Chapter 63 Lucian
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Lucian
I found her at the stream.
The bond channel between us was still closed, sealed by my own making, but the tether connecting me to her operated beneath the channel itself.
It pulsed wrong. Her rhythm had shifted twenty minutes ago. Elevated heart rate, adrenaline. The signature of a body that had entered a defensive state.
The stream sat forty meters from the main clearing. She sat on the fallen log with both hands pressed to her stomach, talking to the babies. The words were too quiet to catch at this distance, but the cadence was soft, reassuring.
Her shoulders held a tension that hadn’t been there this morning.
The details registered before she noticed my presence. Dirt smudged on her left knee. Knuckles white where they gripped the log’s edge. Jaw clenched for longer than was comfortable.
I didn’t know what had happened. But the evidence of it was written across her body in a language I’d spent time learning to read.
“I can hear you standing there,” Mira said without turning. “You breathe louder than you think.”
“Hundred years of kingship and no one has had the courage to tell me.”
Her smile was forced and didn’t reach her eyes.
I crossed the remaining distance and sat on the log beside her. Not touching but close enough to touch if she chose.
She didn’t.
The third channel between us remained sealed. Percy’s warmth and Solomon’s depth flowed freely through the bond network, but the space where my frequency should have lived sat cold and quiet. A locked room in a house that was slowly filling with light.
“Your feet,” I said.
“What about them?”
“You’ve walked the drainage tunnels a lot these days. Eight miles each direction. The terrain is uneven and the concrete grade shifts twice near the eastern junction.”
“Are you tracking my steps?”
“I’m observing the result of them.” My gaze dropped to her boots. Worn at the heel, the sole separating at the toe seam, sized for a woman who wasn’t carrying additional weight that shifted her center of gravity with every step. “Those boots are cheap.”
“Why thank you, Your Royal Highness. But these boots are the only ones I have.”
“Which is why I’m addressing the issue.”
She turned her head and studied me. The mismatched eyes carried the residue of whatever confrontation had driven her to this log, but beneath that, the particular attention she reserved for moments when she was deciding whether to argue or allow.
“Lucian, if you’re about to lecture me about footwear, I’ve had a very long morning and I will throw this log at you.”
“I’m not going to lecture you.” I stood. Moved in front of her and knelt.
She’s the only person who will have me on my knees.
The position put my face level with her knees and my hands near her boots. Kneeling before anyone was a posture I hadn’t adopted in centuries as a king.
I unlaced her left boot carefully.
“Lucian, what are you...”
“Quiet.”
Mira was rendered silent. Probably because she finally realized the sight of a king on his knees unlacing her boots and had temporarily suspended her capacity for commentary.
It came off. The sock beneath it was damp, worn thin at the ball of her foot. I removed it and the damage underneath confirmed what I’d suspected.
Blisters on both heels, the right one broken and raw. Calluses that had formed and split from repeated friction against concrete. The arch was swollen from compensating for the pregnancy’s shifted weight distribution. She’d been walking on this for days without mentioning it to anyone.
“How long?” I asked.
“It’s not that bad.”
“Mira. How long?”
“Since the second rotation. Three days, maybe four.”
Three days.
She’d been walking sixteen-mile round trips through drainage tunnels on feet that belonged in a field medic’s training manual. Just for this operation to free my kingdom despite my sin to her. All of it on blistered feet she’d wrapped in inadequate socks and boots that were falling apart.
My chest ached somewhere between fury and reverence.
I reached for the medical supplies I’d been carrying in my jacket for two days.
“You planned this,” she said, watching me lay out the antiseptic and gauze.
“I’ve been watching you favor your left side since Tuesday. The gait change was subtle but consistent.”
“Then why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because every time I’ve had thirty seconds alone with you, someone needed a stupid briefing or a perimeter adjustment.” The antiseptic went on. She hissed through her teeth. “Running an alliance from opposite ends of the same camp is remarkably effective at preventing personal conversations.”
“So you just carried a medical kit around waiting for an opening?”
“I carried medical supplies because you are stubborn enough to walk on injured feet until they became a tactical liability, and I wanted to be prepared when you finally sat still long enough.”
“That’s very...”
“Practical.”
“I was going to say sweet.”
“Then I retract the explanation.”
“You didn’t tell Solomon,” I said.
“I specifically hid it from him. That one is sick in the head. He would have dismantled the drainage tunnel and rebuilt it with cushioned flooring.”
“He would have. And you should let him, because accepting help doesn’t diminish your strength.”
“Says the man who got stabbed in the chest and refused medical monitoring.”
“That was a tactical decision.”
“No, it’s stubbornness. Farmon said you are an impatient patient. Hear the irony?”
“Farmon is old in age, he exaggerates.”
“Hey, don’t insult the poor man. You and your tongue, really.”
I wrapped the gauze around her heel, tuning out her comments.
The second boot came off and this foot was worse. A bruise had formed along the outer edge where the boot’s failing sole had allowed rocks to press through. I cleaned it, dressed it, and wrapped it with the same care.
When I finished, I sat back on my heels and looked up at her.
Her eyes were wet. The precursor to crying, held back by the same force of will that kept her walking on destroyed feet for days without complaint.
“You are the most stubborn woman I have ever encountered in my entire existence,” I said. “And I have encountered several.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“It’s a diagnosis.”
The laugh that escaped her was small, surprised, pulled from somewhere she hadn’t expected to access after the morning she’d had. It lasted two seconds and I memorized every one.
“Come on,” I said. “You’re not walking back to camp on those.”
“I can walk.”
“I’m aware of your capabilities. I’m questioning the necessity.” I stood and extended my arms. “May I?”
She looked at my arms. Then at my face. The question registered in the shift of her expression, the softening that preceded trust, the moment where the walls she maintained for self-preservation thinned by a fraction.
“You’re going to carry me?”
“Unless you’d prefer to crawl.”
“Lucian.”
“Mira.”
She reached for me. Her arms circled my neck and I lifted her off the log, one arm beneath her knees, the other supporting her back. The bump pressed against my chest with three heartbeats I could count through my shirt.
Her fingers laced behind my neck. The contact shouldn’t have registered the way it did.
I’d held soldiers through wounds, carried casualties from battlefields, lifted bodies without my pulse shifting a single beat.
But her fingertips brushing the skin above my collar sent a current down my spine that settled low in my gut.
“Comfortable?” I asked.
“You smell good.” The words left her mouth before she caught them. Her eyes widened and a flush crept up her neck. “I mean... it’s the pine. The forest smells good.”
“The forest, huh?”
“Shut up.”
The walk back to camp took four minutes. I could have covered it in two but the pace I chose was slower than necessary. Each step measured to extend the duration of having her weight against my chest.
Her head found my shoulder. Gravity and exhaustion pulling her into the curve of my body, and the warmth of her breath against my collarbone made my cock twitch in my pants.
Involuntary. The proximity and her scent and the way her fingers kept moving against the back of my neck in absent, mindless strokes that she probably didn’t realize she was doing.
Every single one fucking registered.
Her thigh shifted in my grip and the hem of her shirt rode up beneath my forearm. Bare skin against my sleeve. My fingers tightened on her leg and the adjustment wasn’t subtle enough because she glanced up at me and the awareness between us compressed.
“Your heart is racing,” she murmured.
“I’m carrying additional weight uphill.”
“It’s flat terrain, Lucian.”
“Then I have no explanation.”
Her mouth curved against my collarbone. The smile pressed into my skin through the fabric and my jaw clenched hard enough to ache. Five hundred years of composure and this woman undid it by smiling against my shirt.
The camp materialized. Percy saw us first. Dimples appeared. He said nothing, which for Percival constituted extraordinary restraint. Solomon glanced up from the map table. His gaze moved from Mira’s wrapped feet to my face. A single nod.
I carried her to the den. Set her on the bedroll, and the loss of her warmth against my chest registered as a physical absence that made my wolf snarl.
“Stay off those feet until morning.”
“I have a rotation at dawn.”
“Then rest until dawn.”
I had to leave before I changed my mind.
“Lucian.” I paused at the entrance. “Thank you.”
It wasn’t quite forgiveness. But a door left unlocked, if not yet opened.
“Rest,” I said. And walked back into the camp that needed its king.
The camp settled by midnight.
Soldiers at posts, converted hunters back through the tunnels. Four in the morning found me at the den entrance.
The tether pulled me the way it had pulled me to the stream, operating beneath strategy, above instinct.
Mira was asleep. Curled on her side in Solomon’s precise blanket arrangement. One hand on her stomach. The other tucked beneath her cheek, fingers loose. The tension from earlier finally released.
The pregnancy had changed her face. Fuller, softer. The glow Farmon described was visible even in sleep, fed by two open channels, diminished by the absence of a third.
My third. The one I’d sealed shut.
I knelt beside the bedroll. At the stream, I’d knelt to tend her feet. Here, no audience, no justification. Just the man beneath the crown needing to be close to the woman he’d failed.
My hand reached for her face. Stopped an inch from her cheek. The memory of every flinch she’d ever made from a man’s hand rising toward her pressed against the gesture.
Then my knuckles brushed her cheekbone. Featherlight. Her skin was warm and the scent of her filled the space between us and my wolf went still for the first time in months.
She didn’t wake. Or she chose to remain still.
My thumb traced her jaw. Once, slow.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. Barely a breath. The words I couldn’t say in daylight because daylight demanded a leader. “For all of it.”
Her breathing didn’t change. But her fingers on her stomach curled, just slightly, around the bump where three heartbeats drummed.
I withdrew my hand and stood.
The envoy from Veyndral was due tomorrow. They would see the hunters, the alliance, the human woman carrying heirs to the throne.
Tomorrow I would stand in front of my kingdom and tell the truth.
Tonight I stood in the dark and practiced being worthy of it.