Chapter 72 Percival
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Percival
We shouldn’t have let her go.
The thought circled my skull on a loop as I stood at the camp’s eastern perimeter and stared at the tree line where we’d left her last night.
Hours ago. She was already inside the compound by now, already swiping that keycard and walking into the belly of a place that had killed her mother and caged our people.
And we’d just watched her walk in. Kissed her goodbye and watched her walk in.
“Stop staring at the trees,” Solomon said from behind me. “It doesn’t help.”
“I’m not staring. I’m monitoring.”
“You’ve been monitoring the same patch of forest since we got back. The trees haven’t moved.”
Lucian was at the command table with Voss and Altun, reviewing breach positions for the fourth time.
His focus was locked on the maps but his jaw hadn’t unclenched since Mira disappeared through the service entrance.
The king was holding court while every instinct he had screamed at him to abandon the table and sprint back to that compound.
I knew the feeling.
“She has a plan,” Solomon said. The words sounded rehearsed. A mantra he’d been repeating to himself since we’d turned around. “The grid prep requires her clearance. The false intel requires her presence. The sublevel mapping requires her access.”
“You’re listing reasons.”
“I’m listing facts.”
“You’re listing facts because the reasons aren’t enough and you know it.”
His silence confirmed it. The enforcer who could calculate odds on any battlefield had run the numbers on sending his pregnant mate into enemy territory and the math didn’t work no matter how many variables he adjusted.
“We could go back,” I said.
“She’d kill us.”
“She’d be alive to do it.”
“And the captive lycans in those cells would still be there. And Thiago would still have the Purifier. And every human who risked their life to convert would have done it for nothing.” Solomon’s voice was flat but I caught the fracture underneath.
“She’s right. We can’t pull back because we’re afraid. ”
“Being afraid for your pregnant mate isn’t weakness, Sol.”
“No. But acting on it when a kingdom depends on the alternative is selfish. And she asked us not to be selfish.”
I hated that he was right. I hated that Mira was right. I hated that the most logical tactical decision and the most terrifying personal one were the same thing and I was standing here pretending to be okay with it.
The camp moved around us.
Voss’s soldiers checked weapons and ran drills. Converted hunters from the compound clustered in their own formation, still uncomfortable in proximity to the lycan troops but holding their positions.
Farmon sat near the fire, grinding supplements with hands that should’ve been too damaged for the work, doing it anyway because his future grandchildren needed the medicine.
Altun and Rheda were already en route to the Barrows with Annora and Giselle.
Part of me wished they weren’t. Altun might’ve sided with us.
Might’ve overruled the plan and ordered Mira extracted.
But that was wishful thinking from a man grasping for any authority higher than his mate’s stubbornness, and no such authority existed.
This was it. The alliance.
Humans and lycans and a pregnant bookshop owner with a flare gun. The most ridiculous and improbable war council in the history of either world, and it was the best chance we had.
I turned away from the trees and walked toward the command table.
Solomon fell into step beside me.
“She’ll be fine,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“The grid prep takes thirty minutes. She’ll prep, she’ll map the sublevels, she’ll feed Thiago the false intel. Forty-eight hours and we breach.”
“Yeah.”
“Stop saying yeah.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Nothing. I want you to focus. We have a breach to plan and your head needs to be in the strategy, not the forest.”
He was right again. I was getting tired of him being right.
Suddenly, the raven screamed.
Not the usual territorial call or the surveillance chatter we’d gotten used to over the past weeks. This was a shriek that cut through camp and made every wolf within earshot snap their heads toward the eastern sky.
Red light.
A streak of fire climbing above the tree line, punching through the gray morning, hanging in the sky with the unmistakable burn of a signal flare. Coming from the compound.
Coming too early.
Every sound in camp stopped. Voss’s soldiers froze mid-drill. The converted hunters turned as one. Farmon stood so fast the supplement bowl crashed off his knee.
Lucian’s head came up from the maps. Solomon went rigid beside me. The bond channels, all three of them, pulsed with a single unified frequency that translated into a word I felt in my teeth.
Mira.
The flare was wrong. Today was prep. Grid work, false intel, sublevel mapping. The breach wasn’t supposed to happen for another forty-eight hours.
This wasn’t the signal. This was a distress call.
I didn’t think.
My legs were moving before the thought completed itself. The tree line blurred and the camp was behind me and I was running, full sprint, branches tearing at my arms as I crashed through undergrowth that I’d walked carefully through last night.
No care for noise or concern for the route Solomon had mapped. Just the straight line between me and that red light in the sky and the woman underneath it.
The bond screamed. Not just my channel. All three. Mira’s signal coming through distorted and panicked, a frequency I’d never felt from her before, and my wolf surged deep in my ribs so hard my vision blurred at the edges.
Behind me, the camp erupted. Shouting. Commands. Voss’s voice cutting through the chaos with military precision, organizing the breach that was supposed to happen in forty-eight hours and was happening now.
Solomon and Lucian were seconds behind me.
I heard them crash through the tree line, heard the footfalls close enough that even at my speed they were keeping pace through sheer fury.
Someone tried to stop them. A soldier’s voice, cut short by what I assumed was Solomon removing the obstacle without slowing down.
The compound’s eastern wall came through the trees. Gray concrete against the dawn sky, the flare still burning above it, fading now but visible.
The service entrance was ahead.
Gunfire met me at the door.
“They’re here! Fire at once!”
Two hunters stationed at the entrance, rifles up, already aimed.
They’d been waiting which only meant one thing.
Fuck.
Thiago knew everything.
His people were positioned and prepared and the element of surprise we’d planned for had died with that flare.
I dropped low.
The first round passed over my head and I closed the distance before the second trigger pull. My hand caught the rifle barrel and redirected it into the wall. The hunter behind it stumbled and I put him down with a blow to the temple that was harder than necessary and exactly as hard as I wanted.
The second hunter fired wide. Solomon materialized from my right and disarmed him with efficiency.. Lucian came through the entrance behind us, black eyes scanning the corridor, his wolf so close to the surface that his features had gone angular.
“Where?” Lucian’s voice was gravel.
The bond. I reached for it, past the panic and the noise, searching for Mira’s frequency beneath the chaos. Solomon was doing the same, his eyes half-closed, processing data the way he processed everything.
“Below us,” Solomon said. “Sublevel.”
He led. Through corridors he’d memorized from Mira’s descriptions and the maps she’d brought back during rotations. Left, right, down a stairwell, past a set of blast doors that should’ve been locked but hung open with the casual invitation of a trap that wanted to be walked into.
More hunters in the corridors. Organized. Positioned at choke points. Prepared for exactly this breach.
We went through them.
Three alphas with their mate’s terror pouring through the bond, moving with a violence that I’d spent months trying to outgrow and now embraced with every fiber of my body.
Solomon broke a rifle in half. Lucian threw a man into a wall hard enough to crack the concrete. I moved between them, fast, faster than either, clearing the path that Solomon mapped in his head.
The sublevel stairwell was reinforced steel. The door stood open.
We descended.
The smell hit first.
Unwashed bodies, chemical antiseptic, blood both old and fresh, and underneath it all the unmistakable musk of captive lycans. Dozens of them. The scent was so concentrated it coated the back of my throat and made my wolf snarl.
The corridor opened into a containment level that made my chest cavity compress.
Cells lined both walls. Floor to ceiling, reinforced glass and steel, each one holding a lycan in various states of destruction.
Some paced in their confined space, naked, feral, eyes glazed with the vacant stare of wolves who’d been purified into mindlessness.
Some sat motionless against the walls, broken in ways that didn’t require chains to maintain.
Others pressed against the glass when they sensed us, hands flat, mouths moving without sound.
And in the larger containment units at the corridor’s end, feral wolves. Full shift. Massive, emaciated, teeth bared, eyes rolling with a hunger that had nothing behind it.
No intelligence or recognition. Just the Purifier’s final product: weapons that used to be people.
My stomach dropped to the floor and kept going.
This was what Mira had been fighting to end.
These cells, these wolves. These bodies that had names and families and kingdoms waiting for them, reduced to specimens in a madman’s collection.
The containment level opened into a wider room at the corridor’s end. Control station. Monitors. A chair in the center.
Thiago sat in the chair.