Chapter 36 Mira
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Mira
The window latch stuck.
My fingers were numb from the predawn cold and still trembling from everything that had happened in the clearing, and the latch that I’d loosened three days ago with a butter knife from the mess hall decided this was the moment to fight back.
Below me, boots pounded across the courtyard. Radios crackled. Someone shouted an order I couldn’t make out, and floodlights snapped on along the eastern perimeter, throwing long white beams across the compound grounds.
They’d found the empty cell.
I jammed my thumb into the latch mechanism and twisted. Pain shot through my nail bed, but the catch released and the window slid open six inches. I hooked my fingers over the sill, pulled myself up, and squeezed through the gap.
I’d climbed out of windows before. Different windows, different reasons. Same survival instinct.
My boots hit the bedroom floor. I kicked them off, shoved them under the bed, stripped my jacket and pants in four seconds flat, and pulled the covers up to my chin. My hair smelled of forest floor and Percival’s skin, so I flipped the pillow and pressed my face into the clean side.
Breathe. Slow. Even.
The hallway erupted. Doors slamming, voices overlapping.
A knock. Then another, harder.
I let it knock a third time before I answered. “What?”
The door opened. A guard I recognized from the south gate stood in the frame, hand on his sidearm, face tight.
“Ms. Maxwell. Are you in your room?”
I sat up slowly. Squinted against the hallway light with the convincing disorientation of someone dragged out of sleep. “I’m in my bed. Where else would I be at four in the morning?”
His eyes swept the room. Bed, nightstand, window closed. My boots were under the bed frame, invisible from his angle. My jacket was balled inside the covers beside me, pressed against my hip.
“There’s been a security incident. Stay in your room.”
“What kind of incident?”
“Stay in your room, Ms. Maxwell.”
He pulled the door shut. His footsteps retreated down the hall, joining the growing thunder of boots and voices and radios that filled the compound.
I lay in the dark with my heart slamming against my ribs and Percival’s taste still on my lips and the absolute certainty that Thiago would be at my door by breakfast.
He was.
“Sleep well?” he asked, coffee in hand, eyes measuring.
“Perfectly,” I said.
Neither of us believed the other.
***
The compound got louder after that night.
Thiago added a second perimeter check at midnight, doubled the camera rotation on the eastern approach, and installed motion sensors along the tree line that blinked red in the dark.
All of it because of a single lycan.
Thiago didn’t accuse me directly. That would’ve required admitting his security had been breached, and his ego couldn’t survive the hit. But the surveillance shifted.
A guard walked past my room every forty-five minutes instead of every two hours. My keycard stopped working on the east corridor. And the breakfast interrogations became a daily ritual. Same question, same answer, same mutual disbelief, for two weeks straight.
The holding cells where they’d kept Percy were on the upper sublevel. Interrogation rooms, concrete and steel, the kind of space designed for short-term containment.
I’d been down there once to free him and I could still feel the ghost of silver clasps under my fingers, the way his wrists had looked when the cuffs came off. But the east corridor keypad led somewhere deeper.
A section I’d never accessed, where the screaming I heard at dawn lived behind reinforced doors that even senior operatives entered in pairs. That was the part of this compound Thiago was protecting.
I kept my head down. Played the dutiful daughter, the legacy student. The same performance I’d been running since I arrived, except now it had a crack in it, and every time Thiago looked at me with that measuring expression, I could feel him searching for it.
The compound’s staff made their feelings clear enough.
A woman in tactical gear shoulder-checked me in the mess hall doorway hard enough to spill my coffee. At the supply building, two men stopped talking the second I rounded the corner and watched me pass in silence, their eyes on my throat.
“Mutt lover,” someone muttered behind me in the corridor outside the gym
Thiago’s daughter was tolerated. Thiago’s daughter who’d been mated by the enemy was despised. It was better this way. I could work with that.
What I couldn’t work with was the guilt.
Percival’s wrists, raw and blistered where the silver had burned through to muscle. The sound he’d bitten back when I pulled the cuffs off. The way he’d kissed me in that clearing, desperate and guilty and full of longing, and how I’d let him because I needed it just as badly.
This didn’t happen.
Right. Except it did. And I sent him into the wilderness with no pack, no plan, and nowhere to go.
Three muted bonds sat in my chest. I’d stopped being able to tell them apart weeks ago. They’d blurred into a single ache that woke me at night and followed me through the day, a constant low-grade wrongness that was working its way outward.
The veins on my forearms were more visible than they used to be. I thought my last proximity with Percival helped a little but it didn’t fix me. A bruise from training three days ago still hadn’t faded.
Some mornings I reached for the bonds without meaning to.
Lucian’s, which used to feel the way a campfire looked from a distance, controlled and warm and absolute. Solomon’s, a weight I’d learned to carry because putting it down meant losing the steadiest thing I’d ever held.
Still there. And I didn’t know which was worse.
Wyatt was already in the courtyard when I arrived, stretching against the low wall.
“You’re late,” he said.
“By two minutes.”
“Three. But who’s counting.” He tossed me a pair of sparring gloves. “Grappling today. Thiago wants you ground-certified by end of month.”
“Ground-certified. That sounds made up.”
“It is. He made it up specifically for you.” He prevented a smile. “Welcome to being the boss’s daughter.”
We drilled escapes. Wyatt corrected my form with his hands, adjusting my shoulders, pressing my elbow down. Professional, always. Not a single touch that lingered or wandered.
The last man who’d corrected my stance had been Lucian. The clearing behind the cabin, late afternoon light through the canopy, his chest against my back as he guided my arm through a dagger slash.
Wyatt’s hands moved my elbow the same way Lucian’s had. Same correction, same angle. Zero electricity. Zero heat.
I threw a cross that connected harder than I intended. Then another. Wyatt absorbed both, his guard shifting, but his eyebrows went up.
“Easy. We’re drilling technique, not aggression.”
I wasn’t drilling aggression. I was thinking about Lucian. About Solomon. About the fact that Percival had come and they hadn’t.
Where were the other two?
The cross came again. Harder. Wyatt caught it on his forearm and pushed back with enough force to stagger me.
“Mira. Pull it back.”
“Sorry.”
Except I wasn’t sorry.
I was angry, and the anger didn’t have a clean target because part of me was furious that Lucian and Solomon hadn’t come, and part of me was terrified by the possibility that they might.
Because if all three of them showed up at this compound, Thiago would have everything he wanted. Three alpha lycans on his doorstep, walking into a trap designed for exactly them.
Percival alone was reckless, survivable. All three of them together was a war.
So maybe I didn’t want them to come. Maybe I needed them to stay away. And maybe the fact that I couldn’t stop reaching for their bonds in the middle of the night made me a hypocrite of the highest order.
I threw another cross. Wyatt redirected it, swept my legs, and put me on my back in the puddle the morning rain had left in the courtyard’s low spot.
I stayed down.
“You going to get up?”
“I’m considering my options.”
“Your options are get up or stay in the mud.”
“The mud is surprisingly comfortable.”
He dropped down next to me. Just sat in the puddle, tactical pants and all, and leaned back on his hands. A laugh escaped before I could stop it. A real one.
The guilt followed immediately. I remembered the times I had shared laughter with the three of them.
The laughter died. Wyatt noticed.
“You okay?”
“Fine.”
He didn’t push. That was the thing about Wyatt. He noticed everything and pushed nothing.
A beat passed. He looked at me sideways.
“Can I say one thing without you biting my head off?”
“You can try.”
“You look terrible.”
“Wow. I’m flattered.”
“I’m serious.” His voice lost its casual edge. “You’ve dropped weight since you started training. Your reaction time’s getting slower, not faster. You had a nosebleed yesterday you thought I didn’t see, and your hands shake when you’re tired.”
He paused. “We have a clinic. Dr. Elaine runs it. She’s good.”
The suggestion landed with a cold spike of alarm that I kept off my face.
A hunter clinic. Where hunter doctors would run tests and find whatever was happening inside a body that was connected to alpha lycans through a bond that was slowly tearing itself apart.
The deterioration wasn’t a medical condition. It was supernatural. And the second anyone in this compound discovered that, they’d be interested in a bad way.
“I’m fine. Just adjusting to the training load.”
“Mira, you can barely hold a grapple for twenty minutes before your arms give out. Your veins are showing through your skin. That’s not a training load issue.”
“Then it’s a bad diet issue. Or a stress issue. Or a my-life-fell-apart-weeks-ago issue. Take your pick.”
Wyatt studied me. The quiet assessment of a man trained to read people, running it against the instinct of a man who might actually care.
“The fact that you’re keeping up at all in this condition is remarkable.” He said it without flattery, just honest evaluation. “Thiago’s right about one thing. You are a legacy.”