“I tried to go, Mira. Picked a direction and walked for three days.” A pause. The sound of someone swallowing around the truth. “Couldn’t find my way home. Kept ending up back here.”
I didn’t turn around. If I turned around, I’d see him.
And if I saw him, I’d break.
I walked back toward the compound without responding. Through the tree line, past the cameras, across the courtyard. I went inside and closed the door.
Pressed my back against it and slid to the floor with my hands over my mouth and my eyes burning.
He was still there.
37
— • —
Percival
The rabbit was not cooperating.
It sat six feet from me in the underbrush, nose twitching, completely unbothered by the six-foot-two lycan crouched behind a rotting log. My wolf wanted to lunge. My stomach agreed. The rest of me couldn’t stop thinking about whether Mira had eaten dinner.
She’d left food at the pine again tonight. I’d waited until she was back inside before retrieving it, folding the napkin the way my wolf instincts apparently demanded. Corners tucked, edges neat. A thank-you note written in fabric.
The rabbit bolted. I let it go.
The compound sat a quarter mile south. Industrial, ugly, bristling with new security upgrades Thiago had installedafter my escape. Doubled camera rotations, additional motion sensors, a second perimeter patrol on a staggered schedule that turned the old camera gaps into almost nothing.
If Mira gives me a chance again, this psycho becomes my father-in-law. Every fairy tale needs an evil stepmother. Ours just happens to be a homicidal hunter.
I’d mapped all of it anyway. Her window was on the second floor, east side. The camera on the east tower swept past it on a fixed arc, and I’d counted the interval so many times the numbers lived in my muscle memory.
A few seconds of blind spot between sweeps. The window she opened during some nights when the compound seemed to be too stale to breathe.
Tonight, she opened it again around 2 AM. Right on schedule.
Her light stayed off, but the curtain shifted. She was awake. I was sitting in the dirt, listening to her silence.
Don’t.
She told me to leave as this is dangerous. She was right. If Thiago caught me near the building, it wouldn’t be a cell this time. It’d be a body bag.
But she’d pressed her hand against the glass last night when she thought I couldn’t see. Palm flat, fingers spread, one second before the curtain fell.
I started walking.
Wolf form to the perimeter, moving between sensor zones. I shifted back at the base of the east wall and the cold hit every inch of bare skin. Right. Clothes don’t survive the shift. I’d known that, obviously, and had chosen not to think about it until this exact moment.
Too late to go back for the jeans I’d shredded somewhere near the tree line. The camera gap was now, not later.
Human form, fully naked, climbing a military compound. My life choices were outstanding.
The brick beneath the newer render was old, the mortar gaps wide enough for fingertips. I’d been a good climber since I was a kid, back when climbing was the fastest way out of whatever house I’d worn out my welcome in.
The window ledge materialized under my hands and I crouched on the narrow lip with the camera arc sweeping past two feet from my head and absolutely nothing between me and God.
Two taps, pause, one tap.
Nothing. I tapped again. Softer.
