Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Lucas
I wake before Sienna does.
The sun has not come up yet. Sienna is on her side, facing me, one of her hands tucked under her cheek, her hair loose across the pillow between us.
The wine-colored satin is still tangled around her thigh from where I pulled it aside last night, the ribbon at her hip undone and trailing onto the bottom bedsheet.
For a long time, I don’t move.
My eyes go from the slow rise and fall of her ribs, to my mating mark at the side of her throat, to the black tendril on her collarbone that has crept another quarter of an inch since yesterday and that I cannot let myself look at for long this morning.
I pull the top sheet up to cover her, and then my hand finds her hip under it.
I trace the line of her ribs slowly, her skin warm from sleep.
My palm opens against her side and stays there.
I cannot stop touching her. There’s something in me that has been wound tight for so long, and seeing her here, breathing easily in my bed with my mark on her, is loosening things in my chest at a rate I cannot keep up with.
She stirs.
A small sound goes into the pillow. Her eyes open slowly, blinking, and fix on mine.
She doesn’t speak. Neither do I.
For a few seconds, we just look at each other. Her face softens, and a quiet warmth goes through me from chest to gut. I smile down at her.
“What?” Her voice is hoarse from last night, eyes still sleep addled.
“I’ve been thinking,” I murmur.
“That sounds dangerous.” She burrows into me.
“If you seducing me is going to be an everyday thing”—my thumb moves once against her stomach—“I can get behind that.”
She huffs a small laugh into my chest. “I had no choice. You were acting like such a prude.”
My smile fades. “Sienna, I wasn’t ignoring your needs. I was trying to give you time. The mark—I took your choice away for that. I didn’t want you to think that I believed I now had complete access to you just because we’re mated. This, what happened last night…It had to be your choice.”
Her fingers press into my chest as she looks up at me. For days, I’ve been feeling the confusion in her, a strange distress that I didn’t know how to deal with. And now, it’s gone. Is that why she was upset this whole time?
“And here I thought you couldn’t get it up.”
My eyes narrow. “Excuse me? You thought what?”
The mischievous grin on her lips has me struggling not to spank her on the ass. I haven’t seen that smile in a while, either.
“I had to say that. Do you know how pent-up I’ve been? And there you were, kissing my forehead after walking around the bedroom shirtless. I was going to murder you, Lucas.”
I pull her closer. “I’m sorry. I should have talked to you.”
“Yes, you should have.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
I look at her hand on the pillow, the pale curve of her knuckles, the bare finger where one day I am going to put a ring, if she lets me.
“I’ve never been one to share my problems,” she says. “I wasn’t raised that way. I am the problem solver, so I thought I could handle it.”
I lift her hand and press my mouth to her knuckles, my eyes closing. “I love you,” I say against her fingers. “I’ve been wanting to tell you. Again.”
She goes still.
“I fell in love with you when I was still trying to push you away. I probably loved you before that and didn’t know what to do with it.
” My eyes open. “I’m not asking you to say it back, Sienna.
I just want you to know how I feel. You are the most precious person in my life.
” Her expression is unreadable, and I realize she may not be ready for this.
“I don’t want you to have to worry about saying it back. I just want you to know—”
“I love you, too, Lucas Steele.”
The bond between us surges, warm and full.
“I’m prideful, as you know,” she goes on, “and very ambitious in my career. But you matter to me more than I know how to put into words.”
For a couple of heartbeats, I cannot trust myself to speak.
I pull her against my chest, one arm at her shoulders, the other under her ribs, my mouth pressed into the top of her head. Her cheek finds the place over my heart. Warm breath fans against my collarbone.
We remain like this, holding each other, for a long time.
Eventually, she stirs. She presses a kiss into the center of my chest and pushes up off me, hair falling forward, announcing that she is taking a shower before the entire household assumes we have died up here.
I watch her go.
When the bathroom door has shut behind her, I sit up on the edge of the bed, rake my hand through my hair, and find the wine-colored bra on the floor where I threw it last night.
The satin is ruined from my rough handling.
I fold the bra with more care than it needs and lay it on the chair by the bed.
Sienna comes out in a robe with her hair piled on top of her head, sees the folded scrap on the chair, and laughs at me.
I look up from my cufflinks. “What?”
“You folded it.”
“I’m not letting any of the household staff handle it.”
She comes over and kisses me on the mouth. “You’re ridiculous.”
“I’m yours.” I kiss her back.
She smiles.
There is always something for the alpha of a pack to deal with besides emergencies. Prime example: the first few hours of my day pass with a pile of dull paperwork. Late morning, though, Monroe bangs through the door of my study without knocking, a large, rolled-up paper under one arm.
“Squadron’s back.”
I am out of my chair before he has finished saying it.
“Two days early. Team lead just gave me the report.” He spreads the paper across my desk. “They tracked the trail back from where Bauer’s section went down. Found a compound deep in the western buffer.”
The drawing is careful and exact, done by someone who watched a perimeter for hours. Patrol rotations marked. Fences. Outer guard positions, inner guard positions. Three structures around what looks like a central holding building.
“Six days of observation,” Monroe goes on. “Armed patrols on a coordinated shift rotation. Not amateur work.”
My finger traces the central structure. “Force estimate.”
“Sixty fighters in the perimeter. Maybe more inside. They couldn’t get close enough for a clean count.”
“Enhanced?”
Monroe nods. “One. Big. Seen on the perimeter twice, supervising patrols. The men say he moved weirdly. Lead couldn’t put a word to it.”
I straighten.
“Two hours. Darius, Violet, Lillian, Sienna, Lydia, Reese, and you. I’ll have Kain pulled in by video from Moonvale.”
“Yes, sir.” He leaves.
By early afternoon, my study is full.
Darius and Sienna on my right. Violet beside Sienna.
Lillian in a chair drawn to the side, with her hands folded in her lap.
Monroe and Reese standing along the wall.
Lydia at the back. The lineage book sit at the corner of my desk where the whole room can see it.
Kain is on the screen above the credenza, lit harshly in a Moonvale conference room.
We discuss the Covenant compound for two hours.
Kain lays out what he knows about the one where he was held for years.
He says the structures of the compounds are all similar; he knows that much.
Also Covenant cell structure, the pairing of enhanced operatives with conventional fighter teams. The perimeter in the squadron’s drawing matches two compounds Kain saw operate from the inside before he defected.
He confirms that the central structure in the layout is almost certainly the holding facility.
Captives, prisoners, anyone they’re keeping alive for use.
Sienna leans forward at that. “If Meera is anywhere,” she says quietly, “she’s in there. If she’s alive.”
Reese shifts against the wall. “Miss Carter, Moonvale ran a coordinated assault on a fortified compound three years back. The Hartson operation. I read the after-action report. Your division contributed the strategic framework. Could you walk us through how Moonvale handles entry against a rotation perimeter?”
She answers him cleanly. The framework. The timing windows.
Feint patrols at one perimeter point to draw rotation toward it while the actual entry happens elsewhere.
Layered insertion of small teams at staggered intervals.
Her voice is steady, her hands quiet on the desk. She is, frankly, brilliant.
And I am, frankly, jealous.
My jaw has tightened. The look I send Reese sits on him a little too long, and Reese, who has been a commander for eleven years and has never once misread a room, registers exactly what is happening and addresses his next question to Darius.
Sienna catches it all.
She doesn’t look at me, and I see her bite the inside of her cheek hard to keep her expression neutral. The corner of her mouth does something it should not be doing in a war meeting, and I have to drop my eyes to the layout sketch on the desk to keep my own face from breaking.
Darius watches me. He doesn’t say anything, but his eyebrows rise as he turns away.
The meeting comes to an end. We agree to reconvene tomorrow morning with maps and force allocations. Everyone in the room rises.
I catch Sienna’s wrist before she can leave. The others file out. My hand pushes the door shut behind them.
She turns to me with that face, the one that knows exactly what is coming and is enjoying it thoroughly. I pin her against the wall and kiss her.
She laughs against my mouth. “Reese knows you almost lost your mind.”
“He’s a professional. He’ll get over it.”
“He was asking me a professional question.”
“My wolf doesn’t know what professional means.” I find the bond mark at her throat with my mouth. “You’re mine,” I tell her against the warm skin under her ear. “I will not be sorry about it.”
“Mm.”
Her hand grasps the back of my neck.
“I know.”
I keep her here for another minute. Her hip presses against my hand. A small sigh leaves her when my mouth moves down her throat. The bond hums between us, full and quiet at once, every door between us thrown open.
Finally, I let her go.
When it’s time to get ready for dinner, Sienna sits at the dressing table and threads an earring through her lobe. The folded piece of wine-colored satin from the chair is gone. One of the staff has taken it for laundering despite my instructions.
I open the chest at the foot of the bed. A small, dark, velvet box waits at the bottom under the linens, untouched in years. I bring it out. The velvet is worn smooth at the corners from a child’s hands—my own, before I learned to leave it where I had been told to leave it.
Sienna catches my movement in the mirror and turns on the stool, curious.
I cross to her and hold out the box. “I’ve been meaning to give you this.”
Her hands come up. She takes the box and lifts the lid.
A gold pendant rests on the velvet inside. The chain is fine, the metal worked in a scrolling pattern that does not belong to anything in current fashion. A single stone at the center, dark, set deep.
She lifts her eyes to mine. “Lucas.”
“It was my mother’s.”
She places one hand over heart.
“She wore it every day for thirty years. I was eight when she died. I’ve kept it since then. Never gave it to anyone because there has never been anyone to give it to.” My voice becomes rough by the end.
Sienna doesn’t say anything. The stool scrapes back as she gets up and crosses the small space between us. She puts the box in my hand; then, she turns around and lifts her hair off her neck.
My fingers shake on the clasp. It catches on the second try. The chain settles beautifully against the line of her collarbone, the pendant resting next to the curse mark, almost touching it, the metal warm against the cold of what she is carrying.
My mouth lowers to the spot at the top of her spine where the clasp sits.
“My mother would have loved you.”
She makes a sound between a sob and a laugh.
Her hand comes up and covers mine where it rests at her shoulder, pressing my palm against the crook of her neck.
We stand like that for a full minute, her back against my chest, the necklace shining around her throat, the bond between us so full that it could break a man.
The alarm bell on the eastern wall sounds.
I go very still against her.
It rings again.
I am moving before the third peal. Sienna follows me. We are down the corridor and on the staircase before the bell has rung a fourth time, the household converging in the entrance hall below us, voices raised.
Monroe meets us at the bottom of the stairs. “Our man on the eastern perimeter saw movement at the tree line,” Monroe informs us. “He sounded the alarm before he even reached the body.”
Sienna gasps.
“Body? How many?” I demand.
“Just the one.” Monroe points in the direction of the situation. “Down at the pines.”
I am out the front door without another word.
The night is cold. Wet grass meets my bare feet. The lawn is dark in the last of the daylight, and across the open stretch of it, I can see torches moving at the eastern tree line.
Sienna is at my shoulder. Darius comes out the door behind us, already shifting, clothes tearing as he hits the lawn on four paws. Violet appears on his back, and he breaks into a hard sprint.
I shift, too. The change rolls through me, and my wolf hits the grass. Sienna leaps onto my back, and I am running.
The torches grow as the pines come up. Two of my guards are kneeling in the moss at the foot of one of the trees. A third man is on a radio. Between them, on the ground, is the body.
I shift back as I cover the last ten yards. Sienna stays behind me as my knees hit the moss next to the still form.
It’s Lydia.
Her face is bloodied. The shawl at her shoulders has been torn. A slash across her temple has soaked part of her hair black, and there’s a deeper wound in her shoulder that I cannot assess in this light. Her chest rises and falls. Barely.
“Alive,” one of my men says in a low voice. “Pulse is there, but it’s weak.”
“Where’s my mother?” Violet’s voice is terrified. “Mom left with Lydia to go for a walk. Where is she?”
Her eyes go past me, into the trees beyond, searching the dark between the pines for a second person who is not there.
The forest goes black ten yards in. Torchlight doesn’t reach past that point. Nothing moves between the trunks. Just an empty stretch of forest where Violet’s mother probably was twenty minutes ago and is nowhere to be seen now.
The alarm bell is still ringing behind us at the wall.
I look down at my friend bleeding onto the ground between us.
Her eyes remain closed.