Whatever I have to do just to beg for a part in her life again.
42
— • —
Solomon
The ridge became my station.
Nights of running, the same position. Flat against the rock shelf overlooking the compound’s eastern tree line, wolf form, cataloging the data that would keep us alive when the time came to move.
Guard rotations held to a six-on, six-off schedule. Blind spots existed between the overlapping zones, narrow corridors where a wolf could pass undetected if the timing was precise.
The timing would need to be precise.
My chest ached from the place where her bond used to live, now a dead channel that throbbed whenever proximity reminded my body what it had lost.
The rejection sat in all three of us and rotted there. A slow poison that tasted exactly the way it should have. Percy’s wolf surfaced more often than it should, gold bleeding into his eyes at the wrong moments. My own hands ached in the mornings, joints stiff, muscles slower to respond.
The bond was punishing us for what we’d done to it, just quieter about it than it was punishing her. We fucking deserve it.
Especially me.
We’d made the decision. She’d absorbed the consequences. Percy had seen her state, the shaking hands, the weight falling off her frame.
We got stiff joints and bad sleep. Mira got destroyed.
Percy ran the outer perimeter in rotation, mapping patrol routes from ground level while I took the elevated positions. Giselle had flagged six potential entry points, three of which I’d already dismissed based on guard density.
We hadn’t decided when to move yet.
The compound was not what any of us had anticipated.
The scroll described an organization. This was a military installation with weapons engineered for our biology. The thermal sensors alone suggested research into lycan physiology that made my jaw tighten every time. Whatever approach we chose needed to account for an enemy that understood what we were better than we’d assumed any human could.
Every night on the ridge added variables, and every variable improved the margin between success and a body count.
Below, Mira moved through the compound on a schedule I’d memorized without intending to. Training at dawn. Thiago’s office mid-morning. Mess hall at irregular intervals that suggested she was skipping meals. Her window on the second floor went dark by most nights.
Most nights.
Not this one.
Her light was off but the curtain had shifted twice in the last hour. Restless, awake.
My wolf tracked her heartbeat through the bond. Faint, steady, the only signal that penetrated the muted wall between us. It was hard to focus on it given the distance and the facility which seemed to be tampering with my heightened senses.
Then she appeared from a gap in the eastern fence, a section where the chain link had been cut and reattached with a temporary clip. Her own exit route, engineered without any of us noticing.
My wolf went still.
She wore a compound jacket zipped to her throat, hair pulled back. The weight she’d lost was visible even from thirty meters. Angles in her face that hadn’t existed before. Wrists too thin, veins showing beneath skin that used to hold warmth.
From the root system at the pine tree, she wouldn’t be visible to any camera on the compound’s grid. She was carrying a notebook. Small, leather-bound, the kind she kept in the drawer beside the bed at the cabin.
Herjournal.I’d recognize it because I had restored one of hers before.
Down on the root system, she opened it. Flipped through pages and stopped at one near the middle.
