“She’s not a blind spot.”
“She’s the only thing in five centuries that’s made you sloppy.”
“Enough.”
Lucian’s voice cut across the clearing. Not loud. He didn’t need loud. The king’s authority operated at frequencies that bypassed volume entirely. He hadn’t moved from his tree but his storm-gray eyes were fixed on Giselle and the wound on his chest was forgotten.
“You are addressing the mate of your commanding officer and the future queen of Veyndral. That woman is carrying the heirs to my kingdom.” The temperature in the clearing dropped. “Whatever opinion you hold about her worthiness, you will bury it. Now.”
Giselle’s jaw tightened.
From the stream, Percival turned to face her, and the look in his hazel eyes was one I’d never seen directed at an ally. Cold. Flat. The same eyes he’d turned on hunters.
Giselle registered both. The king’s command and the rogue’s warning. Two alphas who’d spent three days fractured by grief and guilt, suddenly and completely unified on a single point.
“Solomon.” Lucian’s gaze shifted to me. The snarl hadn’t left his voice. “Remind your soldier where the line is. Because if she crosses it again with Mira, I will. And she won’t enjoy my version.”
I turned back to Giselle. She held my gaze. The frustration was still there but it had been joined by the recognition that she’d miscalculated badly. Not the argument itself. The audience.
“She doesn’t deserve what you’re giving her,” Giselle said quietly.
“That isn’t yours to decide.”
A silence passed.
Two centuries of service and trust built on mutual respect. Giselle meant well. I knew that. She’d followed me through a portal into an unfamiliar world because she believed in our operation.
But she’d made Mira flinch. And the part of me that pointed out threats with cold efficiency had filed that flinch under a category Giselle had never occupied before.
“I’ll map the secondary routes,” she said. “Eastern quadrant first. Coordinates by nightfall.”
She turned toward the perimeter. I let her go.
Percival was by the stream again in the same position. Knees drawn up, locket in his hand.
Lucian had dragged himself from his tree. The effort cost him visibly, sweat beading on his forehead, his hand pressed against the bandage on his chest. But he lowered himself onto the bank beside Percy without complaint, because the king had heard the same silence I’d heard.
I sat on Percy’s other side. Three alphas on a riverbank, the spaces between us smaller than they’d been in months.
“When you’re ready,” I said. “We’re here.”
His jaw worked. The locket turned in his fingers. The vault that had been sealed since he talked to my father alone cracked by a fraction.
“Your father told me about my parents.” Quiet. The tremor underneath was new. “Commander Rowson Kaelwyn and Lady Diera Kaelwyn. They were on the first expedition. Two hundred years ago.”
Lucian went still.
“They didn’t make it back.” Percy’s thumb traced the edge of the locket. “The Order killed them both.”
He didn’t elaborate. Didn’t need to. The locket in his hand and the flatness in his voice told the story that the details would onlyhave cluttered. Two hundred years of not knowing, answered in a single conversation by my father at a stream just upstream from where we sat now.
Lucian’s hand found the back of Percy’s neck. No words. Just the grip of a king whose father had sent men on that expedition and was now learning the cost had been higher than he’d known.
“I’m sorry,” Lucian said. Stripped of title, rank, composure. Just a man apologizing to his brother.
“Don’t.” Percy’s voice cracked for the first time. Just the edge. “If you apologize I’ll fall apart and I can’t do that right now.”
So Lucian didn’t apologize again. He kept his hand where it was, and I kept my shoulder pressed against Percy’s, and the three of us sat with the weight of it while the stream carried on.
