Chapter 61 Solomon
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Solomon
The scrape was not deep.
I cleaned it with antiseptic from the medical kit I’d restocked that morning. Cotton pressed against the wound, solution applied in measured strokes, bandage cut to precise dimensions.
My hands were steady. The rest of me was a disaster.
The den was small. Windbreak on three sides, open at the south-facing entrance, the blanket arrangement I’d rebuilt before dawn creating a contained space that smelled of pine and Mira’s shifting pregnancy hormones and the lingering adrenaline from the fight.
She sat on the bedroll. I knelt beside her. The position put her arm at optimal treatment height and her face at a distance that made focus impossible.
“You’re being very thorough for a scrape,” she said.
“Infection risks increase during pregnancy. Immune response is redirected toward fetal development.”
“Is that from the medical texts or from Farmon?”
“Both.”
Her mouth curved. The scrape was dressed but my hand was still on her arm.
“Solomon.”
“Hm.”
“The scrape is done.”
I released her arm. Packed the medical kit and returned the antiseptic to its compartment with a deliberateness that fooled neither of us.
The den held a silence that pressed against the walls. Outside, camp sounds carried through the windbreak. Percival’s laugh from the training area. Lucian’s voice giving measured instructions. Meanwhile, I was here and couldn’t find a single word.
“You built this for me,” Mira said. Her hand ran across the blanket arrangement, fingertips tracing the pattern I’d folded before dawn. “The blankets, the water, the windbreak. Even the angle of the bedroll.”
“The angle compensates for the grade of the terrain. Without adjustment, gravitational pressure on your lower back would...”
“Solomon.”
I stopped.
“I’m not asking for the engineering report. I’m asking why you won’t say what you actually mean.”
Her eyes held mine. Patient in the way that cost her, because patience with men who couldn’t articulate their feelings was a currency Mira had spent too much of in her life and she was still choosing to spend it here.
My hands found my knees, pressing flat. The tremor started in my fingertips and worked inward.
“Because what I mean is too large for the words I have.” The sentence escaped before the filter caught it. The kind of statement I’d have revised three times before delivering if I’d had the discipline to wait. “I have a large vocabulary and none of it is adequate for what I did to you.”
Mira didn’t move. She waited, the way she always did. Giving space for the words to arrive at their own pace because she’d learned that forcing Solomon Theron to speak before he was ready produced tactical responses, not honest ones.
“I continued practicing what to say.” My voice dropped. “Drafted it the way I draft operational briefings. Structured arguments. Supporting evidence. A logical framework for why the rejection was wrong and how I intended to correct it.”
“And?”
“And every version sounded like an excuse.”
Her breathing changed into a fraction deeper. The shift visible in the rise of her chest and the softening of her shoulders.
“So I stopped practicing. I built the den instead. Because my hands needed to do what my mouth couldn’t.”
The tremor reached my wrists. I pressed harder against my knees.
“Every blanket is an apology I don’t know how to say. Every adjustment is a sentence I can’t construct. Four centuries of language and the only fluency I have left is arrangement and proximity and the pathetic hope that you’ll read the architecture and understand what it means.”
“Solomon...”
“It means I’m sorry.” The words cracked on the way out. “It means I chose the worst moment of your life and delivered it heartlessly. I execute. I’m efficient. And the efficiency of how I broke you is the thing I can’t forgive myself.”
My vision blurred but I held it back.
Mira’s hand found mine on my knee. Her fingers slid between mine. Laced and intertwined slowly.
“You built this den,” she said. “Every morning I’d come back from rotation and find one more thing adjusted. The water closer. The herbs ground. The blankets rearranged.”
Her thumb traced my knuckle. The gesture so familiar and so specific to Mira that my chest contracted around it.
“And I knew. Every time. I knew what you were saying because I’ve spent enough time around you to understand what your action means.”
“Actions don’t erase damage.”
“No. They don’t.” Her grip tightened. “But they rebuild. And you’ve been rebuilding every night while I pretended not to notice because noticing meant I’m letting you back in.”
The den held us. Small, contained, the world reduced to a bedroll and a windbreak and two people holding hands.
“I need to know one thing,” she said. “No practiced speech or overthinking. Just the answer.”
“Ask.”
“If the council demanded it again tomorrow. If Lucian gave the order. If every logical argument pointed to rejection being the right call.” Her eyes didn’t waver. “Would you do it?”
The answer didn’t require drafting or revision or operational frameworks. It existed in a place beneath all of that. Beneath the enforcer and the soldier and the centuries of duty that had defined every decision until the one that shattered him.
“No.” One word with no hesitation. “Not for Lucian. Not even for Veyndral. Not for anything that exists in any world we’ve walked through. I would burn the council chamber down before I spoke those words to you again.”
Her chin trembled. The composure she’d maintained through every beat of this conversation finally cracking at the seams because the answer she’d needed wasn’t eloquence or explanation. It was certainty. And the certainty in my voice left no room for doubt.
“Okay,” she whispered.
She brought our joined hands to her lap. Held them against the bump where three heartbeats drummed. The rhythm pressed against my knuckles, rapid and strong, and my wolf went still in a way he hadn’t been since before the rejection.
“I forgive you, Solomon.”
The bond channel opened.
This was a door. A door that had been locked for months, rusted shut by grief and guilt and the words I’d used to destroy the woman now holding my hand.
It opened by inches. Warmth seeping through first, tentative, testing the spaces between us. Then deeper. Filling the cold places in my chest where the absence of her had lived since the day I’d stood in front of her and performed the worst act of my life.
My wolf settled into a stillness so complete that for three seconds I couldn’t distinguish between peace and shock.
I pressed my forehead to our joined hands, breathing.
“Solomon.” Her free hand found my jaw, tilting my face up. “Look at me.”
I looked.
Her eyes were bright, teary. The mismatched irises steady through the tears she was allowing herself because this space was private and this time, neither of us had an audience to perform for.
She kissed me.
Her mouth found mine with a softness that undid what remained of my composure. My hand released hers and found the back of her neck.
Fingers threading into her hair, pulling her closer, the kiss deepening that made my wolf press against my ribs with a hunger I no longer tried to contain.
My tongue swept past her lips, tasting her, and the groan that escaped me vibrated against her mouth.
She opened wider for me and I took everything she offered, sucking on her lower lip until it was swollen.
She tasted of the camp’s morning tea and the adrenaline from the fight and the salt of tears.
Her fingers curled into the front of my shirt and pulled, dragging my body flush against hers.
My hands slid down her back and gripped her waist, pressing her into me until there was nothing between us but fabric and the heat building beneath it.
My cock hardened against her thigh and she didn’t pull away.
She pressed closer. I memorized the pressure.
Memorized the sound she made when my mouth moved from hers to her jaw, sucking a bruise into the soft skin below her ear, the soft exhale that carried my name in a register I’d never heard from her before.
“Solomon.” Breathless. Against my temple. “We’re in your den.”
“Our den.”
The correction left my mouth without permission. Her breath caught.
I kissed her again, harder this time, one hand fisting her hair to tilt her head back while the other slid beneath her shirt and spread across the bare skin of her lower back. The contact made her gasp into my mouth.
My thumb traced the curve of her spine and she rolled her hips against me, a slow grind that pulled a sound from my throat I didn’t recognize. I pressed back, letting her feel how hard she’d made me, and the whimper she breathed against my lips almost snapped the last thread of my restraint.
“Don’t start something we can’t finish,” she whispered. But her fingers were already tracing the scar along my jaw, her mouth following, pressing soft kisses against the raised skin.
“Then stop doing that.”
“No.”
A kick landed against my ribs. We both froze.
Mira looked down. The bump pressed between us, and the second kick came with enough force to register through my forearm where it rested against her waist.
“I think they have opinions,” Mira said.
“They have bad timing.” My forehead dropped against hers. “Percival’s influence, clearly.”
Real laughter escaped her. The sound echoed in my chest.
A third kick followed, softer. Three heartbeats returning to a rhythm that no longer carried the frantic energy of moments ago.
Suddenly, a shadow passed across the windbreak’s gap.
Brief and masked but I caught and recognized it.
Giselle. Through the narrow space between the panels, she would have seen us from that angle.
The shadow paused for two seconds. Then continued.
My wolf registered her scent and the anger surfaced immediately. The shove she’d given Mira on the sparring ground. Reckless and cruel regardless of the context. The conversation I would need to have with her about that.
Not now. Later. When my mate wasn’t breathing against my skin and the bond wasn’t still settling into its new shape.
Giselle’s silhouette crossed the clearing and ducked into Annora’s tent without hesitation.
It was when I knew that she was choosing a new commanding officer.
I don’t really care unless it would harm Mira. I better not find out any more attempts against my mate or the last of my patience and respect for her as a comrade will be forgotten. She’ll meet me as Veyndral’s enforcer.
Mira hadn’t noticed. Her eyes were closed, the bond pulsing between us in waves that neither of us was ready to interrupt.
I let the moment hold.
Her breathing evened. The fight and the forgiveness and the weight of the morning pulling her toward a rest she’d been denying herself for weeks.
“Stay,” I said.
“I wasn’t planning on leaving.”
Her body shifted against mine until her head rested on my shoulder and the bump pressed against my ribs.
Three channels in the bond network. Two open. One remaining.
I adjusted the blanket over her shoulders, repositioning the water one inch closer.
The den was never finished. But it was ours now, and that changed the architecture of everything.