73
— • —
Mira
The gag tasted of cotton and gun oil.
I shook my head sideways, working my jaw against the fabric, pulling it down with my chin and teeth while Thiago’s laugh bounced off the sublevel walls. The zip ties bit into my wrists behind my back and my cheek throbbed where the hunter had landed his fist during the drag from the balcony to this chair-side position on the concrete.
The smoke was everywhere. White, rolling, filling the corridor in waves that swallowed the cells and the monitors and the three figures standing fifteen feet away.
My mates. My children’s fathers. Standing in a cloud of what was supposed to destroy them.
“No!”I yelled, the gag slipped past my chin. “Lucian, Solomon, Percival!”
I gasped air that tasted of chemicals and fear and the metallic edge of a compound designed to erase everything a lycan was.
I stared into the smoke. Three silhouettes. Still upright. Still standing.
For now.
Fifteen seconds, Thiago had said. One exposure. Irreversible.
God, please. Anyone out there… this can’t be happening.
The count hit fifteen. And I need a miracle.
A shape moved in the smoke. Tall, broad. Walking forward with a stride that carried no hesitation.
Lucian stepped out of the white.
His eyes burned gold. His canines had dropped past his lower lip and his hands were clawed and the expression on his face was murder given form.
Behind him, Solomon emerged. Silver eyes glowing, jaw locked, every muscle coiled. Then Percy. Hazel irises ringed with amber, warmth replaced by a lethality I’d never seen on his face, not in training, not in battle, not once in the months I’d known him.
No… I lost them. They are turning.
That the gold and the canines and the clawed hands were the first stage of the transformation, that I was watching the beginning of the end.
Then Lucian crossed the room and wrapped his hand around Thiago’s throat.
“Wrong move,” he said.
Not mindless or feral. Still here, not gone.
Lucian’s eyes held every ounce of intelligence, every century of authority, every thread of the bond that connected him to me and to the two men flanking him. The gold wasn’t vacancy. It was rage.
They were fine. All three of them were fine.
Thiago’s feet left the ground. The gun clattered from his hand as both his fists closed around Lucian’s wrist, clawing at the grip, his face contorting from composure to confusion to raw, unprocessed panic.
“That’s not... the compound was loaded six months ago, the ventilation...” His voice came out strangled beneath Lucian’s palm. “It should have worked! You should be on the floor!”
And that was when it hit me.
Thecure.
Wyatt did it.
