Chapter 74 Percival
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Percival
The sublevel smelled of smoke and freedom and blood that wasn’t entirely ours.
Voss’s soldiers had reached us twelve minutes after the smoke cleared. Moving through the compound corridors with practiced rhythm. The converted hunters fell in with them seamlessly, Kaia directing teams to choke points while Damon and Reese handled the armory lockdown.
Weeks of distrust between lycan troops and human converts evaporated in the space of a single morning because nothing bonds people faster than a shared enemy.
The hunters who’d stayed loyal to Thiago were on their knees in the main corridor. Disarmed. Zip-tied with the same restraints they’d used on Mira. The irony wasn’t lost on anyone.
Mira stood at the sublevel entrance and watched the cells open.
One by one. Voss’s soldiers working the locks while converted hunters stood on the other side, ready to catch whoever stumbled out.
And they did stumble. Wolves who’d been caged for months, some longer, blinking against the fluorescent light with eyes that were still adjusting to having thoughts again.
A woman came out of the third cell. Couldn’t have been older than thirty, her body wasted to angles and bruises, but her eyes were clear.
She looked at the soldiers, at the open door, at the corridor that led to a stairwell that led to the surface that led to air and sky and a world she’d probably stopped believing in.
She took one step. Her legs buckled and Kaia caught her.
“You’re safe,” Kaia said. “It’s over.”
The woman didn’t speak. Just pressed her face into Kaia’s shoulder and shook.
I had to look away.
The larger containment units took longer.
The feral wolves, the ones who’d been purified furthest, needed more time for the cure to rebuild what had been stripped. Some were sitting up, confused, testing their own hands. Others were still in wolf form, but their eyes had changed. Aware. Frightened. Present.
Voss’s soldiers bowed as the freed lycans passed. Not a formal gesture or a rehearsed protocol. Just men lowering their heads as broken people walked by, acknowledging what had been done to them with the only language that didn’t require words.
Solomon was overseeing the Thiago situation.
The creature remained unconscious on the sublevel floor, and two of Voss’s strongest had it restrained with silver-reinforced chains that Solomon had personally inspected three times.
Lucian stood by the command monitors, his dislocated arm back in its socket thanks to a field reset that I’d heard from two corridors away and never wanted to hear again. He was speaking with Voss in the low, clipped tones of a king transitioning from battle to governance.
Mira hadn’t moved from the sublevel entrance.
She watched every lycan leave their cell. Every single one. Her face carried an expression I’d seen on her exactly once before: the night she’d told us about the sublevels, about the children and the experiments and the wolves who screamed without voices.
She’d looked gutted then. She looked gutted now, but underneath it was a resolve that held her upright when exhaustion should’ve dropped her hours ago.
“The ones who converted are free to go,” she said to Voss when the last cell opened. “The hunters who chose Thiago’s side after knowing what was down here don’t get the same mercy.”
Voss nodded. No argument. The evidence was in every empty cell and every freed wolf and the creature chained to the floor beneath us.
“And the ones who genuinely didn’t know, Your Majesty?” Voss asked. He’s now treating her with more respect and already considered her as a queen even without formalities.
Well, as he fucking should. This was all her. She rescued and saved Veyndral.
Mira paused. The question mattered because some of those hunters on their knees upstairs had joined the Order believing they were protecting people. Had trained and fought and followed orders without ever seeing the sublevels. Without knowing what their leader was manufacturing in the basement.
“Wyatt will sort them,” she said. “He’ll know who knew and who didn’t.”
That was Mira. Even after everything Thiago had done, she sticks to her morals.
She turned toward the stairwell and her first step was a wince.
The second was worse. The limp she’d been hiding since the balcony had graduated into a full-bodied reminder that she’d been dragged down three flights of stairs, zip-tied, thrown on concrete, and had sprinted through a compound while pregnant with triplets.
I scooped her off her feet before the third step.
“Put me down.”
“No.”
“Percival!”
“Full name. Terrifying. Still no.”
“I can walk.”
“You can limp. There’s a difference. And we’re going up four flights of stairs and you’re carrying three passengers, so the math isn’t in your favor.”
She opened her mouth to argue. Closed it and opened it again. Then her head dropped against my shoulder and her body went slack with a surrender so complete it told me exactly how much pain she’d been masking.
“Fine. But go left at the top of the stairs.”
“Why left?”
“Because right takes us past the armory and I don’t want to see any more guns today. Left goes through the east wing. Better lighting.”
“You’re giving me directions.”
“I’m optimizing the route. You’re the vehicle. I’m the navigator.”
Solomon fell into step on my right. Lucian on my left. Neither commented on the carrying arrangement because both of them had been calculating the same move and I’d simply gotten there first.
We climbed four flights. Mira directed every turn apparently enjoying giving me directions as if she was a ship captain.
The eastern service entrance opened onto morning.
Real morning. Not the gray pre-dawn we’d breached through, but full sun cutting through the tree line and painting the compound’s concrete in gold.
The forest beyond was green and still and completely indifferent to the fact that a war had just ended inside the building behind us.
Mira squinted against the light. Her hand came up to shade her eyes and I felt her inhale, deep and slow, the first breath she’d taken in hours that wasn’t laced with smoke or chemicals or fear.
The compound yard was organized chaos.
Freed lycans being triaged by field medics. Voss’s soldiers establishing a perimeter. Converted hunters coordinating with lycan troops on the evidence collection Lucian had ordered.
A stretcher crossed our path.
Wyatt on his back, shirt cut away, a pressure bandage on his abdomen already soaked through with red. His face was gray but his eyes were open, focused on the sky with the dazed concentration of a man who’d lost enough blood to make the clouds interesting.
“Stop,” Mira said.
“We should get you to the medical station,” Solomon said.
“Stop. Take me to him.”
The three of us exchanged a glance.
“To Wyatt,” she clarified. “The man who saved all of your lives by dragging himself across a with a bullet in his stomach to swap a chemical compound because I asked him to. That Wyatt. Take me to him.”
Lucian’s jaw tightened. Solomon’s expression didn’t change, which was his version of the same reaction.
“Is now really...” I started.
“Percival. Walk.”
I walked.
The stretcher bearers paused when we approached. Wyatt turned his head and managed a smile that cost him visible effort.
“Hey,” Mira said from my arms.
“Hey yourself.” His voice was thin. “You look… terrible.”
“That compliment again. You’re the one with a hole in your stomach.”
“Cosmetic damage.” He winced as the stretcher shifted. “Is it done?”
“It’s done. The cure worked. Every wolf on that sublevel is coming back.”
His eyes closed for a second. When they opened, they were wet and he didn’t try to hide it.
“Thank you,” Mira said. “For playing your part.”
“You gave me a part worth playing.”
She reached down from my arms and squeezed his hand. Brief. Firm.
Now is not the time to be jealous of the ‘friend’ who helped us so I gritted my teeth and tried to be as mature as I could.
“So what now?” she asked. “The Order’s gone. Thiago’s gone. What does Wyatt do without a crusade?”
He stared at the sky for a long moment. “Maybe… guide them to a different path. It’s hard to unlearn this life now.
We need a new identity. Not hunters but…
watchers. For whatever’s actually out there, human or supernatural, that means genuine harm.
Just... people who pay attention. All kinds of people. ”
“That sounds dangerously reasonable for a man raised in this compound.”
“Almost dying gives you perspective.” He glanced at the three men surrounding his stretcher, all wearing expressions that ranged from grudging respect to active digestive discomfort.
A weak laugh escaped him. “I doubt I’ll be calling for help though.
Your security detail doesn’t seem thrilled with me. ”
“Don’t worry about them. I’m the boss.”
Lucian made a sound that could’ve been a cough or a protest. Mira ignored it.
“Call if you need us,” she said. “I mean it.”
Wyatt nodded. The stretcher bearers resumed their path toward the medical convoy and Mira watched him go, her hand still extended from the squeeze, fingers curling slowly back into her palm.
“He’s a good man,” she said quietly.
“He got shot for you,” I said. “That earns a baseline of respect.”
“Generous,” Solomon said flatly.
“I didn’t say I liked him. I said I respected him… sort of.”
Mira’s laugh was small and tired and the best sound I’d heard all day.
Farmon found us at the perimeter. He’d come in with Voss’s second wave, and the sight of Mira in my arms pulled a reaction from his face that I’d never seen before: relief so pure it cracked through the careful neutrality he wore.
His ruined hands reached for hers and she gripped his fingers and neither of them spoke for ten seconds.
“The creature,” Lucian said to Farmon. “It needs transport to Veyndral. Maximum containment. The silver and wolfsbane knocked it unconscious but we don’t know the duration.”
“I’ll handle it.” Farmon’s eyes hadn’t left Mira. “The freed lycans need processing. Medical evaluation, identification, families notified. Some of them have been down there for years.”
“Take whatever resources you need. Voss answers to you until we return.”
Farmon nodded. Then looked at me. At Mira in my arms. At the bruise on her cheek and the blood on her wrists and the belly pressed against my chest where three heartbeats pulsed steady and strong.
“Thank you, Mira.” He paused, vulnerability in his voice. “You are Sienna’s true legacy.”
Mira gasped and bit her lip, holding back her tears and she couldn’t speak. Just smiled and nodded at Farmon.
“Take her somewhere quiet,” he said. “She’s done enough.”
Mira’s eyes were half-closed. The adrenaline had burned off somewhere between the sublevel stairs and the Wyatt conversation, and what remained was a woman running on willpower and pregnancy hormones and not much else.
“I can rest now,” she mumbled against my shoulder. “That was a very long day.”
“It’s not even noon,” Solomon said.
“Screw time and stupid clocks, I reject it.” She shifted in my arms, getting comfortable with the entitlement of a woman who’d earned the right to be carried for the rest of her natural life. “I want pancakes.”
“Pancakes,” Lucian repeated.
“With peanut butter. And pickles. And that cheese Farmon makes that smells terrible but tastes amazing.”
“That combination might actually be a different kind of war crime,” I said.
“I grew three humans while dismantling a paramilitary organization. I get whatever I want.”
Nobody argued. Not even the king.
Before we left, Lucian spoke with Voss one final time. Solomon ran through a checklist with Farmon that covered containment protocols, evidence preservation, and medical priorities in an order that only Solomon would consider logical.
I stood in the morning sun and held Mira and waited for the two men who’d been my brothers for centuries to finish being responsible so we could go home.
Home. The word landed and stayed.
We left the compound through the eastern tree line. The same path we’d walked her through at dawn, the same trees that had watched us escort her into danger and were now watching us carry her away from it.
Solomon on my left and Lucian on the right. Mira asleep in my arms before we’d cleared the first ridge, her breathing evening out with the complete surrender of a body that had finally been given permission to stop.
The cabin appeared at sunset.
Small, weathered, tucked into the clearing where the creek bent south and the trees opened just enough to let the light through.
Mira stirred when I stopped walking. Her eyes opened, unfocused, and found the cabin through the haze of exhaustion.
“Oh,” she said.
The word carried everything. Recognition. Memory.
The weight of a place that had been our first home when we didn’t know it yet.
The location where a bookshop owner and her three alphas had stumbled into a bond that rewrote the rules of two worlds.
“We came back,” she said.
“We came home,” I corrected.
She smiled. Small. Devastated in the way that only good things could devastate you, the way a door opening could break your heart if you’d spent long enough believing it was locked.
Lucian opened the cabin door. Solomon stepped in first, because Solomon always stepped in first, scanning for threats in a building that held nothing but dust and memories and the faint smell of old books and honey.
I carried Mira over the threshold.
The four of us stood in the cabin as sunset poured through the windows and painted everything in amber. No hunters or lycans other than us.
Just a cabin and four people who’d walked through the worst of it and come out the other side carrying three heartbeats that hadn’t existed when this story started.
A new beginning.