“Just passing through.”
“Mira left, you know.” She said it the way people shared gossip they’d been saving. “With some older man. Her father, apparently?” She paused, watching my face for a reaction she could use. “The whole town talked about it. Poor bookshop girl, abandoned by three men.”
My hands curled at my sides. “Did you see which direction they went?”
“East, I think. Toward the mountains.” She tilted her head. “Why? You care now?”
I looked at her. Really looked. I didn’t feel much of anything about Cateline, and the fact that she’d watched Mira leave town with a stranger and turned it into gossip instead of concern told me everything I needed to know.
“Take care of yourself, Cateline.”
I walked away before she could respond and didn’t look back.
***
East toward the mountains. The bond pulled faint and muted, barely a whisper since the rejection. But it was there, tugging east, and I followed it.
Don’t get caught.
Sorry, Sol.
I shifted two miles into the eastern foothills and started making noise. The kind of noise that saidcome find mein every language hunters understood. Claw marks gouged into tree bark at lycan height. Tracks pressed deliberately into soft ground. A brown wolf tearing through underbrush without the slightest attempt at stealth.
By the second morning, I found what I was looking for. A motion sensor wired to a tree trunk, its blinking light barely concealed under a patch of moss. I sat in front of it in wolf form, tilted my head, and waited.
Twenty minutes later, two hunters crested the ridge to my south, rifles up, moving in tactical formation. The taller one adjusted his aim. The shorter one reached for his radio.
“Contact. Single lycan, wolf form. Just sitting in front of camera six. Not moving.”
“Confirmed. Tranq and transport.”
I wagged my tail. Once. Just to see the tall one’s trigger finger twitch.
The first dart punched into my shoulder. The second caught my flank before I’d finished deciding whether a third tail wag would be pushing it.
The forest tilted sideways, and the bitter satisfaction of the worst plan in recorded history actually working was the last thing I processed before the sedative finished the job.
I woke up in a concrete cell.
My arms were cuffed behind me with restraints that burned where they touched skin. Silver-infused, probably. Creative. The room was small, underground by the temperature and lack of windows, and furnished.
A man stood on the other side of the bars. Tall, graying at the temples, with Mira’s jawline and none of her warmth.
Thiago Maxwell studied me the way a collector studied a new specimen.
“Percival.” He said my name correctly, which meant he’d done his homework. “The young one.”
“The handsome one, actually. Common mistake.”
His expression didn’t change. “You walked directly into our perimeter. Alone and unarmed. Leaving a trail a blind man could follow. You wanted to be caught.”
“Bold accusation from a man who puts silver in his handcuffs. Bit kinky, don’t you think?”
He watched me for a long moment. The silence was clinical, designed to make people talk. I’d been on the receiving end of Solomon’s silences for two centuries. This was amateur hour.
“Where are the other two?” he asked.
“Far away. This is a solo vacation.”
