I pushed back from the map table. “Giselle.”
The warning carried decades of command, the tone she’d obeyed without hesitation on every battlefield and in every operation since she’d earned her rank.
Mira’s hand came up. Not toward Giselle. Toward me, gesturing to stop.
She didn’t look at me when she did it. Her eyes stayed on Giselle, reading the challenge underneath the offer.
“Show me,” Mira said.
They squared off. Giselle moved first with a controlled strike demonstrating the pivot correction. Mira blocked it clean.
The second exchange escalated. Giselle pushed past instruction into evaluation, her strikes testing range and reaction speed. Mira adapted mid-combination. Caught the rhythm, adjusted her guard, and answered with a counter that forced Giselle back two steps.
I’d trained warriors for centuries. Soldiers, enforcers, operatives. The ability to read an opponent’s pattern and adjust within a single exchange was a skill most lycans took years to develop.
Mira had done it in weeks.
“Again,” Mira said.
Giselle obliged with a combination that would have dropped most humans. Mira redirected the first, absorbed the second on her forearm, and answered the third with an elbow strike that connected hard enough to make the lycan’s guard ring.
The clearing had gone quiet. Wyatt’s training stopped. Percival turned. Lucian’s gaze found the sparring ground from the command area.
My pen had stopped. My eyes hadn’t.
Sweat tracked down Mira’s neck and disappeared beneath her collar. Her chest rose and fell with controlled breathing, combat-focused, her body running on adrenaline and bond-enhanced reflexes. The muscles in her forearms flexed as she reset her guard and the shirt she wore clung where the exertion had dampened it.
Fuck.
Giselle swept at her legs with more force than instruction required. Mira jumped it. Caught her balance. The movement pulled her shirt above her hip and the bare skin between fabric and waistband made my cock strain against my thigh.
My fingers dented the edge of the map table.
Giselle feinted high and drove low, catching Mira’s hip and taking her to the ground. A lycan soldier with decades of training putting a human on her back.
I was halfway out of my seat when Mira rolled. Not onto her stomach. She tucked sideways, protecting the bump with her body’s rotation, and came up on her knees in a single motion. She came up with a fistful of loose earth and threw it into Giselle’s sightline. Mira drove forward with a tackle that slammed the lycan onto her back.
Giselle’s skull bounced off the packed dirt. Before she could reset, Mira had her forearm braced across the lycan’s throat and her knee pinning Giselle’s wrist to the ground.
The clearing went silent.
Mira. Straddling a lycan soldier with centuries of combat experience. Thighs clamped around Giselle’s torso for leverage, arms trembling from the effort of holding position against a body that could throw her across the clearing.
My blood went south so fast my vision narrowed.
Her on top. Flushed, panting. Pinning another body beneath her with raw force. My wolf didn’t register a sparring match. My wolf put me under her instead.
Those thighs clamping around my hips, that forearm braced against my chest, her weight settling onto me while she panted through the adrenaline with her hair loose and her skin slick, eyes daring me to move.
My cock ached immediately as my hands gripped the table hard enough to leave marks in the wood.
Enough. Get control of yourself.
The wolf didn’t care. The wolf wanted her on top of him and underneath him and against every flat surface in this forest.
“Dirty,” Giselle managed, bringing me back to reality.
“Effective,” Mira corrected.
