26
— • —
Percival
It had been three days. I was being punished. Literally.
Despite Solomon running traces and Lucian using his connection in town for more clues, we still didn’t have a solid answer. I wasn’t sure who to hit and where exactly to go from here on because we were still fucking clueless.
I mostly take things lightly but not this. Because this threat we couldn’t name knew about the bond. Knew about Mira.
I couldn’t exactly calm down. So I handled it the way I handled most things that scared me.
By putting a training dummy through the equipment room wall.
In my defense, it wasn’t on purpose. My fist just connected with it during a solo session and through my bottled frustration, thething flew off its stand, cleared twelve feet of open floor, and punched a hole through the drywall into the locker room.
Whitfield had been changing on the other side making him squeal.
And yes, it was a squeal, not a shout. I would have laughed but I knew I was in trouble.
The crew spent twenty minutes trying to figure out how a mounted dummy ended up embedded in a wall. I blamed faulty equipment. Nobody believed me, but nobody had a better explanation either.
Lucian pulled me aside that night. Not the captain pulling aside a subordinate. The king addressing his warrior, jaw set, voice low enough that only lycan ears could catch it.
“We cannot afford attention right now.” His eyes held mine. “Be. Careful.”
Hence the punishment.
He wouldn’t call it that though. He’d call it “rotation maintenance” but really it was nonsense that translated to scrubbing the engine bay alone at nine PM on a Friday.
The firehouse was empty. Night shift had clocked in at seven and rolled out on a call within the hour, leaving me alone with a mop, a bucket of industrial cleaner, and the quiet hum of overhead fluorescents.
I dunked the mop and dragged it across the concrete. The motion was meditative, repetitive, the kind of mindless task that let my brain wander to places it shouldn’t.
Mira carried two heartbeats now. I could feel them through the pack connection, faint echoes filtered through Lucian and Solomon. Every time I caught their resonance through the bond it reminded me that my thread was still waiting.
I wanted her.
The wanting had gone past a physical ache and into the territory of a fundamental need. Watching Lucian claim her, watching Solomon claim her, being genuinely happy for both of them while my own wolf howled with an impatience that bordered on feral.
It was fine. I was fine.
The mop hit a stubborn spot of dried hydraulic fluid and I scrubbed harder.
Totally fine.
Footsteps arrived from the side entrance. A specific gait I’d memorized months ago.
Mira rounded the corner with a paper bag in one hand and a thermos in the other. Her copper hair was pulled back, and the obsidian pendant Lucian had given her caught the fluorescent light at her throat. She wore one of my hoodies. The gray one I’d been looking for all week.
“Solomon dropped me off,” she said before I could ask. “I told him to go home since I’m staying.”
“You came to the firehouse at nine PM on a Friday night?”
“I heard you were being punished.” She set the bag on the bench beside the gear racks. “And I know for a fact that Lucian didn’t feed you before he sentenced you to scrubbing.”
“It’s rotation maintenance.”
