing the adjustment.”
“You noticed that from the perimeter?”
“I notice everything about how the people in this camp fight. It’s my job.”
A beat. Giselle stepped onto the sparring ground.
“I can show you the correction. If you want.”
The offer was professional but the undertone was not.
I pushed back from the map table. “Giselle.”
The warning carried decades of command, the tone she’d obeyed without hesitation on every battlefield and in every operation since she’d earned her rank.
Mira’s hand came up. Not toward Giselle. Toward me, gesturing to stop.
She didn’t look at me when she did it. Her eyes stayed on Giselle, reading the challenge underneath the offer.
“Show me,” Mira said.
They squared off. Giselle moved first with a controlled strike demonstrating the pivot correction. Mira blocked it clean.
The second exchange escalated. Giselle pushed past instruction into evaluation, her strikes testing range and reaction speed. Mira adapted mid-combination. Caught the rhythm, adjusted her guard, and answered with a counter that forced Giselle back two steps.
I’d trained warriors for centuries. Soldiers, enforcers, operatives. The ability to read an opponent’s pattern and adjust within a single exchange was a skill most lycans took years to develop.
Mira had done it in weeks.
“Again,” Mira said.
Giselle obliged with a combination that would have dropped most humans. Mira redirected the first, absorbed the second on her forearm, and answered the third with an elbow strike that connected hard enough to make the lycan’s guard ring.
The clearing had gone quiet. Wyatt’s training stopped. Percival turned. Lucian’s gaze found the sparring ground from the command area.
My pen had stopped. My eyes hadn’t.
Sweat tracked down Mira’s neck and disappeared beneath her collar.
Her chest rose and fell with controlled breathing, combat-focused, her body running on adrenaline and bond-enhanced reflexes.
The muscles in her forearms flexed as she reset her guard and the shirt she wore clung where the exertion had dampened it.
Fuck.
Giselle swept at her legs with more force than instruction required. Mira jumped it. Caught her balance. The movement pulled her shirt above her hip and the bare skin between fabric and waistband made my cock strain against my thigh.
My fingers dented the edge of the map table.
Giselle feinted high and drove low, catching Mira’s hip and taking her to the ground. A lycan soldier with decades of training putting a human on her back.
I was halfway out of my seat when Mira rolled.
Not onto her stomach. She tucked sideways, protecting the bump with her body’s rotation, and came up on her knees in a single motion.
She came up with a fistful of loose earth and threw it into Giselle’s sightline.
Mira drove forward with a tackle that slammed the lycan onto her back.
Giselle’s skull bounced off the packed dirt. Before she could reset, Mira had her forearm braced across the lycan’s throat and her knee pinning Giselle’s wrist to the ground.
The clearing went silent.
Mira. Straddling a lycan soldier with centuries of combat experience. Thighs clamped around Giselle’s torso for leverage, arms trembling from the effort of holding position against a body that could throw her across the clearing.
My blood went south so fast my vision narrowed.
Her on top. Flushed, panting. Pinning another body beneath her with raw force. My wolf didn’t register a sparring match. My wolf put me under her instead.
Those thighs clamping around my hips, that forearm braced against my chest, her weight settling onto me while she panted through the adrenaline with her hair loose and her skin slick, eyes daring me to move.
My cock ached immediately as my hands gripped the table hard enough to leave marks in the wood.
Enough. Get control of yourself.
The wolf didn’t care. The wolf wanted her on top of him and underneath him and against every flat surface in this forest.
“Dirty,” Giselle managed, bringing me back to reality.
“Effective,” Mira corrected.
Three seconds. Giselle’s face cycled through disbelief, fury, and the crushing weight of what had just happened.
She’d lost. It wasn’t a draw but she was defeated by a human. In front of the entire camp.
Giselle shoved Mira, rolled to her feet, and stood with her fists clenched.
A growl ripped from my throat before I could stop it. Lucian’s snarl echoed from across the clearing, and Percy was already halfway to her, gold bleeding into his eyes.
“I’m fine!” Mira’s voice cut through the tension. “Stand down. It’s normal combat. I’m okay. No need to make a fuss.”
She was on her feet, brushing dirt off her training clothes, looking more annoyed than hurt. The other trainees had frozen, eyes darting between the three of us and the human woman who’d just barked orders at lycan alphas.
Dirt caked Giselle’s hair. A bruise forming on her jaw from the impact with the ground. Her eyes found mine across the clearing and the decade of service and loyalty pooled in amber irises that couldn’t hide the humiliation.
She’d come to prove the human wasn’t worthy. The human had put her on her back.
I held her gaze with a stern glare. Let the silence stretch until she flinched.
“Accept defeat,” I said. “With grace.”
Her face crumpled. Shame and fury merged into a single expression that cracked her composure. Her jaw worked, fists shaking. She turned and stormed toward the eastern perimeter, stride too fast for regulation, discipline shredded.
I would’ve dealt with Giselle and reprimand her actions but she wasn’t my priority. I was already moving.
Mira shot me a look that said she didn’t need rescuing. I ignored it.
Three strides and I had her arm. My hand closed around her bicep, firm, steering her away from the sparring ground toward the supply station behind the tree line. Away from the audience.
“Solomon, I’m fine.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“It’s a scrape.”
“You’re bleeding and your heart rate is elevated.
You seem to forget that you are pregnant.
” My voice came out lower than intended.
My discipline barely contained the wolf who wanted to press her against the supply crates and check every inch of her with his hands and then his mouth and then his hands again.
I pulled her behind the crates. Enough tree coverage that the clearing couldn’t see us.
“Let me look.”
“Solomon, it’s a scrape on my elbow.”
“Let me look.”
She held out her arm. My fingers wrapped around her wrist and turned her arm, clinical on the surface, possessive underneath.
Her skin was flushed from the fight, pulse slammed beneath my thumb. Dirt smudged her jaw and her hair had come loose and her chest was still heaving with exertion that made the damp fabric shift against her body in ways I was memorizing.
“You beat her,” I said.
“I got lucky.”
“You adapted faster than she could. That’s not luck.” My thumb was still on her pulse. I hadn’t let go. “I’ve trained warriors for centuries, Mira. What you just did on that ground doesn’t come from training manuals.”
Her eyes lifted to mine. Still carrying the fight. The adrenaline hadn’t faded and neither had whatever she was reading in my face because her gaze dropped to my mouth for one second before pulling back up.
The space between us compressed. My hand on her wrist. Her pulse racing. Mine matching it. Neither of us breathing at the correct rate.
“We should treat that,” I said. My thumb was still on her pulse, voice quieter than intended.
She didn’t pull away or break eye contact.
“Okay,” she said.
I released her wrist. She turned toward the sleeping area and I followed.
We crossed the clearing. Side by side. Close enough that our arms brushed.
Percival’s gaze hit my back first. From the command area, Lucian’s attention followed. They knew even without words that I needed to be alone with Mira.
Because there were other things to treat. Deeper than a scrape, older than a sparring match.
And the words I’d been practicing for weeks pressed against my teeth, demanding to be said.