Chapter 51 Solomon
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Solomon
She slept between us.
Mira had curled into Lucian’s uninjured side while Percival pressed against her back, his arm draped over her waist with his hand on her stomach.
I sat against the nearest tree keeping watch because someone had to, and because the image of her tangled between them was the closest thing to peace I’d witnessed in months.
The babies’ heartbeats had evened out. Three rhythms, synchronized now. Even in sleep, her color had improved. The hollows under her cheekbones had softened.
In approximately four hours, she would leave this clearing and walk back into the compound and every improvement would begin to reverse.
Dawn crept through the canopy. Lucian stirred first, the wound pulling him from sleep with a grimace. He registered Mira against his side and went still, memorizing the weight of her before she woke.
Percival didn’t stir. His arm tightened around Mira’s waist and his face pressed into her hair, holding on to the only warmth his silence would let him reach for.
No murmuring, no restless shifting. His energetic personality that defined him for centuries had gone dormant, and what remained was a man gripping his mate in sleep because his voice wouldn’t cooperate while awake.
I’d tried to reach him yesterday. After the meeting, after we felt our children kicking.
“Talk to me.”
“Can’t.” He’d turned the locket over in his fingers. “There’s too much in here right now.” He’d pressed his fist against his own temple. “If I open my mouth it’ll come out wrong, or it’ll come out as screaming. Neither one helps.”
So I’d left him. Because I understood sealed doors. I’d lived behind one for four hundred years.
Mira woke with a groan that was equal parts pregnancy nausea and general displeasure at being alive. She extracted herself from the pile with the graceless efficiency of someone who’d spent years waking up in unfamiliar places.
Her shirt had ridden up during the night. A strip of skin above her waistband, the faintest curve of her stomach visible before she tugged the fabric down. My wolf pressed inside my ribs so hard my teeth ached.
Fuck. She just looks hotter lately.
The pregnancy had changed her body in ways I was not prepared to process rationally.
Fuller through the chest and hips. A softness to her frame that hadn’t been there before, layered over the lean muscle training had built. She looked fertile and strong and entirely unaware of what the combination was doing to me from three feet away.
“Morning,” Lucian said.
“Don’t talk to me yet. I need to not be awake for at least five more minutes.”
“You’re standing.”
“My body betrayed me. It doesn’t count.”
She stumbled toward the stream and I intercepted her path with a canteen and dried fruit. She took both without looking at me, which I chose to interpret as progress.
The rotation needed structure. Random departures created pattern gaps that Thiago would notice. We settled on every third night, alternating exit points.
“Two days of separation is manageable,” my father said during the briefing. “Three crosses the threshold. The bond will compensate for short absences but not sustained ones.”
Mira accepted it without argument. The babies had made the decision for her.
By mid-morning, the plan was set and Mira was pulling on her jacket. The keycard, the tablet, the journal tucked into inner pockets. She looked at me.
“I’ll be fine.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You were thinking it. Your jaw does this thing when you’re worried.”
“My jaw doesn’t do anything.”
“It tightens. Right here.” She touched her own jaw to demonstrate. “Every time. It’s your tell.”
The fact that she’d been studying me closely enough to identify a tell I didn’t know I had landed somewhere in my chest and refused to leave.
She turned to Lucian. “Don’t die while I’m gone. I just got used to arguing with you again.”
“I’ll do my best to accommodate your schedule.”
Percival got a different farewell. She crossed the clearing and stood in front of him. He looked up. She pressed her hand to his cheek, brief and warm, and said nothing. He leaned into it for half a second. Then she pulled back and walked toward the tree line.
I followed her to the perimeter. Standard protocol.
“Solomon.”
I stopped.
“The note.” The corner of her mouth twitched. “Under the rock. Did you find it?”
The note. The response to the message I’d thrown over the wall during her training session with Wyatt. The message that, in retrospect, was not standard protocol by any interpretation.
Every time the male’s name surfaced, my wolf offered the same suggestion: remove him. Snap his neck, drag the body into the forest, and resume the conversation as if nothing happened.
The impulse was irrational and I recognized it as such, but rationality had limited authority over a mated alpha whose bond was fractured and whose children were growing inside a woman he couldn’t fully reclaim.
The strained space between us made it worse. And every hour she spent training beside another man while that space remained unresolved fed a possessiveness I couldn’t reason away.
“I found it.”
“And?”
“You told me to stop throwing rocks. I’ve adjusted my methods accordingly.”
“I also told you Wyatt doesn’t stand that close.”
My jaw tightened. The tell she’d just identified, functioning on cue.
“He stands within arm’s reach during sparring drills.”
“It’s sparring. He has to be within arm’s reach. That’s how combat works. You know that.”
“Yes. I’m aware of how combat works. I’ve been conducting it for four centuries.”
“Then you should know the difference between tactical proximity and romantic proximity.”
“I know the difference.” The words came out before I could moderate them. “I simply don’t enjoy watching another male other than us occupy space near you. Regardless of the tactical justification. It’s one immaturity I allow myself.”
The amusement in her eyes shifted to warmth. She held my gaze and the wall between us thinned another fraction.
“I’ll be back in two days,” she said. “Try not to throw any rocks at Wyatt while I’m gone.”
“No promises.”
She turned toward the tree line and almost collided with Giselle.
The two women stopped. Giselle had materialized from the eastern perimeter, a water container in each hand, returning from the stream on a path that intersected Mira’s exit route. For a beat, neither moved.
Giselle recovered first. Her gaze swept Mira the way a soldier assessed a variable: head to boots, pausing at the stomach, then back up to her face.
“You’re leaving.”
“I am.” Mira’s voice stayed even but I caught the shift in her posture. Spine straightened. Chin lifted. A body language learned from a lifetime being evaluated and had learned to stand taller for it.
“Through the eastern drainage tunnels. The ones you used last night.”
“That’s the plan.”
Giselle set the water containers down. “I’ve been here for weeks. Running perimeter security, treating Lucian’s wound, maintaining operational discipline while the three of them tracked your movements from outside those walls. Do you know how many hours Solomon has spent watching that compound?”
“Giselle.” My voice carried the warning clearly.
She didn’t look at me. Her eyes stayed on Mira. “Every patrol gap, every guard rotation, every camera angle. He mapped that facility from memory so thoroughly that when he finally went in, he navigated it in the dark.”
Mira’s expression didn’t waver.
“Is there a point you’re getting to?” Mira asked. “Or are you just listing things I already know?”
“The point is that they’ve given everything to be here.
Lucian abandoned his throne. Solomon compromised his operational standards.
Percival went rogue.” Giselle’s voice didn’t rise but the weight behind it increased.
“And you’re walking back into a compound run by your father, playing both sides, while they sit in a forest and wait. ”
“I’m not playing both sides.”
“You’re sleeping in his compound and in their camp. From where I’m standing, that’s both sides.”
The clearing went quiet. Lucian had gone still against his tree. Percival’s head turned toward the confrontation but he didn’t move.
Mira stepped closer to Giselle. Not aggressive but not retreating. The two of them were close in height, and at this distance the contrast was stark: Giselle’s military discipline against Mira’s scraped-together resilience.
“You don’t know me,” Mira said. “You don’t know what I’m doing in that compound or what it costs me every time I call that man Dad and smile through his lies. You don’t know what it’s doing to me to leave my mates every two days while I’m carrying their children.”
Her voice dropped. “And you don’t get to stand between me and that tree line and tell me I’m not sacrificing enough. Not when I’m the one walking back in there alone.”
Giselle held her ground. “I’m not questioning your courage. I’m questioning whether you intend to honor what they’re sacrificing for you. Because right now, you haven’t forgiven them, you haven’t committed to them, and they’re still rearranging their entire world around you.”
The words landed. I watched them land on Mira’s face, watched the flinch she almost hid.
“Giselle. Enough.” My voice left no room for interpretation.
This time she looked at me. The amber eyes held a challenge, a plea, and a wound underneath both that she’d carried for decades without naming. Then she stepped aside.
Mira turned toward the tree line.
“Mira.” Lucian’s voice carried from his tree. Strained from the effort of raising it. “Wait.”
She didn’t stop.
Percival was on his feet. The first time he’d moved with urgency lately, crossing the clearing in three strides. “Mira, don’t leave it at that. She doesn’t speak for us.”
“I have to go.” Flat. Controlled. The mask back in place. “Morning patrols start in forty minutes and if I’m not in my room when Elaine does her rounds, this entire rotation falls apart.”