The man who’d been training my mate for weeks. Whose name Solomon spat between clenched teeth and Lucian couldn’t hear without his eye twitching. Granted he helped Mira survive the compound and converted hunters to our cause but my so-called maturity lately backtracked at this moment.
So fuck Wyatt anyway.
“Solomon, Lucian, Percival,” Mira said, gesturing at our side. A pause. “My… mates.”
Damon’s face went through a journey. “All three?”
“All three,” Lucian said. The royal finality shut the topic down.
“I have questions,” Reese said.
“No you don’t,” Wyatt cut in.
Mira looked at me. The nudge was clear.
‘Your turn. Bridge this. Do the thing you do.’
I opened my mouth.
Wyatt’s hand brushed Mira’s on the map between them. It wasn’t lingering. Just the kind of incidental contact that happened between people who shared space without thinking about it.
Still, the gold of my eyes pressed in.
A wash at the edges, the hazel going warm and then hot, my wolf surging forward with a focus that incinerated the joke I’d been building. The charm evaporated. The grin died before it reached my face.
“So,” I managed. “Reese. You said you had questions?”
Flat. The warmth arriving three beats late. Reese’s eager expression wavered and Mira’s eyes cut to me with a crease between her brows.
I should have recovered. Should have leaned into the bit, flexed, cracked a joke about being the handsome one. Two hundred years of social instinct and I couldn’t access any of it because Wyatt had shifted on the log and his thigh was touching Mira’s now and my vision kept narrowing to that single point of contact.
Oh, hell.
His casual proximity is grating my nerves. And the way he existed next to her without understanding what that cost the three men across the fire.
I knew it was petty but I couldn’t control myself tonight. I rather keep my mouth shut than say my unfounded hatred out loud and destroy this alliance.
Mira took over. Walked the group through logistics, rotation schedules, compound intel. Her voice carried the clearing while I sat on my log and carved a stake into a weapon and contributed nothing.
She kept glancing at me. Each look carried more concern than the last.
The camp wound down. Hunters drifted toward the sleeping area Solomon had designated. Reese yawned. Kaia was already gone. Damon waited for Wyatt because Damon didn’t go anywhere without Wyatt yet.
Mira caught my arm at the edge of the clearing.
“Talk to me.” Low. The one she’d used when I was curled around her legs in wolf form and the silence was eating me alive. But underneath it, a tightness. Frustration held on a leash.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You sat at that fire for two hours and gave me nothing. I needed you tonight, Percy. I was standing between two groups ready to kill each other and you were carving stakes.”
“I tried.”
“You managed one sentence before you checked out.” Her grip on my arm softened but her jaw didn’t. “What happened?”
The honest answer sat in my throat. The ugly, irrational, unfair answer that had nothing to do with the alliance and everything to do with four inches of log space and a hunter’s thigh against my mate’s.
Damn it, Percival. Get your shit together.
