But I still failed.
“Maybe next time your training partner could sit somewhere that isn’t directly on top of you.”
The words came out colder than I intended. Charged. The jealousy I’d been swallowing all night finally finding a crack to escape through.
Mira went still.
“Excuse me?”
“His hand was on the map. His shoulder was on yours. His leg was against yours for the last hour. I’m surprised he didn’t climb into your lap for the logistics briefing.”
“Are you serious right now?”
“I’m stating facts.”
“You’re jealous.” Her voice dropped and the frustration cracked through. “Wyatt is building this alliance with me. His intel is keeping everyone in this camp alive. And you’re upset about where he sat on a log?”
“I’m upset that the man who represents everything that destroyed my family had his hands all over you while I sat ten feet away and pretended it didn’t gut me.”
The silence after that held weight.
“Okay,” Mira said. Controlled, trying. “That is real. I hear that. But Percy, they turned against the Order. They lost people too. Reese lost a sister. Damon’s been questioning for years. They’re here because they chose the right side.”
“They chose the right side after spending years on the wrong one.”
“So did Wyatt. And Wyatt is the reason we have an alliance at all.”
“Wyatt again. He didn’t have to sit on top of my pregnant mate, getting way too comfortable as a hunter of his caliber.”
“He wasn’t on top of me, Percy. We were sharing a map.”
“From where I sat, the difference was not much.”
She exhaled. Patience thinning but still intact. “I need you to work through this. The alliance depends on both sides trusting each other and they can’t trust us if one of our alphas looks at them and sees the enemy.”
“Maybe that’s because they are the enemy.”
The words came out quiet, cold. Not a yell but worse than one.
“Every hunter in this camp was trained to kill us. They carried those weapons for years. They followed those orders. And now they sit at our fire and we’re supposed to forget that.”
The vault had opened all the way. The cold rage pouring out in sentences that sounded rational and felt poisonous and I couldn’t stop them.
“They can turn their coats and share our food and sleep thirty feet from our fire but they’re still hunters, Mira. They still carry the training, the instincts. And I don’t trust a single one of them near you or our children. Not one. I don’t care what side they claim to be on now. Once a hunter, always a hunter.”
The silence after was the worst kind. The kind where you hear your own words played back and the echo is uglier than the original.
Mira’s face had gone still. Still, in the way water goes still before it freezes.
“I have hunter blood too, Percy.”
Four words. Quiet enough that the dying fire almost swallowed them.
The cold rage shattered.
Every poisonous sentence I’d just spoken reassembled in my mind with Mira at the center of them. Hunter blood. Hunter training. The daughter of the man who ran the Order. The woman carrying my children belongs to the bloodline I’d just condemned, and I’d stood three feet from her and called it the enemy.
“Mira...”
