Chapter 40 Solomon
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Solomon
We ran.
The full, reckless sprint of three lycans covering ground in a forest, weaving between trees at a speed that turned the undergrowth into a blur of black and green.
Lucian set the pace, his black wolf bleeding through in the gold of his eyes, every stride calculated despite the urgency. Giselle flanked my left, silent, reading the terrain at full speed.
The portal had deposited us four miles southeast of the compound.
Lucian stopped. I stopped. The momentum carried me forward half a step before my boots dug into the soil, and Giselle was already crouching, her fingers hovering over a thin wire stretched ankle-height between two trees. Infrared beam, connected to a sensor mounted on the trunk.
One more stride and every guard in that compound would have had our position.
The hand came from the branches above.
It closed around Lucian’s collar and wrenched him sideways. My claws extended before my brain finished processing the movement, my body rotating toward the threat, and I had the attacker slammed against a trunk with my forearm across his throat before the scent registered.
Brown sugar and pine needles. Faded. Weeks old on his skin. But unmistakable.
Percival.
“Easy.” His voice was a rasp under my forearm. “Friendly.”
I released him, stepping back. My wolf took another two seconds to reclassify him as pack before the claws retracted.
Percy braced against the tree and rubbed his throat, but the grin was already surfacing. Thinner than it should have been on a face that had lost weight, but there.
“Took you long enough,” he said. “I’ve been tracking your scent since you came through the portal.”
“You could smell us from four miles out?” Lucian asked.
“Wind was in my favor. And I know what your scent.” The grin softened into honesty. “I knew you’d come.”
Lucian gripped the back of Percy’s neck, holding it. A gesture that carried more weight between them than an embrace would have. Percy tapped his shoulder before straightening, and the moment passed.
Then Lucian’s gaze moved over him slowly, cataloging the damage with the practiced assessment of a king who’d sent soldiers to war and learned to read the cost on their bodies.
“You’ve lost weight,” Lucian said.
“Intermittent fasting. It’s the new trend around here.”
“Your clothes are held together with bark and thread.”
“I have a new aesthetic.”
“Percival.” Lucian’s voice carried no amusement. “How long since you’ve eaten properly?”
The grin didn’t falter but the deflection died. Percy straightened again, shoulders back, spine aligned, the humor filing itself away behind a professionalism that most people never got to see.
“I’m functional,” he said. “Underfed, under-rested, and in need of a shower that doesn’t involve a creek, but functional. I’ve been rotating through six positions. Never the same one twice. Their search pattern is predictable if you watch it long enough.”
He turned and gestured for us to follow. “There’s a ridge overlook half a mile north. Best vantage point for the compound. I’ll brief you on the way.”
Giselle fell into step beside me. “I’ll make rounds on the sensor grid. Mark what I can, flag the blind spots.” She glanced at the three of us with a perceptive look that saw more than she’d comment on. “I’ll give you privacy.”
She disappeared into the trees before anyone could respond.
We moved. Percy led, navigating the terrain with a certainty that came from weeks of repetition, every root and stone memorized. He talked while we walked, voice low, delivery precise.
“Four structures. Main building houses command, Thiago’s quarters on the second floor. Barracks to the west, and a newer facility. Guard rotation is six on, six off. Thirty-two active personnel, all armed, all trained.”
“The sublevels,” I said.
“Two. Beneath the main building.” He ducked under a low branch. “Restricted access. Keypad entry. I got the first three digits while they had me down there.”
The scroll’s details surfaced in my mind. Security increasing after a wolf escape. An escaped wolf from inside the compound.
“You were the wolf in the scroll,” I said.
Percy’s jaw tightened. “I tracked Thiago’s convoy from Ashvale. The perimeter was too tight to breach from the outside, so I made a call.”
“You let them capture you,” Lucian said.
“I didn’t have anyone to plan for me.” He said it without malice. “So I planned for myself. Baited a patrol, let them bring me in, and used the time inside to map what I could.”
Then I hit him.
Not hard. Not the way I’d hit him in Veyndral. An open palm across the back of his skull. The kind of hit that said you idiot more than it said I’m angry.
“I told you not to get caught.”
Percy rubbed the back of his head, his grin surfacing despite the fact that he looked half-dead. “To be fair, the getting caught part was intentional. The prison was just a commitment to the role.”
“You were captured, Percival. In a cell.”
“A cell that taught me they have lycans underground. Dozens of them.” The grin fell away. “I could feel the presences below me. Muted, wrong. Feral, but not the natural kind.”
That confirmed the scroll. Captive wolves held beneath a hunter compound, subjected to methods we aren’t sure yet.
“Mira broke me out,” Percy added. “Picked the lock, covered our tracks. I think Thiago still can’t pinpoint her involvement.”
A beat of silence.
“She’s better at this than any of us want to admit,” he said. Pride bleeding through despite everything.
The name settled between us. Mira.
My chest ached in the place where her bond used to live, the dead channel where her voice had been loudest now reduced to static and distance.
“Tell us about her,” Lucian said after a long silence. A need stripped bare.
Percy’s gaze stayed forward. “She’s training daily with one of their men. A human male.” His teeth clenched on the name. “His scent is on her. Every time I get close.”
My claws pressed against my fingertips before I registered the reaction.
A man. Touching her.
Close enough that his scent clung to her skin and stayed there. My wolf snarled behind my ribs, and beside me Lucian’s hands curled into fists, gold bleeding into his irises for a full second before he blinked it back.
“Who is he?” Lucian’s voice was too controlled.
“Don’t know.” Percy’s jaw still hadn’t unclenched. “She calls him her training partner.”
The three of us stood in a forest full of enemies and the most dangerous emotion in the clearing was jealousy over a man none of us had met. I forced the wolf down. To be revisited when the mission allowed for it.
“Her physical state,” I said. Redirecting all three of us back to what mattered.
“Deteriorating.” Percy’s tone shifted. “She’s pale. Thinner these days. Unsteady on her feet some mornings when she steps outside. I’ve watched her brace against the wall before she can walk straight.”
He vaulted a fallen log without breaking stride. “Whatever the rejection is doing to her physically, it’s getting worse.”
“The muted bond,” Lucian said. “Her body wasn’t designed to endure it.”
“That’s what I assumed.” Percy ducked a branch. “But there’s more than the physical. I think Thiago’s conditioning her.”
“Is it working?” I asked.
“The recruitment? No. Not quite. At least, I hope so.” He shook his head.
Lucian was quiet for several strides. When he spoke, the control in his voice was threadbare.
“Does she hate us?”
Percy stopped walking. Turned to face us both and the humor was gone.
“I believe she doesn’t hate you. She’s angry and hurt and she has every right to both. She told me she needs to figure out what she wants on her own terms.” He held Lucian’s gaze. “She told me to leave.”
He sighed deeply.
The guilt sat between us. Men who’d chosen a kingdom over a woman, standing in a forest and counting the cost.
“Distance is better for now,” Lucian said. “Until we neutralize harm to her on both sides. We need to take down the Order first to get the council off her back.”
We moved again. The terrain steepened, the incline pushing us toward the ridge Percy had mentioned.
A sound from behind broke the rhythm.
My wolf registered it a fraction before my ears, and my body rotated toward the source. A presence, stationary, set back roughly thirty meters. Watching.
I signaled. Lucian and Percival went still.
The presence didn’t advance or retreat. It occupied the forest with patience. The scent was wrong for a hunter.
I stepped forward. One foot, then another, closing the thirty meters between us. My wolf pressed at the surface, urgent, pulling me toward the source of that ache.
The scent was faint, buried under years of forest and soil, but my wolf strained for it. Then the presence shifted before retreating and moving through the trees without disturbing a single branch.
I stood in the empty space where it had been.
Nothing. No tracks, no broken foliage, no scent trail strong enough to follow. Whoever it was moved through this forest the way only a lycan could.
Percy’s low whistle pulled me back. He pointed east. A patrol, two guards, sweeping toward our position from the compound’s northern perimeter.
We moved. The ridge was closer than the alternative and higher ground meant cover. I filed the presence away. Unknown entity, northwest, non-hostile but observant. Another variable that didn’t fit.
My wolf paced.
The ridge opened ahead, and the view stopped all three of us.
The compound spread below.
Modern, fortified, lit by floodlights on automated sweeps. Guard towers at each corner, a motor pool with six vehicles including an armored transport.
“This isn’t what I expected,” Lucian said.
“No.” I cataloged entry points, blind spots, patrol overlaps. “This is a military installation. The funding alone suggests resources on a scale we didn’t anticipate.”
“I’ve been staring at it for weeks,” Percy said quietly. “It doesn’t get smaller.”
The wind shifted.
It rolled up from the compound, carrying concrete, gunpowder, human sweat. Standard scents of a military operation. And beneath all of it, buried under layers of contamination, a thread I knew better than my own name.
Old books and honey.
Mira.
My wolf surged. Gold flooded the edges of my vision, claws pressing against my fingertips, every part of my body orienting toward that scent. Intense, bordering on violence.
But it was wrong.
The foundation was hers. The warmth, the sweetness. But layered over it was a secondary note I couldn’t identify. Richer. Deeper.
Her scent had shifted during the heat. After the rejection it had faded to a whisper. This was neither of those. This was entirely new.
Lucian caught it too. His head turned, nostrils flaring, gold burning behind his irises.
“Her scent,” he said.
“Changed,” I finished.
Percy nodded slowly. “She’s smelled different for about a week. I assumed it was the rejection doing damage. Or the stress.”
My wolf paced behind the muted bond, pushing knowledge through instinct and image instead of words. But what came through was a feeling, not a fact.
Protect. Ours.
Below us, behind those walls, she slept. Or didn’t.
I turned away from the ridge.
We’d come to retrieve a weapon and dismantle an organization that had hunted our kind. All of it necessary, urgent.
But the only question that mattered was whether the woman behind those walls would still want us when it was over.