“The Order took my parents,” Percy said after a long silence. “Took so much from all of us.” The locket closed in his fist. “And right now, Mira is walking back into their compound. Pregnant. With our children.”
The words settled over the three of us and hardened into a single, unified clarity.
“There’s no version of this they survive,” I said.
“No.” Lucian’s hand tightened on Percy’s neck. The king’s voice returning, roughened by pain and certainty. “There isn’t.”
“We must end them.” Percy opened his eyes. The flatness was still there but underneath it, the fault line had shifted with purpose. “Before the next person they take is her. Or them.”
I stood. Lucian let me pull him to his feet. Percival rose on his own, the locket pressed against his chest, and his spine straight.
One war that had been taking from us for hundreds of years.
It has to end now.
52
— • —
Mira
Solomon and I drew the supply run because the universe had a sick sense of humor.
Camp rotation assigned pairs for the cache retrieval two miles northwest. Farmon had mapped the locations months ago, stashing emergency provisions in weatherproof containers buried beneath cairns he’d built during his years in hiding. The retrieval required two people: one to dig, one to watch.
Lucian couldn’t walk two miles without reopening the wound. Percy had taken the eastern perimeter with Giselle. Which left me and the man I’d been successfully avoiding direct conversation.
We walked in silence.
Professional, efficient silence. The kind Solomon was built for and I was faking. My boots found the trail Farmon had marked with notched trees and Solomon moved beside me, matching my pace without crowding, scanning the forest with mechanical focus.
A mile passed. The only sounds were footsteps, birds, and the occasional snap of a branch under my weight that Solomon never seemed to produce under his.
“You can talk, you know,” I said. “Silence isn’t a personality trait.”
“It’s efficient.”
“It’s annoying.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
I bit my cheek inwardly to keep the smile from forming. Absolutely not. I was not going to find Solomon’s dry humor endearing right now. Not after Giselle’s speech.
Sky had been gray all morning. By the time we reached the ravine path, the gray had darkened into a threat.
A drop hit my shoulder. Then twelve more. Then the sky stopped pretending and the rain arrived with a commitment that was almost personal.
Vertical, immediate, the kind of downpour that soaked through to skin in seconds and turned the ravine path into a brown river before I could process what was happening.
“The cache point is flooded,” Solomon said. Already assessing, already adjusting. “The ravine channels all surface runoff east. It won’t be accessible for hours.”
“So we’re stuck?”
“There’s an overhang. Thirty meters west.”
He moved and I followed because the alternative was standing in a forest being drowned by precipitation. The overhang was a rock formation jutting from the hillside, barely enough cover for two people if those two people didn’t mind being pressed together.
We pressed together. My back against the stone, his shoulder against mine, rain hammering the ground a foot from our boots. The canopy did nothing. Water poured through the leaves and turned the forest floor into a shallow current.
