Lucian had council and captain matters. Solomon was running surveillance. Percival picked up extra shifts at the station. The excuses arrived separately, delivered through the bond in pulses of reassurance that felt increasingly rehearsed.
‘We’re fine. Just busy. We’ll be home tonight.’
They were always home by the time I got back. But the quality of their presence had changed.
Lucian held me at night with arms that felt deliberate instead of instinctive. Solomon’s silences, usually comfortable, had developed an edge I couldn’t name. Percy smiled, but the dimples didn’t crease as deep.
I told myself I was imagining it. Told myself the bond was still new and I was still learning to read its signals. Told myself that three ancient men had complicated lives that didn’t always revolve around me.
I was getting very good at telling myself things.
Thiago’s rental car pulled into the cabin’s gravel drive. He’d driven me back from town, where we’d spent the afternoon walking the main street while he asked about my childhood.
“I’ll see you at dinner,” he said through the open window. “Seven o’clock? I found a place on the east side of town.”
“Seven works.”
He smiled warmly. “I’m glad we’re doing this, Mira.”
I watched his car disappear down the road before turning to the cabin.
It was quiet.
My key turned in the lock and the door swung open to silence.
For a moment, I thought no one was home.
Then the bond pulsed.
Faint, muffled, three heartbeats that had been a constant drumline in my chest since the triple claiming now reduced to distant echoes. I reached for them through the connection.
I hit resistance.
The bond was there. They were there. But a barrier sat between us that hadn’t existed a week ago, dampening the signal, reducing three vivid presences to shadows of themselves.
I didn’t know if that was possible. I wasn’t lycan. The mechanics of the bond were still territory I navigated by feeling rather than understanding, and I had no framework for what an ordinary connection is.
Maybe bonds faded sometimes. Distance could affect them. Or maybe it was just the self-destructive thoughts I was used to.
But the part of me who’d learned to read a room before she could read a book knew exactly what a dwindling connection meant.
They were pulling away.
Their scents led me to Lucian’s office. The door was closed. I pushed it open without knocking.
They had their backs to me, facing the window. The raven was there. The same black bird that had been appearing on windowsills and porch railings these days. It perched on the frame of the open window before launching itself into the fading afternoon light.
“That raven’s been coming by a lot lately,” I said from the doorway, forcing the lightness into my voice. “Should I be concerned we have a stalker? Is that a thing in Veyndral? Raven harassment?”
No one spoke or turned around.
Lucian’s shoulders were a rigid line beneath his shirt. Solomon stood to his left, arms crossed, his entire body a closed fist. Percival sat in the chair by the bookshelf, elbows on his knees, head bowed, staring at the floor between his feet.
The joke died in my throat.
I was done telling myself I was imagining things. My denial built on the desperate hope that the people who’d claimed me weren’t capable of what I was suddenly, horribly certain they were about to do.
“Do we have a problem?” I asked.
