Chapter 20 Percival
— · —
Percival
The green juice was an act of torture.
“Drink it,” Mira said, setting the glass on the coffee table in front of me with a tone not to be argued with.
I stared at the glass. The contents were a shade of green that didn’t exist in nature.
Chunks of unidentifiable plant matter floated near the surface, and the smell hit me from two feet away.
Underneath all of it is an earthy bitterness that suggested she’d blended a handful of dirt and called it a healthy food.
“I’m fully healed, Mira. Solomon confirmed it. Lucian confirmed it. The wound is closed. My shoulder works.” I rotated my arm in a full circle to demonstrate. “See? Perfect range of motion. Good as new like nothing happened.”
“Drink. It.”
“This feels more of a punishment than medicine.”
She glared at me. The glare that said this conversation had one possible ending and I’d already reached it.
So I drank it.
It tasted exactly how it looked.
My wolf whimpered somewhere in my chest cavity. I powered through, swallowing without letting the liquid touch more of my tongue than absolutely necessary, and set the empty glass down.
“I think I just survived a second assassination attempt. Happy?”
“Thrilled.” Mira picked up the glass and headed for the kitchen. “I’m making another batch for dinner.”
“I will leave this house and run away from this town.”
“Try it. See how far you get.”
She disappeared around the corner. I heard the blender fire up again, an ominous whirring that promised a future full of pulverized vegetables and suffering.
Solomon sat across from me in the armchair, reading through a stack of papers he’d brought from the firehouse. Or pretending to read. His eyes tracked Mira’s movements in the kitchen the way they always did.
We waited until the blender stopped and her footsteps moved to the pantry. The sound of cabinet doors opening and closing. She was searching for more ingredients. We had maybe three minutes.
“The dart.” Solomon set his papers down. His voice dropped to the register that meant operational briefing. “I sent a sample of the compound to a contact in Veyndral through the raven courier. Results should arrive within the week.”
“And the shooter?”
“Can’t track. I swept the tree line twice. No scent or traces. Whoever it was used the same masking agent that hid Hudson for a while.” His jaw tightened. “This wasn’t improvised.”
My shoulder twinged. Phantom pain, nothing more. The wound was sealed, the tissue regenerated, the dark veins long gone thanks to the herbs. But my body remembered the burn of that compound working through my blood.
“So we have an unknown party,” I said. “With access to anti-lycan weaponry, scent-masking techniques, and knowledge of our healing capabilities.”
“Additionally, a connection to Hudson.” Solomon’s pale eyes held mine. “This is more than Mira’s stalker, Percival but it was definitely related.”
“What do you think is the agenda?”
“Uncertain. But I keep recounting that night. The dart wasn’t aimed at me. It was aimed at whoever moved to attack Hudson. As if it was a test.” He paused. “I was the target because I was attacking him first.”
The blender fired up again. We had another minute.
“Do we tell her about our theories?” I asked.
“Soon.” Solomon’s voice was final. “She’s processing a lot. Adding an unknown enemy organization to the list can send her to a breakdown.”
“She’s tougher than you think.”
“I know exactly how tough she is. That doesn’t mean we pile every threat onto her at once. Especially if we’re unsure.”
“So basically, we have a larger problem than we anticipated.”
The blender stopped. Footsteps padded back toward us. Mira rounded the corner carrying a tray with three glasses of green liquid and a plate of sliced fruit. Her version of a peace offering wrapped in nutritional warfare.
She stopped in the doorway.
The tray hovered mid-step. Her eyes moved from Solomon’s rigid posture to the papers he’d flipped face-down on his lap to my face, which I was actively trying to rearrange into something that didn’t scream guilty.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said. Too fast.
Shit. We’re screwed.
“Your faces say otherwise.” Mira set the tray on the side table. The glasses clinked. “Both of you looked the way you do when you’re pretending everything’s fine. Which means it’s not.”
My mind scrambled. Solomon’s expression had locked into neutral, which was somehow worse than looking guilty because Mira had learned to read his neutrality as a tell.
I needed to say a word. An excuse that was boring enough to kill her curiosity but believable enough to survive her bullshit detector.
“Firehouse scheduling,” I said. “Lucian’s been dealing with the shift changes since Founder’s Day. Solomon was updating me on the new rotation.”
Sorry, Lucian. Throwing you under the bureaucratic bus.
“Scheduling.” Mira repeated the word. Her gaze lingered on Solomon’s papers. On his hands, which had shifted to cover them more completely. “And where is Lucian?”
“Went to the firehouse earlier,” Solomon said. “Captain updates.”
She didn’t believe us. I could see it in the tilt of her head, the way her jaw set, the micro-pause before she decided whether to press or file it away. Mira had a mental cabinet for conversations she planned to revisit, and I could practically hear the drawer sliding open.
“Fine,” she said. The word carried a warning. “Drink your smoothies.”
She handed me a glass. I accepted it with the gratitude of a man who’d just dodged a bullet and the dread of a man who now had to drink another glass of liquified suffering.
Solomon took his without complaint. He drank half in one pull, face betraying nothing, because of course the man who could endure torture could survive this poison smoothie without flinching. Show-off.
The front door opened twenty minutes later.
Lucian walked in carrying a folder tucked under his arm, still in his uniform, looking exactly the way a man looks when he’s spent the morning doing actual captain duties and has no idea he’s been drafted into a cover story.
Mira looked up from her book. “Did you sort out the scheduling?”
Lucian paused. One foot still on the threshold. His eyes found mine, then Solomon’s, then returned to Mira with the careful blankness, performing rapid calculations.
Behind Mira’s back, I widened my eyes. Nodded once and mouthed “say yes”.
“Yes,” Lucian said. The half-second delay was almost imperceptible. “The scheduling. It’s handled.”
“What was the issue exactly?”
Another pause. Longer this time. His gaze cut to me again and I could feel the silent conversation happening across the room. What did you tell her? What scheduling? Why am I lying about shifts I actually did today?
I made a frantic face behind Mira’s head. Pointed at Solomon’s papers. Made a vague circular gesture that was meant to communicate “just go with it” but probably looked unhinged.
“Overlap in the rotation,” Lucian said. Smooth now, recovering. “Two crews assigned to the same window. Paperwork error.”
Mira’s head whipped around toward me.
I looked at the ceiling, whistling. It was suddenly very fascinating. I examined a very interesting spot on the wall that I’d never noticed before.
“Percival.”
“Hmm?”
“You’re a terrible liar.”
“You’re lucky you recently got shot.”
“Totally grateful. I’m gonna keep cashing this in.”
“But you’re all hiding something.” She pointed at each of us in turn. “You. You. And you.” Her finger landed on Lucian last. “I’ll figure it out. I always do.”
She picked up her book and returned to reading with the pointed silence.
Lucian crossed to the doorframe and leaned against it. The look he gave me over Mira’s head was a masterclass in restrained annoyance.
I mouthed “sorry” and took another sip of the smoothie as penance.
The silence stretched, loaded and obvious, until I decided that someone needed to break it before Mira started asking questions none of us were ready to answer.
And also, I was starting to feel guiltier about the lie.
“So,” I said. “I’ve been thinking.”
“Dangerous. You’ll hurt yourself again,” Mira murmured without looking up from her book.
“About the bond.”
That got her attention. The book lowered an inch. Her eyes lifted to mine, curious and cautious in equal measure.
Solomon shifted in his chair. Lucian, who’d been leaning against the doorframe, straightened. Both of them recognized what I was doing. The look they exchanged confirmed it: this was a conversation that needed to happen, and I’d just volunteered to start it.
We couldn’t tell her some things for now but we should definitely tell her the stuff we can talk about. Gotta build that healthy communication. And since the other two are, again, emotionally constipated, I have to do the heavy lifting.
“You’ve been feeling things,” I begin. “Through the bond. Emotions that aren’t yours. The pull toward us that you can’t explain. Also, the way we knew you were in danger at the dance before anything happened.”
“The alarm,” she said. “How you found me in the forest.”
“That was the bond. It’s incomplete, but it’s strong enough to transmit distress. Fear. Proximity.” I held her gaze. “What you’re feeling now is the thread. The beginning of the connection.”
She closed the book, setting it on the coffee table with full attention. “And the rest of the connection?”
“Claiming.” Lucian’s voice from the doorway. One word.
Mira looked at him. To Solomon, to me.
“You’ve all mentioned claiming,” she said. “Bits and pieces. You keep dancing around it.” Her eyes settled on mine. “What does it actually involve?”
This was the part where tact mattered. Where the delivery had to be honest without being clinical, romantic without being evasive.
Mira didn’t respond well to half-truths or careful omissions. She responded to directness, and if we handled this wrong, she’d spend the next week assuming we were hiding additional secrets.
I mean we are, kind of.
Damn. This is making my head hurt.