Chapter 72 Percival #2
Rocking it on its back legs, casual, his eyes on the ceiling. The gun in his right hand dangled at his side, barrel pointed at the floor, and his left hand rested on his knee with the relaxed posture of a man waiting for a meeting he’d scheduled himself.
Mira was on the floor beside him. Hands bound behind her back with zip ties with a gag in the mouth. A bruise darkening on her cheek. Her jacket torn at the shoulder. She was conscious, eyes burning, but the gun’s proximity to her head kept her still.
My entire body ignited.
“Ah.” Thiago lowered his gaze from the ceiling and looked at us. The smile spread slowly, warm, paternal, as wrong on his face as a funeral in sunlight. “There they are. Record time, boys. I’m impressed.”
Lucian’s growl filled the corridor. Unbroken, the sound of a king’s wolf pressing against human skin, demanding release.
“I have to say,” Thiago continued, rocking the chair forward until all four legs touched the ground, “the pregnancy was a surprise. Not an unwelcome one, though. Three lycan offspring.” His eyes moved to Mira’s belly. “Thank you for the new research subjects.”
I lunged.
Lucian moved at the same second. Solomon a heartbeat after. We were crossing the distance between the door and the chair with singular intent.
Thiago cocked the gun and pressed it to Mira’s temple.
We stopped.
Every muscle in my body screaming forward while my feet cemented themselves to the concrete. Mira’s eyes met mine. Steady, furious. Telling me a message I couldn’t read because the panic was louder than the meaning.
“There it is.” Thiago hadn’t flinched. “The mating bond. The most elegant leash ever designed by nature. Three of the most dangerous wolves, and all I need is one gun and one girl to keep them on their heels.”
“Take the gun off her,” Lucian said. Every word pulled from somewhere deep and controlled.
“Or what? You’ll kill me? You’ll try, certainly. But the bullet moves faster than any of you, and you know it.” He pressed the barrel harder against Mira’s temple. She didn’t close her eyes. “So we’re going to have a conversation instead.”
“We’re not here to talk,” Solomon said.
“You’re here because she fired a flare and your biology did the rest. Predictable. Exploitable.” Thiago stood from the chair, gun still pressed to Mira’s head. “Did she tell you about her mother?”
Nobody answered.
“Sienna was brilliant. The most gifted researcher even amongst legacies. Her work on lycan physiology advanced our understanding by decades. And she repaid that investment by spending six months sneaking into a prisoner’s cell, fabricating medical records, redirecting compound resources, and ultimately helping a lycan escape through the tunnels beneath this facility. ”
He stopped circling. Faced us.
“My wife. In his cell. Night after night. And when I discovered the truth, she chose him. The wolf over her husband. Over her daughter. Over everything we’d built.”
Farmon’s voice surfaced in my memory. A conversation by the fire during one of the preparation nights, his ruined hands wrapped around a cup, his eyes fixed on a distance that spanned twenty-four years.
“He convinced himself it was an affair,” Farmon had said. “Because he needed a reason to make us evil and Sienna’s sympathy a sin. It was easier to call it betrayal than to accept that his wife simply had a conscience.”
Thiago was confirming every word.
The jealousy contorted his features into a mask that he wore as righteousness, and the man standing in front of us believed, truly believed, that helping a tortured prisoner escape was an act of romantic betrayal rather than basic decency.
“I killed her,” Thiago said. Matter-of-fact. No remorse, no triumph. A data point. “And I told our six-year-old daughter that monsters were responsible. Which, in a sense, they were. Sienna became a monster the day she chose a wolf over her own family.”
Mira’s jaw clenched. The zip ties cut into her wrists.
“But her death gave me a gift. Her research. Her formula. Twenty years of data that she’d gathered. I refined it. Perfected it.” He gestured at the cells around us. “The Purifier.”
“You turned people into weapons,” I said.
“I restored a balance.”
His voice shifted. The paternal warmth evaporated, replaced by the fervor of a man delivering a sermon he’d rehearsed in the mirror for years.
“Lycans became myths. Stories told to frighten children. Your kind retreated behind your portals and left the human world believing the threat had passed. And what happened? The Order died. Hunters lost their purpose. The greatest protective force humanity ever produced withered because there was nothing left to hunt.”
He spread his arms. The gun stayed trained on Mira.
“So I gave them prey. The rogues. The ferals. Wolves with no minds and no masters, released into human territories to create the incidents that justified our existence. Every attack, every sighting, every terrified village that called for help. I manufactured the threat and built the army to fight it.”
“You murdered your own creations,” Solomon said.
“I recycled them. There’s a difference.” Thiago’s smile returned. “The Order of Silver Dawn was dying. I revived it. Gave it purpose, funding, soldiers. Built it into a force that could actually accomplish what generations of hunters had failed to do: restore the natural order.”
He pointed at us. “Predators.” Then at himself. “And hunters.”
Thiago smiled and declared, “That is the order of the world.”
“You’re fucking sick in the head,” I said.
“I’m a visionary. History will agree with me.”
The explosion came from the adjacent room.
A deep, concussive boom that shook the floor and rattled the glass on every cell in the corridor. Dust cascaded from the ceiling and the monitors on the control station flickered.
The purifier vaults assigned to the converted hunters. Kaia, Damon, Reese, executing the part of Mira’s plan that still worked despite everything falling apart.
Thiago glanced at the wall separating us from the vault room. Yawned.
“Your converts think they did something, huh?” He brushed the dust from his shoulder. “Touching, really. Months of careful infiltration to destroy a stockpile that took me years to build.” He shrugged. “It will take time to produce more. But it’s not as though I don’t have a backup.”
He reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a small remote. Single button. Black casing.
“The compound’s environmental system runs through every room on this level. Climate control, air filtration, emergency dispersal. I had the Purifier loaded into the ventilation reserves six months ago. A precaution. In case of exactly this scenario.”
His thumb hovered over the button.
“Don’t,” Lucian said.
“The beautiful thing about the Purifier in aerosol form is its efficiency. One exposure. Fifteen seconds. Irreversible.” He looked at each of us in turn. “Three alpha lycans. The king, his enforcer, and the warrior. Reduced to the same mindless creatures pacing those cells.”
Mira flailed and tried to scream.
His thumb pressed down.
The sound was mechanical. A deep hiss that started in the walls and spread through the ceiling, followed by the vents above us opening with synchronized precision.
White smoke poured into the corridor, rolling across the floor in waves, filling the space between us and the cells and the chair where Thiago stood with Mira at his feet.
The smoke reached my lungs before I could hold my breath.
Thiago looked down at Mira. The gun was still at her temple. The smoke curled around both of them, rising, thickening, filling every inch of the sublevel.
“I wonder,” he said, tilting his head with genuine curiosity, “does this mean she’ll give birth to mindless wolves?”
The smile that spread across his face was the last clear thing I saw before the smoke swallowed the room.
“Try not to chow down on my daughter, boys.”