I’d been down there once to free him and I could still feel the ghost of silver clasps under my fingers, the way his wrists had looked when the cuffs came off. But the east corridor keypad led somewhere deeper.
A section I’d never accessed, where the screaming I heard at dawn lived behind reinforced doors that even senior operatives entered in pairs. That was the part of this compound Thiago was protecting.
I kept my head down. Played the dutiful daughter, the legacy student. The same performance I’d been running since I arrived, except now it had a crack in it, and every time Thiago looked at me with that measuring expression, I could feel him searching for it.
The compound’s staff made their feelings clear enough.
A woman in tactical gear shoulder-checked me in the mess hall doorway hard enough to spill my coffee. At the supply building, two men stopped talking the second I rounded the corner and watched me pass in silence, their eyes on my throat.
“Mutt lover,” someone muttered behind me in the corridor outside the gym
Thiago’s daughter was tolerated. Thiago’s daughter who’d been mated by the enemy was despised. It was better this way. I could work with that.
What I couldn’t work with was the guilt.
Percival’s wrists, raw and blistered where the silver had burned through to muscle. The sound he’d bitten back when I pulled the cuffs off. The way he’d kissed me in that clearing, desperate and guilty and full of longing, and how I’d let him because I needed it just as badly.
This didn’t happen.
Right. Except it did. And I sent him into the wilderness with no pack, no plan, and nowhere to go.
Three muted bonds sat in my chest. I’d stopped being able to tell them apart weeks ago. They’d blurred into a single ache that woke me at night and followed me through the day, a constant low-grade wrongness that was working its way outward.
The veins on my forearms were more visible than they used to be. I thought my last proximity with Percival helped a little but it didn’t fix me. A bruise from training three days ago still hadn’t faded.
Some mornings I reached for the bonds without meaning to.
Lucian’s, which used to feel the way a campfire looked from a distance, controlled and warm and absolute. Solomon’s, aweight I’d learned to carry because putting it down meant losing the steadiest thing I’d ever held.
Still there. And I didn’t know which was worse.
Wyatt was already in the courtyard when I arrived, stretching against the low wall.
“You’re late,” he said.
“By two minutes.”
“Three. But who’s counting.” He tossed me a pair of sparring gloves. “Grappling today. Thiago wants you ground-certified by end of month.”
“Ground-certified. That sounds made up.”
“It is. He made it up specifically for you.” He prevented a smile. “Welcome to being the boss’s daughter.”
We drilled escapes. Wyatt corrected my form with his hands, adjusting my shoulders, pressing my elbow down. Professional, always. Not a single touch that lingered or wandered.
The last man who’d corrected my stance had been Lucian. The clearing behind the cabin, late afternoon light through the canopy, his chest against my back as he guided my arm through a dagger slash.
Wyatt’s hands moved my elbow the same way Lucian’s had. Same correction, same angle. Zero electricity. Zero heat.
I threw a cross that connected harder than I intended. Then another. Wyatt absorbed both, his guard shifting, but his eyebrows went up.
“Easy. We’re drilling technique, not aggression.”
I wasn’t drilling aggression. I was thinking about Lucian. About Solomon. About the fact that Percival had come and they hadn’t.
Where were the other two?
The cross came again. Harder. Wyatt caught it on his forearm and pushed back with enough force to stagger me.
