“You’re making the case.”
“I’m assessing the situation.”
“Enough.” Lucian’s voice. Barely above a whisper, rough with pain, but carrying authority. We both turned.
His eyes were open. Gold-rimmed, fever-bright, focused on the ceiling with the concentration of someone fighting to stay conscious.
“She didn’t twist the blade,” he said.
The room went quiet.
“The angle.” Lucian swallowed. The effort of speaking was visible in the tendons of his neck. “A wound that bleeds and burns and looks fatal from the outside.” His eyes moved to mine. “But misses every major organ. The silver compound will slow my healing for days. It won’t kill me.”
“That could be a miss,” I said. Testing it. Not believing it.
“I taught her where to aim.” Lucian’s mouth curved at one corner. Faint. Pained. “Throat or the inner thigh or inside of the arm. And I told her: don’t stab without twisting unless you want your enemy to live.”
The words echoed in the cave. I ran them against the evidence: the fact that a woman trained with a blade for weeks had driven it into a stationary target and somehow avoided every critical structure.
“Then it’s not a miss,” I said.
“No.” Lucian closed his eyes. “Mira doesn’t miss.”
Percy’s breath left him in a rush. He tipped his head back against the stone, and the relief that moved through his body was visible in every muscle that unclenched.
“She’s running an operation,” I said.
The pieces rearranged themselves behind my eyes. The flat expression. The refusal to make eye contact. The precision of the attack, designed to incapacitate without killing, timed so the hunters would fire on already-falling targets rather than standing ones.
“The trial earned her trust. Whatever she needs access to inside that compound, she just bought it with our blood.”
“Smart girl,” Father said quietly from the corner.
“We go back.” Percy was already pushing himself to his feet. The counter-agent had restored his color but his hands still trembled. “Right now. She’s in there alone, pregnant, surrounded by...”
“No.”
Father’s voice cut through the room with an authority that surprised all three of us. He stepped away from Lucian’s cot and faced Percival.
“You don’t understand what’s in that compound. Not fully.” His silver eyes moved between us. “I’ve been observing the Order for over a decade. The captive wolves in the sublevels are not prisoners in the way you think. They’re test subjects. The device they call the Purifier doesn’t merely restrain our kind. It forcesa feral reversion that strips the lycan consciousness entirely. What’s left is an animal. Permanently.”
“We know about the Purifier,” I said.
“You know its name. You don’t know its trajectory.”
Father crossed to his workstation and pulled a hand-drawn schematic from the pile.
“Three years ago, the Purifier was a stationary device. Required physical contact with the subject. Two years ago, they developed a proximity variant. Effective range of ten meters.” He laid the schematic on the table. “Six months ago, I intercepted documents referencing an aerosol deployment system. Airborne. Dispersal radius of half a kilometer.”
The numbers settled in my chest.
“If you rush that compound and fail,” Father continued, “Thiago deploys the aerosol variant. Not against the captives. Against any lycan within range. Against you and even your mate, who carries lycan children.” He let that land. “Against the children themselves.”
Percival sat back down.
“She bought you time with that performance,” Father said. “Don’t waste it by being reckless without a plan that accounts for what they’re actually building.”
The silence held. Lucian’s breathing filled the cave, shallow and labored.
