Chapter 43 Lucian
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Lucian
Five days since we arrived back here in the human realm.
We memorized patrol routes and guard rotations, mapping blind spots while Mira moved through that compound and we forced ourselves to hold back.
At dawn right now, we move to infiltrate.
But as we planned the west entry through the motor pool’s blind spot, the tree line opened into the clearing at the compound’s northern perimeter.
And they were waiting.
Twelve hunters in tactical formation, rifles raised, positioned in a semicircle that covered every angle of approach. Behind them, three more with equipment I didn’t recognize: long-barreled weapons with cylindrical attachments that hummed with a low frequency my wolf registered as pain.
And at the center, a man I’d seen only through enhanced vision from the ridge.
Thiago Maxwell.
He was standing in front of the line. Hands clasped behind his back, chin raised, the posture of a man who commanded rather than followed. The hunters deferred to him with the automatic precision of soldiers responding to a general.
So he was the leader.
My wolf snarled.
“Lucian Valdris.” Thiago’s voice carried across the clearing. “King of Veyndral. With your second and your warrior through a barely stable portal.”
He knew a lot of things.
“I’ve been watching you for months,” Thiago continued.
“Since you arrived in Ashvale pretending to be firefighters. When you bonded with my daughter, rejected her and sent her running to the only family she had left.” His smile was pleasant, rehearsed.
“Which was me. I guess I have to thank you for our close reconnection.”
Solomon shifted at my left. Giselle’s hand moved to her blade. Percival’s body went rigid with controlled stillness.
“I’m not here to fight,” Thiago said. “Not yet. I’m here to offer you a choice.” He stepped aside, and the line of hunters parted behind him.
Mira walked through the gap.
My chest caved.
She was thinner. The copper hair I’d buried my face in during the heat now hung past her shoulders, duller than I remembered.
Her mismatched eyes were flat, empty of the fire that had drawn me across a portal and through two centuries of numbness to find her.
She wore tactical gear, black, fitted, hunter-issue. A blade strapped to her thigh.
My blade.
The Valdris crest caught the light. The dagger I’d given her.
“My daughter has expressed a desire to prove her commitment to the Order,” Thiago said. His hand rested on Mira’s shoulder. She didn’t flinch. “I thought it only fair to give her the opportunity.”
“Mira.” Her name left my mouth before strategy could stop it.
She didn’t respond or look at me. Her gaze fixed on a point past my shoulder, unfocused, and the absence of recognition in her expression was worse than hatred.
“You came for something in my compound.” Thiago tilted his head, studying me the way a man studies an insect he’s already decided to pin.
“I assume you thought you’d sneak in at dawn and take it.
Whatever it is you think I have.” His smile widened.
“But I’m a generous man, Your Majesty. So I’ll give you something instead. ”
He squeezed Mira’s shoulder.
“Go on, sweetheart. Show them what you’ve learned.”
“Mira,” I said again. Quieter. “Look at me.”
Nothing.
Thiago squeezed her shoulder. “Whenever you’re ready, sweetheart.”
She moved. Not toward us but through us. She stepped past Thiago’s line and into the clearing deliberately at a measured pace and my wolf screamed. The intensity was so much that it buckled my knees.
I put my arm out. Giselle had already started forward, claws out, reading the threat in the formation, and my hand caught her shoulder.
“No. Stay out of this.”
“She’s going to attack.”
“I said no.” I didn’t look away from Mira. “Nobody touches her.”
Giselle’s jaw tightened and she stepped back.
Mira’s hand moved to the dagger on her thigh. The crest glinted between her fingers, the blade I’d taught her to hold and she was using it against me. Against us.
“Get out of my way.” Her voice was flat, stripped of everything I’d fallen in love with. No sass, no warmth, no defiance. Just instruction.
“No,” Percy said from my right. Gentle. “Mira, whatever he told you...”
She attacked.
Percival first. The dagger slashed horizontal. He dodged, barely, his reflexes saving him from a cut that would have opened his arm. She pressed forward, relentless, and Solomon moved to intercept from the left.
It hit me before my ears registered it.
Not with my ears. Deeper. The wolf’s hearing, tuned to frequencies that human senses couldn’t register, picking up vibrations that bypassed the conscious mind.
Three heartbeats.
Aside from Mira’s. Not Mira’s. Hers was there too, fast and adrenaline-fueled, the rhythm I’d memorized. These were beneath hers. Smaller. Rapid.
Three distinct pulses nestled inside her body.
Three lives. Growing inside the woman who was currently trying to kill us.
My legs stopped working.
“Lucian.” Solomon’s voice interjected the static. He’d heard it too. His pale eyes were wide, the mask cracked open, silver irises flooding with gold. Percival stumbled back from Mira’s next strike, not because he couldn’t block it but because his face had gone white.
They heard it. All three of us, frozen in the clearing while Mira fought with a precision that made the ground tilt beneath my feet.
Fucking hell.
She was pregnant.
Mira drove the dagger toward Solomon’s chest and he sidestepped, refusing to engage, his hands open at his sides. She spun on Percy and he caught her wrist but didn’t twist, didn’t apply force, just held her there while his hazel eyes searched her face for the woman underneath the mask.
None of us could fight her. Especially not now when the new heartbeats had gutted us.
I stepped forward. My mouth opened to say her name, to say anything that would reach through but she read the movement and pivoted. The dagger arced toward my throat and I barely leaned back in time, the blade passing close enough that the wind of it kissed my skin.
“Mira, stop.” Percy’s voice cracked. “Please.”
She was already turning back to him. Wrenched free of his grip and drove her elbow into his jaw. Percival’s head snapped back, and Solomon stepped between them on instinct, shielding Percival, his back to the hunter line for half a second.
That was all they needed.
Two darts hit Solomon between the shoulder blades. He staggered forward, went down on one knee. A third dart caught Percival in the neck before he could recover, and he dropped, hand reaching for the feathered end before his muscles seized and he collapsed into the dirt.
Mira didn’t look at them.
She turned to me.
The clearing emptied. The hunters, the rifles, the humming weapons, Thiago’s smile. All of it dissolved until there was only her. Walking toward me with my dagger in her hand and our children in her body and an expression on her face that I couldn’t read.
“Get out of my way, Lucian.”
“No.”
“I will hurt you.”
“You already have.” I spread my hands. Open. Unarmed. A king with no weapons facing the woman who held every piece of him in her blood-stained fingers. “Every day. You’ve already hurt me worse than any blade. And I deserve it.”
She didn’t stop.
The dagger drove into my chest.
By the heart. Two inches right. The pain was white, electric, a point of fire between my ribs that sent my vision swimming. Silver compound on the blade, the same formula that had been in the darts but concentrated, burning through my blood with an immediacy that dropped me to one knee.
I grabbed her.
Both arms around her waist. Pulling her into me, against me, the dagger still buried in my chest with her hand around the grip.
Her body hit mine and the scent overwhelmed everything. It makes sense now. That new note underneath, richer, deeper, the note we detected since the ridge. I understood with a clarity that shattered every remaining wall.
Our child. My wolf howled inside me.
The pain was a gift. Every nerve ending screaming meant she was here, pressed against me, real and breathing. Her heartbeat vibrated through my ribs alongside the three smaller ones I’d carry in my chest for the rest of my life.
I would have driven the blade more myself if it meant another second of holding her.
“Push it deeper.” My mouth was against her ear. My arms tightened around her, pressing her closely that the dagger shifted and the pain flared and I didn’t care. “If this is what you need to do. Push it deeper.”
Her hand trembled on the grip.
“I had ached for you every single day.” The confession fell out of me. “Since that day I have regretted, Mira.”
Her breath stuttered against my neck.
“Pierce my heart if you want.” The words came from the place where the bond lived, bleeding but alive, always alive. “I’ll hold still and let you do it because I would rather die at your hand. If it means you will be able to forgive me someday. Forgive us.”
The blade pressed closer. My heartbeat pushed against the edge with every contraction, the rhythm driving my flesh into steel.
Her hand stopped.
I looked down at her face to count the freckles across her nose, to see the way her mismatched eyes were swimming with tears she refused to shed.
She didn’t twist.
“I hate you,” she whispered. The words caught in her throat, rough with everything she was holding back.
I stared straight into her eyes. “I know.”
Her jaw clenched.
The hunters were repositioning. I could hear boots on gravel, the click of weapons being adjusted. Not darts this time. The barrels were different. The shots they were loading would definitely kill, not sedate.
She pulled the dagger out. The withdrawal sent a fresh wave of fire through my chest and my knees buckled, both hitting the ground. Blood soaked through my shirt, warm and spreading.
The hunters raised their weapons. Two aimed at Solomon’s prone body. One tracked to Percy. Three more pointed at me, and the thrum from those cylindrical attachments intensified to a pitch that made my wolf growl.
A blur of movement.
A figure erupted from the tree line and hit the closest hunter with enough force to send the man’s weapon spinning into the dirt. The figure moved down the line, taking out the shooters before they could reorient and disabling them.
The shots never fired.
“Move,” the figure ordered. A voice that carried the weight of years spent surviving alone. “Now.”
Solomon and Percival were already moving. On their feet despite the darts. Solomon reached for me and Percival turned back toward the clearing.
Toward Mira.
I did the same. Every inch of my body pulled toward the woman standing alone between twelve hunters with my blood on her hands and our children in her body. We couldn’t leave her.
The hunters fired rounds.
The crack of live ammunition split the pre-dawn air and the figure threw himself into the path, claws out, moving with speed. He swatted the first round out of the air, deflected the second with his forearm, and the third grazed his shoulder without slowing him.
Giselle materialized as her claws caught a fourth shot aimed at Solomon’s back, deflecting it into the dirt, and she fell into formation beside the figure without a word exchanged.
“Go!” The roar tore from his throat. “They will put you in the ground. Go now!”
Percival was shaking beside me, his whole body angled toward the clearing, fighting every step that carried him in the wrong direction. Solomon had my arm over his shoulder, hauling me forward, but his head kept turning back. Even the man who never broke protocol couldn’t stop looking.
Another volley cracked through the trees. The figure and Giselle held the line, drawing the fire, giving us the distance we needed.
I looked back one last time.
Mira stood in the clearing. Head down. The dagger hung at her side, dripping with blood that belonged to the three of us. The hunters were regrouping around Thiago, whose expression had shifted from satisfaction to calculation.
She didn’t lift her head.
The trees swallowed us.
The figure caught up moments later, moving through the forest. Pre-dawn gray was just beginning to thin, the first light filtering through the canopy in pale strips that turned everything to shadow and suggestion.
Behind us, the sound of pursuit. Boots crashing through underbrush, hunters mobilizing to follow. Then a snarl from the east, a crash, and the pursuit scattered in the wrong direction. Giselle, drawing them off our trail.
He stopped at a rock formation. Turned toward Solomon.
The early light caught his face.
Solomon went still beside me. His entire body locked, the soldier’s composure dissolving in a way I’d never witnessed in four centuries of standing beside this man.
The face that looked back at us was old. Weathered by decades, lined with the particular erosion of a man who’d survived alone for longer than anyone should. White hair, cropped short. Gaunt frame beneath layered clothing, hands that bore calluses.
But the eyes.
Pale silver, almost colorless.
“Solomon,” the man said. Just the name. His son’s name, spoken with twenty-four years of silence behind it.
Solomon’s hand tightened on my arm until the grip hurt.
He didn’t speak. His mouth worked but no sound came out, and the scar on his face went white.
“Father,” Solomon said.
Lord Farmon caught his son before his knees hit the ground.