The split-second distraction cost Lucian his grip. Thiago reached for his belt and the explosive went off in his hand, a concussive blast that threw Lucian backward and sent Thiago staggering into the wall. Blood streaked from a gash on his forearm where the device had detonated too close, but the distance was what he wanted.
Solomon materialized behind him. Claws extended, aimed at the throat, a killing strike from the enforcer who never missed.
Thiago spun and held up a vial. Small. Black-cased. Loaded into an injection gun.
“One more step,” Thiago said. Blood dripped from his arm. His hair was matted with dust from the explosion. The composure was gone entirely now, replaced by the manic focus of a man whose empire was crumbling around him in real time. “This isn’t the compound from the ventilation. This is new. Upgraded. The formula your mate’s cure was never designed to touch.”
“It’s useless,” I said from the floor, Percy still over me. “I made a cure. Look around you.”
Thiago’s eyes swept the cells.
The wolves inside were in pain, bodies contorting as neural pathways rebuilt themselves, but the transformation was visible. One lycan in the nearest cell had stopped pacing. Was sitting. Was looking at his own hands with an expression of bewildered recognition, eyes clearing with humanity returning in real time.
“Look at them,” I said. “It’s done.”
“This vial is a different generation.”
Thiago’s voice had shifted into the register I’d heard minutes ago: the sermon, the mission statement, the manifesto of a man who’d confused genocide with purpose.
“The original Purifier strips cognition. This one restructures the biology entirely. What it creates isn’t a feral wolf. It’s beyond wolf. Beyond lycan. A creature that can’t be killed. Not by silver. Not by wolfsbane. Not by any weapon your kingdoms have ever produced.”
He cradled the injection gun with the tenderness of a father holding a newborn.
“Immortality,” he said. “I invented immortality. The perfect predator. Unkillable, uncontrollable, unstoppable. A monster that will outlast every hunter and every wolf and every alliance you cobble together in your desperation.”
“You’re bluffing,” I said.
He smiled. The same smile from the balcony. From every bedtime story and every breakfast and every carefully constructed memory of the father I’d thought he was.
“Are you willing to take that risk? Standing where you are now?”
I looked at the injection gun. At the vial inside it, dark liquid catching the fluorescent light. At the man who had manufactured rogues and murdered my mother and burned mybookshop and poisoned my tea and shot my friend and held a gun to my head in front of my mates.
I hesitated.
“Lucian. Solomon. Step back.”
“Mira...” Lucian started.
“Step. Back.” I held the command in my voice. “We don’t know what that vial is. I won’t risk it.”
The brotherhood communicated in the space between seconds. Solomon’s jaw clenched. Lucian’s claws retracted a fraction. They retreated two steps, three, enough distance that a lunge wouldn’t reach Thiago before the injection gun could fire.
Thiago laughed. The sound bounced off the cells and the concrete and the waking wolves who flinched at the noise.
“Your mother would have done the same thing. Calculated the odds, weighed the risks, made the noble choice.” He shook his head. “Sienna always thought she was smarter than me too. Right up until the moment she wasn’t.”
I locked eyes with Solomon. Then Lucian. The message didn’t need words. We’d fought together long enough that the signal was a shift in my gaze and a micro-movement of my bound hands behind my back.
Take the vial. Then end him. Percy protects me.
Percival’s hand tightened on my shoulder. He’d read it too.
My fingers found the dagger strapped to my inner thigh. The zip ties had loosened during the drag from the balcony, enough slack that my hands could reach the sheath I’d hidden beneath my pants since the first compound rotation. I cut it with my dagger.
Thiago was mid-sentence when we moved.
Solomon was behind him in a blur. Arms locking around Thiago’s torso, pinning his elbows, the grip crushing inward. Lucian came from the front, hands closing on the injection gun, fighting to wrench it from Thiago’s fingers.
