Old books and honey.
Mira.
My wolf surged. Gold flooded the edges of my vision, claws pressing against my fingertips, every part of my body orienting toward that scent. Intense, bordering on violence.
But it was wrong.
The foundation was hers. The warmth, the sweetness. But layered over it was a secondary note I couldn’t identify. Richer. Deeper.
Her scent had shifted during the heat. After the rejection it had faded to a whisper. This was neither of those. This was entirely new.
Lucian caught it too. His head turned, nostrils flaring, gold burning behind his irises.
“Her scent,” he said.
“Changed,” I finished.
Percy nodded slowly. “She’s smelled different for about a week. I assumed it was the rejection doing damage. Or the stress.”
My wolf paced behind the muted bond, pushing knowledge through instinct and image instead of words. But what came through was a feeling, not a fact.
Protect. Ours.
Below us, behind those walls, she slept. Or didn’t.
I turned away from the ridge.
We’d come to retrieve a weapon and dismantle an organization that had hunted our kind. All of it necessary, urgent.
But the only question that mattered was whether the woman behind those walls would still want us when it was over.
41
— • —
Lucian
The bird landed on my shoulder at dawn and I resisted the urge to throw it into a tree.
It had followed us through the portal. Uninvited, unannounced, launching itself through the archway in the final seconds before the crossing sealed. I’d turned to find it perched on a branch three feet from my head, feathers puffed, amber eyes blinking at me.
I’d been threatening this raven for months. It had delivered council messages I didn’t want and once stolen a piece of bread directly from my hand while I was reading a report. My relationship with this bird was adversarial at best.
But it was here. And unlike the council’s surveillance ravens, this one answered to no one. A rogue from the highland cliffs, toostubborn to be trained into the official network, too intelligent to be dismissed.
“You’re useless,” I told it. “You know that.”
The raven clicked its beak. Shifted on my shoulder, talons pricking through my jacket. Its amber eyes pulsed once, the low glow that meant it was recording, and I flicked its chest with my finger.
“Stop that. I’m not sending a message.”
It stopped. Settled. Waited with the patience of a creature that had learned exactly how far it could push me before I actually followed through on the dismemberment threats.
Percival and Solomon were running reconnaissance. Giselle had disappeared into the forest’s southern corridor to map sensor grids. I sat at the base camp with a raven on my shoulder and a compound half a mile south that held everything I’d ruined.
The bond ached. It had ached since the rejection, a constant low-grade agony that I’d learned to breathe around. But proximity had changed its texture. In Veyndral, the muted channel was silence. Here, it was static with shape, direction. A compass needle that pulled south and didn’t stop.
She was in there. Behind reinforced walls and armed guards and a father who’d built a fortress designed to keep creatures exactly what I was as far from his daughter as possible.
