My grip tightened on the steering wheel until the leather creaked.
I wanted to find Hudson.
Wanted to drag him into the woods behind the cabin and take my time with him. Days, maybe. Weeks. However long it took to return everything he’d ever given her.
I knew exactly how to make it last. I’d done it before, for Lucian, when the kingdom required it. The enforcer’s work. The ugly things that kept a king’s hands clean.
But Hudson’s death would be personal.
Percy twisted around in the passenger seat for the third time in five minutes.
“You hungry? We could stop somewhere. There’s a diner on Route 7 that makes these pancakes. Or we could grab groceries. Do you like groceries? That’s a stupid question, everyone needs groceries. I meant do you have preferences? Allergies?”
Mira’s eyes flicked to him. “I’m fine.”
“Fine like actually fine, or fine like‘please stop talking, strange man I just met’?”
“The second one.”
Percy grinned. “Noted. I’ll switch to comfortable silence mode.”
He lasted approximately twelve seconds.
“So the cabin’s nice. Rustic but not in a creepy way. There’s hot water and everything. Solomon built most of it himself, which sounds fake but isn’t. He’s weirdly good with his hands.”
“Percival.” My voice came out flat.
“Right. Silence mode. Activating now.”
In the rearview mirror, Lucian’s headlights followed at a constant distance. He’d insisted on driving separately. Said he needed to make some calls. What he actually needed was to hit something, and the steering wheel was a safer target than Percy’s face.
Through the pack bond, I felt his rage. A low, constant burn that hadn’t faded since we’d walked into that inn room and seen the destruction. Underneath the rage, fear. The kind that came from almost losing the one thing you couldn’t survive without.
I felt it too. But my fear was quieter, colder. It lived in the same place where I kept the memories of the forgotten week.
Her laughing at one of Percy’s terrible jokes while I watched from the corner of her shop. The weight of her head on my shoulder when she fell asleep during a movie, trusting me enough to be vulnerable.
The moment she’d looked at me and said my name for the first time.
“Solomon.”
No fear or flinch. Just recognition, warm with certainty.
Gone now. All of it.
She’d said my name at the fire scene too, pulled it from wherever the drug couldn’t reach, but there’d been confusion behind it. She didn’t know why she knew me. Didn’t remember the way she’d touched my scar, tracing the line from temple to jaw with gentle fingers.
“Does it hurt?” she’d asked.
“Not anymore.”
“Good.” And then she’d kissed my jaw, right where the scar ended. “I’m glad.”
I’d nearly come apart. She unraveled me with a single kiss that barely counted as a kiss at all.
Now she sat in my backseat, wrapped in my jacket, and looked at me with the wariness of prey watching a predator.
Percy’s guilt crashed through the bond in waves, battering against my awareness. He’d been on watch. He’d left for the fire call, radioed me to take over. But the gap between his departure and my arrival, those minutes when no one was watching her door, that was when Hudson struck.
