“Two. Beneath the main building.” He ducked under a low branch. “Restricted access. Keypad entry. I got the first three digits while they had me down there.”
The scroll’s details surfaced in my mind. Security increasing after a wolf escape. An escaped wolf from inside the compound.
“You were the wolf in the scroll,” I said.
Percy’s jaw tightened. “I tracked Thiago’s convoy from Ashvale. The perimeter was too tight to breach from the outside, so I made a call.”
“You let them capture you,” Lucian said.
“I didn’t have anyone to plan for me.” He said it without malice. “So I planned for myself. Baited a patrol, let them bring me in, and used the time inside to map what I could.”
Then I hit him.
Not hard. Not the way I’d hit him in Veyndral. An open palm across the back of his skull. The kind of hit that saidyou idiotmore than it saidI’m angry.
“I told you not to get caught.”
Percy rubbed the back of his head, his grin surfacing despite the fact that he looked half-dead. “To be fair, the getting caught part was intentional. The prison was just a commitment to the role.”
“You were captured, Percival. In a cell.”
“A cell that taught me they have lycans underground. Dozens of them.” The grin fell away. “I could feel the presences below me. Muted, wrong. Feral, but not the natural kind.”
That confirmed the scroll. Captive wolves held beneath a hunter compound, subjected to methods we aren’t sure yet.
“Mira broke me out,” Percy added. “Picked the lock, covered our tracks. I think Thiago still can’t pinpoint her involvement.”
A beat of silence.
“She’s better at this than any of us want to admit,” he said. Pride bleeding through despite everything.
The name settled between us.Mira.
My chest ached in the place where her bond used to live, the dead channel where her voice had been loudest now reduced to static and distance.
“Tell us about her,” Lucian said after a long silence. A need stripped bare.
Percy’s gaze stayed forward. “She’s training daily with one of their men. A human male.” His teeth clenched on the name. “His scent is on her. Every time I get close.”
My claws pressed against my fingertips before I registered the reaction.
A man. Touching her.
Close enough that his scent clung to her skin and stayed there. My wolf snarled behind my ribs, and beside me Lucian’s hands curled into fists, gold bleeding into his irises for a full second before he blinked it back.
“Who is he?” Lucian’s voice was too controlled.
“Don’t know.” Percy’s jaw still hadn’t unclenched. “She calls him her training partner.”
The three of us stood in a forest full of enemies and the most dangerous emotion in the clearing was jealousy over a man none of us had met. I forced the wolf down. To be revisited when the mission allowed for it.
“Her physical state,” I said. Redirecting all three of us back to what mattered.
“Deteriorating.” Percy’s tone shifted. “She’s pale. Thinner these days. Unsteady on her feet some mornings when she steps outside. I’ve watched her brace against the wall before she can walk straight.”
He vaulted a fallen log without breaking stride. “Whatever the rejection is doing to her physically, it’s getting worse.”
“The muted bond,” Lucian said. “Her body wasn’t designed to endure it.”
