Chapter 24 Lucian
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Lucian
The results arrived by raven at dawn.
I intercepted the bird right away. Took the sealed scroll from its talons, fed it a strip of dried meat from the pouch and sent it back before Mira woke up.
She didn’t need to see the contents. At least, not yet.
Solomon was already in the kitchen when I came downstairs. He stood at the counter with his back to me, coffee mug in hand, and I could tell by the set of his shoulders that he knew. He’d been waiting since the raven arrived.
I set the scroll on the counter between us.
He unrolled it and read. His jaw tightened incrementally with each line, the only indication that what he was absorbing was as bad as I’d expected.
“The compound matches,” he said.
“To what?”
“The dart that hit Percival. The compound is a modified silver-wolfsbane. The carrier is the part hard to identify because it doesn’t exist. It was engineered.” His pale eyes lifted from the scroll. “Someone designed it with specific knowledge of lycan physiology.”
The device Solomon had recovered from outside the diner sat on the table wrapped in his handkerchief. I’d examined it the previous night while Mira slept. The casing was silver, the internal components beyond anything I’d encountered in my long lifetime.
“The device is a listening instrument,” Solomon continued. “Our contact confirmed it picks up vibrations through walls. Whoever planted it was monitoring our conversation at the diner.”
So someone had positioned surveillance equipment and possibly been tracking our movements with enough precision to anticipate our location, employing weapons specifically designed to neutralize lycans.
“The scent masking from the forest,” I said. “The dart compound, the surveillance device… Do you think one can pull this off alone?”
Solomon nodded once. “No. They are definitely working in groups.”
The word settled between us. There was this nagging theory in the back of my head that I didn’t want to consider unless there were no other answers.
“We don’t have confirmation,” I said. “Not enough to act.”
“We have enough to prepare.” Solomon’s voice was controlled, but beneath it, I heard the calculating threat levels. “I’ve asked our contact to trace the device’s components. If they were manufactured, there’s a supply chain. If there’s a supply chain, there’s a location.”
“How long?”
“Weeks. Maybe less if the trail isn’t buried.”
Footsteps creaked on the stairs. Both of us went quiet in the same breath, the scroll disappearing into Solomon’s back pocket with practiced efficiency.
By the time Mira appeared in the kitchen doorway, rubbing her eyes with the sleeve of my shirt that she’d claimed as sleepwear, we were two men drinking coffee.
“Morning,” she said, her voice rough with sleep.
“Morning.” I poured a third mug and held it out.
She took it, wrapped both hands around the ceramic, and leaned against the counter beside me. Her shoulder pressed into my arm. Not deliberate, just gravitational.
The bond vibrated between us, constant as a second pulse, and beside it, Solomon’s newer thread beat steadily. Two heartbeats in her chest now. Two presences she could feel without looking.
It changed things. The way she moved through the cabin, the way she touched us without thinking about it. It was no longer just the careful, exploratory contact from before the claiming.
This was ownership. Confident, casual, permanent.
She sipped her coffee and her free hand found the back of my neck. Fingers in my hair, nails dragging lightly against my scalp. A gesture so small it barely registered as intentional, but my wolf clawed my ribs in response, greedy for it.
“You’re tense,” she murmured.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re tense and lying about it. Your neck is a rock.”
“It’s always been a rock. It’s a neck.”
She tugged my hair gently. A reprimand. I leaned into it despite myself, and her mouth curved against the rim of her mug.
Solomon watched us from across the counter. His expression was neutral, but the bond between Mira and him sent a pulse of contentment through the room that even I could feel through her.
This was how it was supposed to work. A connection so clean that possessiveness only pointed outward, never inward.
The front door burst open loudly. Of course, there is only one suspect.
Percival came through looking as if he’d been in a war. Soot on his jacket, his curls flattened on one side from his helmet, and a man who spent eight hours on a call that tested every ounce of his considerable patience.
He didn’t say a word. Just crossed the living room, rounded the counter, walked directly to Mira, and buried his face in her chest.
She barely had time to set down her coffee before a six-foot-two lycan was slumped against her, face pressed between her collarbones, arms wrapped around her waist, every line of his body communicating total surrender.
“Bad shift?” she asked.
A muffled groan vibrated against her sternum.
“Three calls,” he said into her shirt. “Back to back. The last one was a kitchen grease fire where the homeowner tried to put it out with a garden hose and somehow made it worse. Then Thompson spilled chili on the engine controls and I had to spend forty minutes cleaning salsa out of a gauge panel.”
“Salsa?”
“Chunky salsa. The worst kind for machinery.”
Instances such as this reminded me how young Percival is.
Mira’s hand came up and carded through his hair. He made a sound against her chest that was closer to a purr than anything that should come from a grown man, and his weight settled deeper into her.
Then she gripped a fistful of his hair and pulled his face up.
“Well, you love that, don’t you?” The grin on her face was wicked, aimed at the fact that he’d chosen her chest as his personal rest station.
Percy blinked up at her. Soot on his nose, dimples emerging despite his exhaustion, hazel eyes bright with the particular energy that was entirely his.
“Please have mercy.” His voice was plaintive, flirtatious, devastatingly charming. “I’m going through a tough time.”
“You’re going through a salsa incident.”
“Chunky salsa. That’s trauma.”
I watched the exchange from the counter, arms crossed. “He’s being dramatic.”
“I’m being emotionally vulnerable.” Percy didn’t lift his head from where Mira had let him resettle against her collarbone.
Mira ran her fingers through his hair again and he practically melted. Solomon shook his head once, the barest movement, and returned to his coffee. He knew there was another person who was about to spoil Percy of his whims aside from us.
The domestic normalcy of the scene sat in my chest with a warmth I hadn’t earned and couldn’t stop wanting.
This. All of it.
The four of us in a kitchen, bickering over salsa and bad shifts, Mira’s fingers in Percy’s hair and her shoulder still warm against my arm where she’d leaned.
I diverted my mind away from the investigation scroll in Solomon’s back pocket and the threats that were still out there. Outside the confines of this cabin.
Not yet.
I needed to keep it this way.
Percy eventually peeled himself off Mira and disappeared upstairs to shower. Solomon left for the bookshop, muttering about buying supplies, and the cabin settled into the afternoon quiet that I’d come to associate with the hours when Mira read and the world stopped demanding things from me.
She’d settled on the couch, legs tucked beneath her, a paperback open on her knee. The light from the window caught the copper in her hair and the claiming mark on her throat, the single point where two signatures now overlapped.
My mark. Solomon’s. Layered, permanent, a testament to what she’d chosen.
Soon, Percival’s will be added too.
I reached into the drawer of the side table beside the couch. The box had been there for three days, waiting for a moment that felt right. I’d had it sent through the portal with the herbs for Percival, tucked between the leather pouches, small enough to miss.
“Mira.”
She looked up. Those mismatched eyes found mine with the unguarded attention she gave to everything now. Trusting, in a way that made my lungs ache because I knew what it cost her.
I sat beside her and held out the box.
She stared at it. Then at me. Then back at the box.
“If that’s a ring, we need to have a conversation about timelines.”
“It’s not a ring. For now.”
“Well, I’ve known you for a handful of months and you’re already a king and I haven’t even finished renovating my bookshop.”
“Open the box, Mira.”
She paused but took it and lifted the lid.
Inside sat a pendant on a fine chain.
The stone was obsidian, polished to a mirror finish, cut in an oval that caught the light and reflected it back in dark iridescence. Veins of deep blue ran through the black, natural formations from the volcanic shores of the Obsidian Sea.
It was delicate, woven metal that wasn’t gold or silver but somewhere between, a Veyndral alloy that didn’t exist in the human world.
Her fingers hovered over the stone without touching it.
“This is from your kingdom,” she said.
“From the Obsidian Sea. The stone forms on the volcanic cliffs where the lava meets the water.” I watched her face, cataloguing every micro-expression. “In Veyndral, obsidian is given to mark belonging. Not ownership. Connection.”
“It’s… beautiful.”
“May I?”
She turned on the couch, presenting the back of her neck. The copper hair fell forward as she gathered it in one hand, and the vulnerability of the gesture, the exposed nape, the trust required to bare your throat to a predator, sent a current through the bond that she felt too.
Her pulse jumped.
I lifted the necklace from the box and unclasped it. The pendant settled against her collarbone, dark against her skin, and the rightness of it was almost painful.
My lips found her shoulder.
The bare skin where my shirt had slipped, the curve of muscle beneath warm flesh, and I pressed a kiss there that carried everything I couldn’t articulate in language she’d understand.
Mira turned her head. Her fingers found the pendant, thumb running over the polished surface.
“You’re spoiling me.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t need expensive interdimensional jewelry.”
“I know.”
“You can’t just buy me things from your kingdom whenever you feel moody.”
“I can.” I let my mouth curve against her shoulder. “Get used to it. I have a lot to spare.”
She twisted to face me. The pendant hung between us, catching the light, and her expression was the particular blend of exasperation and affection that I’d grown addicted to.
“You’re insufferable.”
“Frequently.”
“And arrogant.”
“Consistently.”
“And I...” She stopped, swallowing. The humor faded into an expression that was more honest than anything she’d shown me in weeks, and the bond between us shuddered with a wave of emotion so intense my breath caught.
“Thank you. For all of it. Not just the necklace.”
I held her gaze. My hand came up and tucked a strand of copper behind her ear, the gesture I’d been repeating since the day we met, the same motion every time, and she leaned into it the same way she always did.
The afternoon stretched into evening.
Percival went down and sprawled across the armchair with his legs over the arm rest, as if the concept of sitting properly had been lost somewhere in his two centuries. Solomon came back with hordes of supplies.
I could sense Mira standing at the back porch railing, probably watching the sunset.
The sky had gone amber and violet, light bleeding through the tree line in bands that turned the forest canopy into a cathedral. The obsidian pendant glinted at her throat.
I came up behind her.
My arms wrapped around her waist, chin finding the top of her head. She leaned back into me, the full weight of her body settling against my chest, and I felt her heartbeat.
The sunset painted us gold.
“I could get used to this,” she said.
“That’s the idea.”
“Being spoiled rotten by a king while watching sunsets.”
“Among other things.”
She tilted her head back against my shoulder, looking up at me with an angle that made her nose scrunch. “What other things?”
I kissed her forehead. “Patience.”
“Coming from the man who threatened to eat a raven.”
Behind us, the back door opened. Percy’s head appeared.
“Dinner’s ready.” His grin was audible even before I saw it. “Solomon made a delicious smelling dish and if you two don’t come inside in the next thirty seconds, I’m eating your portions. This is not a bluff.”
Mira laughed against my chest. The sound vibrated through the bond, through my ribs, through the ancient and stubborn organ in my chest that had spent five centuries beating for no one and now couldn’t remember how to exist without her.
“Coming,” she called.
She pulled away and my arms let her go, even though every instinct demanded otherwise.
The pendant swung at her throat as she turned, catching the last of the sunset, and for a moment, she stood framed in the doorway with the golden light behind her and the obsidian at her collarbone with the marks on her neck that declared her ours.
A queen who didn’t know she was one yet.
I followed her inside.
There was still danger lurking in the shadows for us. And I thought they were getting closer.
But tonight, we’ll have our usual dinner.
And the world outside these walls could wait until morning.