Chapter 47 Mira
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Mira
My inner thighs were going to be the death of my cover story.
Every lunge Wyatt called sent a reminder screaming through muscles that had been used in ways combat training didn’t account for. The soreness ran deep and every time I shifted my weight, my body delivered a very specific flashback of Solomon’s hands sinfully gripping my hips.
Fantastic life choices, Mira. Really stellar decision-making. The man rejects you, you stab his king, and then you let him bend you over your crazy father’s desk in a compound full of people who want their kind dead.
If there was an award for worst coping mechanisms, I’d win it every year.
Every romance novel I’d ever shelved had a version of this scene. The heroine sleeps with the man who broke her heart and then has to pretend her legs work the next morning. I used to judge those characters. Karma was a spectacular bitch.
I forced myself through another drill.
The nausea was better. That was the infuriating part.
Whatever the desk encounter had done to the muted bond, it had loosened the stranglehold the rejection and pregnancy had on my body. The morning sickness had dialed back. My hands were steadier. The veins on my forearms looked less translucent.
Solomon’s proximity had done what the herbs and the willpower couldn’t. My body responded to his and the babies responded to the bond, and the result was the first morning in weeks where I could stand up without bracing against a wall.
I hated how much I needed that. I hated that the relief came attached to a man who’d rejected me. It drives me insane and wounds my pride.
“Mira. You’re favoring your right side.” Wyatt adjusted his guard and circled. “Shift your weight. Whatever’s tight, work through it.”
“Just slept wrong.”
“You’ve been sleeping wrong a lot lately.”
“Bad mattress. Foam here has the give of a concrete slab.”
Wyatt didn’t push. He corrected my stance with a tap on my hip that sent a fresh wave of pain through muscles that was a certain large man’s fault, and I bit my tongue to keep my expression neutral.
We moved to the eastern training ground after warm-ups. Thiago had added perimeter defense to my curriculum, which meant observation drills from a shooting blind at the tree line’s edge.
Wyatt set up the spotting scope and knelt beside me. “Watch the rotation timing. Flag any gap longer than forty seconds.”
“Forty seconds isn’t a gap. That’s a scheduling error.”
“Welcome to military infrastructure. Half of security is intimidation, the other half is prayer.”
I logged patrols, noted the gaps. Filed the useful ones away for reasons Wyatt didn’t need to know about.
Then my body turned.
My entire torso rotated toward the tree line before my brain caught up. The bond pulling me south with zero subtlety.
He was out there.
The compound’s sensors wouldn’t catch him. Solomon moved quietly. I’d spent months learning the particular silence of a man who could cross a room without disturbing dust particles.
But the bond didn’t care about silence. It cared about proximity, and right now it was screaming south with zero subtlety.
A low growl rolled from the tree line. Barely audible, buried under wind and birdsong, but I caught it because my body was already tuned to his frequency. The possessive rumble of an alpha registering another male’s scent on his mate.
Wyatt was kneeling two feet from me. His hand had been on my hip thirty seconds ago, correcting my stance. Solomon had watched that happen from thirty meters away, and apparently centuries of discipline wasn’t enough to keep his wolf quiet about it.
I am so going to murder him after this.
Wyatt’s head turned toward the trees. His hand drifted to his sidearm. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“That sound. From the tree line.”
“Probably a deer. I’ve been seeing them all week.”
“That didn’t sound like a deer.”
He studied me. Then stood, hand still on his sidearm, eyes scanning the tree line.
“I’m going to check it out.”
He took one step toward the trees.
My hand caught his arm and pulled him back. “Wyatt, don’t. Last time a trainee chased wildlife, they tripped a sensor and the whole compound went on lockdown for two hours. You really want to explain that to my father?”
He hesitated. My fingers were still on his arm.
From the tree line, another growl, deeper this time.
I spoke louder, turning Wyatt bodily toward the northern ridge. “Actually, look. Movement at the north post.” I pointed past his shoulder at nothing. “Two o’clock, past the drainage ditch. See it?”
Wyatt squinted north. His training overrode his instinct, attention redirecting where I’d aimed it. “I don’t see anything.”
“It was fast. Could be a patrol gap. Might be worth checking.”
He looked back at the eastern tree line one more time. Then north again. The hunter in him weighed both directions. I held my breath.
“Fine. I’ll check the northern post. Five minutes.”
“Copy.”
He moved north along the tree line. The moment his back turned, I exhaled and dropped from the blind.
The eastern tree line was still. No movement, no sound. But the bond pulsed with the steady rhythm of a man standing thirty meters away, camouflaged in forest and patience.
Again, I was going to kill Solomon.
I’d told him two days. A clear instruction, delivered in person.
That was just last night and this was the morning after. And the man who could plan a war operation apparently couldn’t count to forty-eight hours.
I walked to the eastern water runoff. Crouched by the pipe, pretending to refill my canteen.
“I know you’re there.”
Silence.
“Sol. You just growled. Twice. In front of a hunter. If he’d taken three more steps into those trees, what exactly was your plan?”
The forest held its breath.
Then his voice. Low, close enough that he’d been within ten meters this entire time and I hadn’t pinpointed him until now. The man was infuriating in his invisibility.
“Your symptoms have improved.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“Your hands aren’t trembling. Heart rate is steadier than yesterday.” A pause. “I needed to confirm the improvement held through the night.”
“You needed to confirm it by stalking me and growling at my colleague?”
“The risk was calculated.”
“Right. Because growling near the compound is a smart plan.”
A beat of silence. “The growling was involuntary.”
“Well, it was stupid. I told you two days which means two days.”
Another pause. When he spoke again, the clinical tone had cracked.
“I couldn’t leave.”
Three words. Stripped bare of the act he wore on everything else. My hands tightened on the canteen.
“Last night, after, I went to the ridge. Standard overwatch position.” His voice dropped lower.
“I told myself it was protocol. That confirming your safety post-contact was standard procedure. But I sat on that ridge and listened to your heartbeat through the bond until dawn, and at no point was the word protocol anywhere in my thinking.”
The canteen trembled against my palm.
“I understand, Mira. Two days. I’m not asking you to adjust it.
I’m not asking for forgiveness or access or anything you haven’t already decided to give.
” A breath. “I am asking you to know that I couldn’t physically make myself walk away from you this morning.
And I am aware of how insufficient that is. ”
I pressed my tongue against the roof of my mouth to keep the burning behind my eyes from winning.
“Insufficient is one word for it.”
“Name a better one.”
“Selfish. Reckless. Disobedient.”
“All accurate.”
“You don’t get to agree with me and make it sound noble just because you’re standing in my tree line begging to stay.” My voice roughened. “I don’t know what to do with that because the last time I trusted you to stay, you ruined me.”
The forest went quiet. The gutted silence of a wound reopened.
“I understand,” he said.
“So go back to wherever you’re staying. Wait two days.”
“Mira...”
“Go.”
Silence stretched. Then a shift in the underbrush, barely perceptible.
I stayed crouched at the runoff. Let the water run over my hands. Cold, grounding, pulling me back from the edge of breaking.
When I stood and turned back toward the blind, I caught it. A flash of movement at the southern tree line, retreating. He’d let me see him go.
His back. The rigid set of his shoulders, the controlled stride, the way his head didn’t turn. But for half a second before the trees swallowed him, I caught his profile.
Jaw clenched. Eyes holding the expression of a man absorbing a blow he’d earned, carrying it in his chest.
My chest caved.
I looked away. Walked back to the blind with hands that were steady because his proximity had fixed what his absence had broken.
Wyatt returned from the northern stake, settling beside me.
“Anything on the eastern corridor?”
The tree line was empty. Solomon was gone.
“Clear.” I adjusted the scope. “Nothing to report.”
Wyatt accepted it.
When the session ended and Wyatt packed the gear, I stood at the tree line for one extra minute, looking south. The forest was still, ordinary, empty of the presence that had been breathing thirty meters away all morning.
My hand pressed against my stomach. The babies were quiet.
“Two days,” I said to no one. To the man who could probably still hear me if he’d paused at the outer perimeter the way I suspected he had.
Then I walked back inside and closed the gate behind me.