“You’re doing it again,” Solomon said from behind me, quiet enough that only wolf ears caught it.
“Doing what?”
“Performing.”
“It’s not a performance if it works.”
His silence was the specific brand that meant he agreed but would rather swallow his own tongue than say so. I took the win.
Mira had gone back to the compound yesterday. The rotation demanded it, and the security grid still needed mapping from the inside. Every hour she spent behind those walls tightened a knot in my chest that no amount of charm could untangle.
The bond pulsed between us, muted but present. Her frequency running beneath everything, steady, a thread I followed in my sleep.
I was carving a practice stake by the fire pit when Wyatt dropped onto the log beside me. Closer than a man usually sat next to another man whose mate he spent weeks training alone with.
“She’s strong,” Wyatt said. No greeting, no lead-in. Just the statement, delivered with the quiet certainty of someone who’d watched Mira work up close.
“I know.”
“Stronger than when she arrived at the compound. Whatever the bond does to her, it’s accelerating.”
“I know that too.”
“She swept me last week. Full leg sweep, put me on my back on the mat.” A half-smile crossed his face. The kind of smile a man wore when remembering a woman who’d surprised him. “Nobody’s done that to me since advanced training.”
My hand paused on the stake. The carving knife pressed a little harder than necessary into the wood.
“Sounds painful,” I said.
“Mostly humbling.” The half-smile widened. “She’s a fast learner.”
“She’s a lot of things.”
The edge in my voice wasn’t subtle. Wyatt caught it. His gaze shifted to me, reading the subtext with a soldier’s precision, and for a second the two of us sat on that log and acknowledged what neither of us was going to say out loud.
He didn’t have a chance. He knew it and I knew it and the bond ensured it wasn’t even a competition.
But knowing you couldn’t have someone didn’t kill the wanting, and the wanting was there in the way he said her name and the way his eyes tracked her when she moved through camp.
“I dare you to a round,” I said. Changed the subject by making it physical. Worked for lycans, probably worked for hunters too. “Hand to hand. No weapons, no shifting. Just skill.”
“A dare.” Wyatt raised an eyebrow. “From an old supernatural wolf.”
“Scared?”
“Pragmatic. You could bench-press me without breaking a sweat.”
“I’ll dial it back. Human speed, human strength. Promise.”
The competitive spark caught. The soldier in him overriding the pragmatist because ego was a universal language.
“Fine,” he said. “One round.”
We cleared space near the eastern tree line.
Word traveled fast in a small camp and within minutes we had an audience. Reese and two of the newer converts perched on supply crates. Damon leaned against a tree with his arms crossed. Kaia watched from a distance with the expression of a woman cataloging weaknesses.
On the lycan side, Solomon observed from the map table without pretending he wasn’t. Lucian stood at the command post, arms folded, the eyebrow already raised in that specific arch that said he was tolerating this.
