Lucian chuckled and he closed his eyes at the contact and turned his face into my palm, pressing his lips against the center of it.
Tender.After everything. The yelling, and the teeth, the grinding and the fury.
Suddenly, our short-lived fantasy was interrupted.
The office door opened.
Solomon stood in the doorway. His gaze swept the scene. Me wrapped around Lucian, books everywhere, shirt destroyed, both of us wrecked and breathing hard.
He didn’t blink or react. Whatever Solomon was carrying into this room was so much worse than walking in on a makeout session that his brain had simply skipped over it entirely.
His expression was grim. I didn’t have a good feeling.
“Something is wrong.” His voice was flat, his jaw tightened. “Percival’s wound reverted.”
He meets our eyes. “He’s not healing.”
19
— • —
Solomon
Percival wasn’t supposed to get worse.
I stood in the doorway of his room and watched his chest rise and fall. Counting the seconds between each breath. Noted the sweat beading along his hairline and the way his fingers twitched against the blanket in his sleep, chasing pain even unconscious.
This was my fault.
I’d been blinded. I was careless and made a mistake I usually wouldn’t have.
Hudson’s hands on Mira’s throat had turned my vision red, flooded my blood with a rage so absolute that everything else disappeared. My body had moved before my mind caught up, launching at Hudson. And in that blind, furious second, I hadn’t sensed the shooter in the trees.
Percival had.
Percival, who was two hundred years old. Young by any lycan measure, and our responsibility in every way that mattered. Mine, specifically. I was the enforcer. The protector. Born to it, built for it, given a body that towered over most specifically so I could stand between danger and the people I loved.
I grit my teeth. I’d failed him the same way I’d almost failed Lucian before.
The wound had closed before I left to dispose of Hudson’s body. I’d checked. Confirmed the tissue was knitting, the bleeding had stopped, his vitals were steady.
But it was another mistake from me.
When I returned, I was still drowning in guilt so I checked again and that’s when my world tilted.
The wound reopened. The sealed edges had split apart as if pulled by invisible fingers, raw and wet, and dark lines I’d never seen in centuries of battlefield medicine were spreading from the puncture site, tracing his veins outward in a web that made my hands go still.
I’d gone to find Lucian and Mira immediately. Found them in his office in a state I didn’t have time to process because Percival was deteriorating.
Mira sat on the floor beside his bed now. Still in the blue dress. Her hair fell around her face in tangled waves, and every time she looked up at me, her eyes were raw from crying. She hadn’tslept or eaten. Hadn’t moved from that spot since she came back to watch him.
I stood in the doorway, arms crossed. Cataloguing, monitoring. Doing the only thing I knew how to do when the people I wanted to protect were hurting and I couldn’t stop it.
Lucian appeared carrying two leather pouches sealed with the Valdris crest a minute later. The smell hit me before he entered the room. Dried herbs, Veyndral-grown remedies that didn’t exist in the human world.
He’d sent for them through the portal. Probably from the messenger raven he loves picking fights with.
“How is he?” Lucian set the pouches on the nightstand.
