Chapter 42 Solomon
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Solomon
The ridge became my station.
Nights of running, the same position. Flat against the rock shelf overlooking the compound’s eastern tree line, wolf form, cataloging the data that would keep us alive when the time came to move.
Guard rotations held to a six-on, six-off schedule. Blind spots existed between the overlapping zones, narrow corridors where a wolf could pass undetected if the timing was precise.
The timing would need to be precise.
My chest ached from the place where her bond used to live, now a dead channel that throbbed whenever proximity reminded my body what it had lost.
The rejection sat in all three of us and rotted there. A slow poison that tasted exactly the way it should have. Percy’s wolf surfaced more often than it should, gold bleeding into his eyes at the wrong moments. My own hands ached in the mornings, joints stiff, muscles slower to respond.
The bond was punishing us for what we’d done to it, just quieter about it than it was punishing her. We fucking deserve it.
Especially me.
We’d made the decision. She’d absorbed the consequences. Percy had seen her state, the shaking hands, the weight falling off her frame.
We got stiff joints and bad sleep. Mira got destroyed.
Percy ran the outer perimeter in rotation, mapping patrol routes from ground level while I took the elevated positions. Giselle had flagged six potential entry points, three of which I’d already dismissed based on guard density.
We hadn’t decided when to move yet.
The compound was not what any of us had anticipated.
The scroll described an organization. This was a military installation with weapons engineered for our biology.
The thermal sensors alone suggested research into lycan physiology that made my jaw tighten every time.
Whatever approach we chose needed to account for an enemy that understood what we were better than we’d assumed any human could.
Every night on the ridge added variables, and every variable improved the margin between success and a body count.
Below, Mira moved through the compound on a schedule I’d memorized without intending to. Training at dawn. Thiago’s office mid-morning. Mess hall at irregular intervals that suggested she was skipping meals. Her window on the second floor went dark by most nights.
Most nights.
Not this one.
Her light was off but the curtain had shifted twice in the last hour. Restless, awake.
My wolf tracked her heartbeat through the bond. Faint, steady, the only signal that penetrated the muted wall between us. It was hard to focus on it given the distance and the facility which seemed to be tampering with my heightened senses.
Then she appeared from a gap in the eastern fence, a section where the chain link had been cut and reattached with a temporary clip. Her own exit route, engineered without any of us noticing.
My wolf went still.
She wore a compound jacket zipped to her throat, hair pulled back. The weight she’d lost was visible even from thirty meters. Angles in her face that hadn’t existed before. Wrists too thin, veins showing beneath skin that used to hold warmth.
From the root system at the pine tree, she wouldn’t be visible to any camera on the compound’s grid. She was carrying a notebook. Small, leather-bound, the kind she kept in the drawer beside the bed at the cabin.
Her journal. I’d recognize it because I had restored one of hers before.
Down on the root system, she opened it. Flipped through pages and stopped at one near the middle.
“‘He fixed the shelf today.’“ Her voice broke the silence, quiet, directed at the trees.
Then louder, mocking, the narrator of her own stupidity.
“‘Didn’t say anything about it. Just walked in with the tools and fixed it while I was reading. When I thanked him, he said the structural integrity was compromised.’“
She snorted. “Structural integrity. God, I actually thought that was romantic. A man says the word structural and I write a whole paragraph about it.”
My claws dug into the rock.
“‘Solomon doesn’t do favors. He solves problems.’“ She read it in a voice reserved for eulogies. “‘The fact that my problems keep ending up at the top of his list is the closest thing to a love language he has.’“
My chest cracked open. She’d written that about me and believed it. Now she read it as a stranger’s words, searching for proof that none of it was real.
It was real. Every moment.
Every problem I solved for her, every time I put her at the top of my list without hesitation.
She’d never believe me now.
“Mira.” Her name left my mouth, barely a sound. She couldn’t hear me. I said it anyway.
She flipped the page. “‘Percy burned dinner again.’“ Faster now, clipped, performing an autopsy on her own happiness. “‘Lucian ate it. Sol cleaned up the mess.’“ She paused on the name.
My name. The version only she used.
“‘Sol cleaned it up before anyone asked him to.’“
Because that’s what I did. Cleaned up. Fixed. Maintained. Every act of love disguised as logistics, every moment she’d noticed that I thought I was hiding. She’d written all of it down and I’d never known.
I was supposed to be the one who fixed things. Who solved problems. Who made the broken pieces fit back together.
This time, I was the one who broke her.
The one thing I couldn’t fix was the damage I’d helped cause.
Mockery died in her throat. “‘This is what happy looks like. I didn’t recognize it at first because I’ve never had it.’“
She closed the journal. Held it against her chest with both arms.
Then she tore the page out.
A lighter appeared from her jacket. Cheap, plastic. The flame caught the corner and climbed. She held it until the fire reached her fingers, then dropped it into the pine needles. Ash scattered.
She was burning me.
The version of me she’d loved, the one who fixed shelves and cleaned salt off the floor and showed up in the margins of her journal as proof that someone gave a damn. She was setting that man on fire because I’d taught her he wasn’t real.
Another page torn out. Percy’s name from what I could make out from here. The word pancakes. A line I caught before the fire consumed it: he makes me laugh and I hate how much I need that right now.
Burned. Gone.
“Mira.” Again. My forehead pressed against the rock and my claws left grooves in the stone.
A third page. The bitterness was back when she spoke but thinner, stretched over something it couldn’t fully cover.
“‘I keep waiting for the catch.’“ She stared at the words. “‘These three keep showing up and I’m running out of reasons to expect the worst. Maybe that’s the scariest part. That I’ll let myself believe they won’t leave.’“
She held the page over the lighter. Watched it curl.
“Spoiler alert,” she whispered to the ash. “They left. Congratulations, past Mira. Your instincts were right all along.”
One more page. This one she didn’t read aloud. Her eyes moved across the words and her lips pressed together and the trembling in her chin spread to her hands.
The flame caught. She watched it curl.
Her mouth moved. No sound at first. Then: “I miss you so much it makes me sick.”
Not to the page. To the forest, to the dark.
To us.
My wolf broke formation.
Not physically. I held position on the ridge, motionless, camouflaged. But behind my ribs, the wolf that had maintained operational discipline through four centuries of service, through wars and losses and the violence of enforcing a king’s will, tore my walls.
Mira was burning the record of the happiest months of her life.
Keeping those pages hurt worse than destroying them, and the woman who’d written about love and burned dinners had decided that erasing the evidence was easier than carrying it.
When she stood and brushed her knees, I expected her to walk back.
She didn’t.
Her body went rigid. Head tilted, not seeing but feeling. The bond pressed against its walls with directional awareness that human senses couldn’t override.
“Someone’s out here.”
Silence.
Her hand extended into the dark. Not reaching for a weapon but reaching for confirmation.
“Sol?”
My name in her mouth. Two letters that bypassed every protocol I had.
I opened my eyes. Just the eyes. Silver catching the barest edge of moonlight through the canopy. A flash. Half a second.
Her hand dropped as her breath stuttered. She stared at the exact spot where the silver had been, and her expression was crushed. It wasn’t relief or anger but raw, more vulnerable.
I closed my eyes. The forest was just forest.
She stood there. Seconds stretching. Her hand pressed against her sternum where the bond sat beneath the skin.
“If that was you,” she said, her voice fracturing, “you don’t get to do that. You don’t get to watch me fall apart and then disappear.”
I didn’t move.
“And if it wasn’t you, then I’m talking to a tree and I’ve officially lost it.”
The compound’s hum filled the gap. A guard’s radio crackled on the south wall.
Then she turned and walked back through the fence gap. Clipped it shut, crossed the courtyard without looking back.
Her window, second floor. The light stayed off. The curtain shifted once, then settled.
I remained on the ridge for a long time after she’d gone.
The journal entries lived in my ears. The shelf, the burned dinners, the entry about a woman who’d never been happy and found it in a cabin with three men who would destroy it.
Every calculation I’d run since the rejection recalculated in my chest. Not as a strategic error I could adjust. As a wound that data couldn’t quantify and precision couldn’t close.
When my body cooperated, I descended the ridge and knelt at the base of the pine, weakening my presence, the way I do when I want to turn invisible for others to track.
The ash had settled into the needles, most scattered by the wind. Fragments of her handwriting, charred, dissolving into the forest floor.
One piece survived. A corner, singed brown, still warm. Two words in her handwriting, ink smudged but legible.
‘I miss’
The rest was gone.
I folded the fragment. Placed it in the interior pocket of my jacket, against the left side, over the ribs. Where the bond sat beneath muscle and bone.
It will stay there until I could face her again.