“You need to eat.” Solomon’s voice, behind me. Closer than expected.
“I just got here.”
“You’ve lost weight,” he said flatly. “Father, is there...”
“Already prepared.” His father appeared from the tree line carrying a pack. The older lycan moved silently that reminded me of Solomon in twenty years, if Solomon ever learned to relax. “Dried meat, nuts, water. The caloric density isn’t ideal but it’s what we have.”
He handed me the pack and then stopped. Mid-motion, his hand still extended, his silver eyes locked on my face with an intensity that made the hair on my neck rise. The color drained from his expression.
“You...” He caught himself. Pulled his hand back. Blinked once, twice, resetting himself. “Forgive me. You remind me of someone.”
Solomon’s gaze cut to his father. A question he didn’t answer.
“I get that a lot,” I said because the way he’d looked at me felt too personal for a man I’d barely spoken to.
“I can feed myself, by the way.”
“Then do it,” all three of them said. In unison. Without looking at each other.
I blinked. Opened my mouth to argue, found no reasonable defense against a wall of coordinated concern, and sat down by the fire to eat.
Solomon’s father settled across from me. The firelight caught his eyes and I noticed him watching the journal tucked under my arm. The expression from before hadn’t fully cleared. Whateverhe’d seen in my face was still sitting behind his composure, waiting.
“Before we begin,” Farmon said. “May I see the journal?”
I held it against my chest. “Why?”
“Because I believe I know who wrote it.”
The camp went quiet. Solomon shifted his weight. Percival, against his oak, went still.
I opened the journal to the entry I’d bookmarked. The one with the initial.
“My mother references a prisoner. She calls him F. She spent the year protecting him, planning his escape.” I looked at him. “The death report says she died during a containment breach. The same night of escape.”
His silver eyes held mine without blinking.
“She got me out.”
The fire cracked. A log shifted. The forest held its breath and so did I.
Solomon’s father is the lycan prisoner captured then. The timeline assembled itself and the answer had been sitting across the campfire from me the whole time.
“My name is Farmon,” he said. As if giving it to me mattered. “Lord Farmon Theron.”
The initial had a name now. And the name belonged to the man sitting across from the daughter of the woman who’d died saving him.
“Sienna saved my life.” He didn’t look away from me.
I realized he wasn’t going to. That he’d been waiting for this conversation for two decades and he was going to hold my gaze through every word of it.
“I was captured on my expedition. Imprisoned. Tortured. The Order’s methods were... thorough. By the time your mother found me in sublevel two, I’d been there for a while.”
Solomon went rigid beside me. I felt it through the bond, fracturing another inch as his father’s story cut through the static.
“She was a researcher. Officially, her access to my cell was for data collection.” Farmon’s voice was calm, the way you spoke about old wounds. “But the treatments improved after she was assigned. The burns healed faster. The silver doses decreased. Small changes, invisible to anyone not paying attention.”
I glanced at his hands as he spoke. The fingers of his right hand curled at an odd angle, the joints misaligned. Whatever the Order had done to him, they’d made sure he’d carry it in his grip for the rest of his life.
