Chapter 35 Percival
— · —
Percival
The cabin was cold.
Not the kind of cold that meant someone had stepped out for an hour. This was deep, settled, the kind that moved in when nobody planned on coming back. I stood in the doorway with my pack on the ground behind me and let the emptiness hit me in the chest.
Their scent was everywhere and nowhere.
She wasn’t here. None of us were. The cabin was a museum of a life that had lasted for a month and ended in an afternoon.
I closed the door behind me and headed toward town.
The bookshop sat on the quiet end of Ashvale’s main stretch.
The windows were intact, the new paint still holding up, the sign above the door blank because she’d never named it.
Solomon had finished the rebuild before the rejection.
Every beam, every shelf, every exposed ceiling she’d asked for. A building with no one inside it.
I tried the door. Locked. Peered through the glass. Dark, clean, abandoned. The reading nook he’d framed out sat empty in the east wall. The coffee bar she’d designed for the front window had stools tucked neatly against the counter.
My jaw worked around the ache that had been living in my chest since Veyndral.
The bruise Solomon had put there was fading, finally, a greenish stain where the purple had been. I’d let it heal on its own. Partly because I deserved it. Partly because, in the most messed-up way possible, it was the last thing either of them had given me before I left.
Ashvale’s main street was quiet in the early afternoon.
I kept to the storefronts, hood up. A few people glanced my way without recognition. Good. The last thing I needed was the gossip mill firing up about one of the firefighters being back.
The hardware store. The diner. The post office where Mrs. Tenley sorted mail.
No sign of Mira anywhere.
“Percy?”
I stopped. Turned.
Cateline stood outside the grocery store. Her eyes went wide, then narrowed, cycling through surprise and calculation in about two seconds flat.
“You’re back.” She adjusted the bags. “Alone?”
“Just passing through.”
“Mira left, you know.” She said it the way people shared gossip they’d been saving. “With some older man. Her father, apparently?” She paused, watching my face for a reaction she could use. “The whole town talked about it. Poor bookshop girl, abandoned by three men.”
My hands curled at my sides. “Did you see which direction they went?”
“East, I think. Toward the mountains.” She tilted her head. “Why? You care now?”
I looked at her. Really looked. I didn’t feel much of anything about Cateline, and the fact that she’d watched Mira leave town with a stranger and turned it into gossip instead of concern told me everything I needed to know.
“Take care of yourself, Cateline.”
I walked away before she could respond and didn’t look back.
***
East toward the mountains. The bond pulled faint and muted, barely a whisper since the rejection. But it was there, tugging east, and I followed it.
Don’t get caught.
Sorry, Sol.
I shifted two miles into the eastern foothills and started making noise.
The kind of noise that said come find me in every language hunters understood.
Claw marks gouged into tree bark at lycan height.
Tracks pressed deliberately into soft ground.
A brown wolf tearing through underbrush without the slightest attempt at stealth.
By the second morning, I found what I was looking for. A motion sensor wired to a tree trunk, its blinking light barely concealed under a patch of moss. I sat in front of it in wolf form, tilted my head, and waited.
Twenty minutes later, two hunters crested the ridge to my south, rifles up, moving in tactical formation. The taller one adjusted his aim. The shorter one reached for his radio.
“Contact. Single lycan, wolf form. Just sitting in front of camera six. Not moving.”
“Confirmed. Tranq and transport.”
I wagged my tail. Once. Just to see the tall one’s trigger finger twitch.
The first dart punched into my shoulder. The second caught my flank before I’d finished deciding whether a third tail wag would be pushing it.
The forest tilted sideways, and the bitter satisfaction of the worst plan in recorded history actually working was the last thing I processed before the sedative finished the job.
I woke up in a concrete cell.
My arms were cuffed behind me with restraints that burned where they touched skin. Silver-infused, probably. Creative. The room was small, underground by the temperature and lack of windows, and furnished.
A man stood on the other side of the bars. Tall, graying at the temples, with Mira’s jawline and none of her warmth.
Thiago Maxwell studied me the way a collector studied a new specimen.
“Percival.” He said my name correctly, which meant he’d done his homework. “The young one.”
“The handsome one, actually. Common mistake.”
His expression didn’t change. “You walked directly into our perimeter. Alone and unarmed. Leaving a trail a blind man could follow. You wanted to be caught.”
“Bold accusation from a man who puts silver in his handcuffs. Bit kinky, don’t you think?”
He watched me for a long moment. The silence was clinical, designed to make people talk. I’d been on the receiving end of Solomon’s silences for two centuries. This was amateur hour.
“Where are the other two?” he asked.
“Far away. This is a solo vacation.”
“A lycan crossing into human territory alone, without his leader or his pack, surrendering himself at the gates of the very organization that hunts his kind.” Thiago clasped his hands behind his back. “Either you’re remarkably stupid, or you’re here for my daughter.”
“Can’t it be both?”
His jaw tightened. He turned and walked away without another word, and I was left alone in a cell with silver-burning wrists and the distant, muted thread of Mira’s bond pulling from somewhere above me.
Phase one complete.
Solomon was going to kill me. That is if I don’t die here.
***
Mira came on the second night.
I’d been dozing against the wall when the sublevel door opened and footsteps came down the corridor. Light, deliberate, pausing at every corner to listen.
Then she was in my cell, and the air left my lungs.
Mira looked exhausted.
Dark circles carved beneath her eyes, both irises visible without the brown contact, catching the fluorescent light.
The claiming marks on her throat were visible above her collar, faded but present.
Lucian’s obsidian pendant hung against her collarbone, and even from here I could tell it sat wrong on her.
“Percival.” Her voice cracked on the third syllable.
“Hey, love.”
Her hand gripped the bars. “What are you doing here?”
“Sightseeing. The accommodations need work, but the interrogation room has excellent acoustics.”
“This isn’t funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
“They could kill you.”
“They could try.” I shifted, wincing as the silver bit into my wrists. “I came back for you.”
Her expression fractured. For half a second I saw everything, relief, anger, grief, longing, all of it crashing together behind those mismatched eyes. Then the walls went up and she was shaking her head.
“You shouldn’t have come.”
“Yeah, Solomon said the same thing. Well, technically he said don’t get caught, which I interpreted creatively.”
“You rejected me, Percy. All three of you looked me in the eye and said the words.”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to show up in a cell and act like you were some bystander. You said it too. You rejected me too.”
“I know that, Mira.”
She pressed her forehead against the bars. Her hands were shaking, and not from the cold.
“I need you to leave,” she whispered.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re here. With a man who orchestrated everything bad that happened to you. And I left once already. I’m not built for doing it twice.”
Her eyes snapped up. The anger there was real, and it landed as a blade.
“You want to talk about what you’re built for? You’re built for following orders. Lucian says jump, Solomon makes the plan, and you fall in line. That’s what happened in that study. You all decided what was best for me without asking me, and then you left me.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because you’re doing it again. Showing up, making decisions about my life, barging in without asking if I want you here.”
“You’re right. I didn’t ask.” I held her gaze through the bars. “I’m asking now.”
She looked away. Her jaw worked, and I saw the effort it took her to hold herself together. The bond pulsed, faint and distant, and for one second the wall thinned enough that I felt what was underneath. Pain.
“Lucian and Solomon had reasons,” I said carefully. “The council was threatening not just the throne but your life. Your father’s connection to the Order puts the entire kingdom at risk. They didn’t reject you because they wanted to.”
“And that’s supposed to make it hurt less?”
“No. It’s supposed to explain why two men who’d die for you chose to walk away instead.”
“Maybe that’s the problem.” Her voice went flat. “Maybe lycans have been making choices for humans for centuries and calling it protection. Maybe the Order exists because your kind hurt people first, and my family decided to fight back.”
The words landed between us.
“Is that what he told you?” I asked quietly.
“He told me a lot of things. Some of them might even be true.”
“And some of them are designed to turn you against us.”
Her eyes blazed. “Don’t. Don’t tell me I’m being manipulated. I’m not stupid, Percy. I’m just bad at choosing who to trust.”
She pressed closer to the bars, and her voice dropped. “I trusted three men who promised me forever and then decided I wasn’t worth the political inconvenience. So forgive me if my judgment needs some work.”
I had nothing for that. No joke to smooth over the fact that she was right and it destroyed me.
“You want to know what your protection cost?”