“Take her,” he said.
The hunters moved forward. The balcony door was behind them. The railing was behind me. And above us all, the flare burned red against the sky, painting the compound in the color of war.
They were coming.
72
— • —
Percival
We shouldn’t have let her go.
The thought circled my skull on a loop as I stood at the camp’s eastern perimeter and stared at the tree line where we’d left her last night. Hours ago. She was already inside the compound by now, already swiping that keycard and walking into the belly of a place that had killed her mother and caged our people.
And we’d just watched her walk in. Kissed her goodbye and watched her walk in.
“Stop staring at the trees,” Solomon said from behind me. “It doesn’t help.”
“I’m not staring. I’m monitoring.”
“You’ve been monitoring the same patch of forest since we got back. The trees haven’t moved.”
Lucian was at the command table with Voss and Altun, reviewing breach positions for the fourth time. His focus was locked on the maps but his jaw hadn’t unclenched since Mira disappeared through the service entrance. The king was holding court while every instinct he had screamed at him to abandon the table and sprint back to that compound.
I knew the feeling.
“She has a plan,” Solomon said. The words sounded rehearsed. A mantra he’d been repeating to himself since we’d turned around. “The grid prep requires her clearance. The false intel requires her presence. The sublevel mapping requires her access.”
“You’re listing reasons.”
“I’m listing facts.”
“You’re listing facts because the reasons aren’t enough and you know it.”
His silence confirmed it. The enforcer who could calculate odds on any battlefield had run the numbers on sending his pregnant mate into enemy territory and the math didn’t work no matter how many variables he adjusted.
“We could go back,” I said.
“She’d kill us.”
“She’d be alive to do it.”
“And the captive lycans in those cells would still be there. And Thiago would still have the Purifier. And every human who risked their life to convert would have done it for nothing.” Solomon’s voice was flat but I caught the fracture underneath. “She’s right. We can’t pull back because we’re afraid.”
“Being afraid for your pregnant mate isn’t weakness, Sol.”
“No. But acting on it when a kingdom depends on the alternative is selfish. And she asked us not to be selfish.”
I hated that he was right. I hated that Mira was right. I hated that the most logical tactical decision and the most terrifying personal one were the same thing and I was standing here pretending to be okay with it.
The camp moved around us.
Voss’s soldiers checked weapons and ran drills. Converted hunters from the compound clustered in their own formation, still uncomfortable in proximity to the lycan troops but holding their positions.
Farmon sat near the fire, grinding supplements with hands that should’ve been too damaged for the work, doing it anyway because his future grandchildren needed the medicine.
Altun and Rheda were already en route to the Barrows with Annora and Giselle. Part of me wished they weren’t. Altun might’ve sided with us. Might’ve overruled the plan and ordered Mira extracted. But that was wishful thinking from a man grasping for any authority higher than his mate’s stubbornness, and no such authority existed.
