“Solomon never hit me before,” I said eventually.
“And he shouldn’t have.”
“He basically raised me. Taught me everything as a warrior. Never once laid a hand on me, not even when I deserved it, and trust me, there were moments I deserved it.” The ball went up. Came back down. “Two hundred years. And the first time he ever hits me is because I wanted to go back for her.”
“Give Solomon leniency.” The same words as the corridor but gentler now. A request, not a command.
“You’re siding with him?”
“No.” Lucian paused. Not choosing words. Deciding whether to share a secret. Then, quiet enough the stone walls couldn’t carry it: “Solomon never told anyone. But I stumbled upon his things here, before we left for the human realm. Documents, maps, correspondence with contacts in the border territories.”
The ball stopped mid-toss.
“We all believed the Order was gone. The Long Watch declared the threat extinct. The council accepted it. I accepted it.” He looked at me. “Solomon didn’t.”
“What are you saying?”
“He had his own suspicions. Years, possibly decades. He never brought it to me because he didn’t have proof, and Solomon doesn’t speak without proof. But I realized there’s a reason why he was obsessed about investigating the threat since the dart compound.”
A shift moved through my chest. The first crack in my anger, widened by a piece of information I hadn’t known I was missing.
“Why would he spend years chasing a dead organization?”
Lucian straightened from the doorframe. His expression settled into the careful neutrality of a king about to deliver information that would rearrange the world.
“Because it’s not dead to him. It was never dead to him.”
The pause lasted three heartbeats.
“He believes the human hunters killed his father.”
32
— • —
Mira
I couldn’t decide if I was waking up from a dream or a nightmare.
The road unspooled in front of the rental car, two lanes of asphalt cutting through forest that thinned as we moved further from Ashvale.
My forehead rested against the passenger window, the glass cool against skin still flushed from crying, or from the rejection, or from whatever it looked like when three supernatural bonds got slammed shut inside a human body never designed to hold them.
The muted bond sat in my chest, dampened to almost nothing. If I concentrated, pressed against the wall they’d built, I could feel each one. Lucian’s, steady and grieving. Solomon’s, cold with purpose. Percival’s, desperate and getting further away.
I stopped pressing. It hurt worse than the silence.
Thiago drove with both hands on the wheel. The concerned father act from the cabin doorway had settled into patient silence.
My mind catalogued the route on autopilot. Highway 9 east, exit 47, two lefts, a right onto a private road with a gated keycard. The foster kid in me was memorizing the way out before I’d even arrived.
The estate appeared through cypress trees. Iron gate, stone pillars, a winding driveway that curved through manicured grounds.
There were two guards at the gate. They waved Thiago through with familiarity. Security cameras tracked our approach from the pillars. I counted four before the entrance, then stopped because the number was already higher than anything a private residence would require.
Inside was worse in a way that it was beautiful. Marble floors, a curved staircase, art on the walls that cost more than every foster home I’d ever lived in combined.
But the beauty had seams. A reinforced door at the end of the east corridor with industrial hinges. Keypads beside exits that didn’t belong on interior doors.
