Chapter 50 Mira
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Mira
The forest swallowed me whole the moment I cleared the drainage tunnel.
My feet found the path by instinct, or maybe the bond was doing the navigating because I sure wasn’t.
Every step away from the compound walls loosened a knot in my chest I hadn’t realized was strangling me. My lungs filled deeper. The nausea pulled back. The heartbeats beneath my ribs steadied from their frantic flutter into a calmer rhythm.
The babies knew. Somehow, they knew we were going toward their fathers.
“Traitors,” I muttered. “All three of you. Already picking sides.”
A woman found me at the tree line before I found the camp. Lycan. I’d seen her at the trial but we’d never spoken. She materialized from the shadows as if she’d been tracking my scent.
“This way,” she said. No greeting, no introduction. Just the direction and the expectation that I’d follow.
I followed.
The camp was small.
A fire banked low, a cot near the stream, supplies stacked under a makeshift canopy. And three men arranged around the clearing in positions that told me everything about the past two days.
Lucian sat against a tree with his back straight and his jaw set, wearing an expression that said he would die before admitting he couldn’t stand up. The wound on his chest was bandaged but the gray tinge to his skin hadn’t faded.
My stomach dropped. I’d done that. The guilt had been eating at me since that morning and seeing the damage up close made it worse.
His storm-gray eyes found me the moment I stepped into the firelight and the relief in them was so raw it almost knocked me sideways.
Solomon stood at the perimeter, arms crossed, already scanning the forest behind me to confirm I hadn’t been followed. His gaze swept me once. When it settled on my stomach, his jaw tightened.
But there was a difference in him. A looseness in his shoulders I’d never seen before. The permanent tension in his spine had eased by a fraction. Maybe it has to do with his father being alive.
Percival sat against an oak tree with his knees drawn up and his arms wrapped around them. No grin or wave, which was weird. He wasn’t bounding toward me with a joke and an invasion of my personal space. He looked up when I arrived and raised a hand.
It was wrong. The two of them had switched. Solomon had lightened and Percival had gone dark, and the reversal unsettled me in a way I couldn’t name.
What happened to them when I was gone?
“You look terrible,” I said to Lucian. Because I needed words and those were the first ones that felt honest.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re gray. Literally gray.”
“I’ve survived worse.”
“Name one time.”
“I was stabbed by my own mate with a silver blade in front of an audience. That was recent.”
The words landed between us. Delivered with the dry humor of a man who’d had two days to process the irony and had apparently decided to weaponize it.
“Low blow,” I said.
“Just the truth.”
“Can you stand?”
His eyes narrowed. The challenge registered exactly the way I’d intended it to, and Lucian braced his hand against the tree and pushed himself upright. He made it, barely. A tremor ran through his arms that he couldn’t hide and the bandage on his chest darkened at the edges.
“Sit down, you stubborn idiot.”
“You asked if I could stand. I can stand.”
“And now you’re bleeding. Sit.”
“I’m the king. I don’t take orders from...”
“Sit down, Your Majesty, or I will put you down myself and we both know how that ended last time.”
He sat. The ghost of a smirk crossed his face and vanished, and beneath the bravado I caught the guilt.
The king should be leading, not leaning against trees. He should be planning the assault, not letting his pack members and a pregnant woman do the work.
The crown was crushing him and the wound was proof that even kings bled.
“You need to eat.” Solomon’s voice, behind me. Closer than expected.
“I just got here.”
“You’ve lost weight,” he said flatly. “Father, is there...”
“Already prepared.” His father appeared from the tree line carrying a pack. The older lycan moved silently that reminded me of Solomon in twenty years, if Solomon ever learned to relax. “Dried meat, nuts, water. The caloric density isn’t ideal but it’s what we have.”
He handed me the pack and then stopped. Mid-motion, his hand still extended, his silver eyes locked on my face with an intensity that made the hair on my neck rise. The color drained from his expression.
“You...” He caught himself. Pulled his hand back. Blinked once, twice, resetting himself. “Forgive me. You remind me of someone.”
Solomon’s gaze cut to his father. A question he didn’t answer.
“I get that a lot,” I said because the way he’d looked at me felt too personal for a man I’d barely spoken to.
“I can feed myself, by the way.”
“Then do it,” all three of them said. In unison. Without looking at each other.
I blinked. Opened my mouth to argue, found no reasonable defense against a wall of coordinated concern, and sat down by the fire to eat.
Solomon’s father settled across from me. The firelight caught his eyes and I noticed him watching the journal tucked under my arm. The expression from before hadn’t fully cleared. Whatever he’d seen in my face was still sitting behind his composure, waiting.
“Before we begin,” Farmon said. “May I see the journal?”
I held it against my chest. “Why?”
“Because I believe I know who wrote it.”
The camp went quiet. Solomon shifted his weight. Percival, against his oak, went still.
I opened the journal to the entry I’d bookmarked. The one with the initial.
“My mother references a prisoner. She calls him F. She spent the year protecting him, planning his escape.” I looked at him. “The death report says she died during a containment breach. The same night of escape.”
His silver eyes held mine without blinking.
“She got me out.”
The fire cracked. A log shifted. The forest held its breath and so did I.
Solomon’s father is the lycan prisoner captured then. The timeline assembled itself and the answer had been sitting across the campfire from me the whole time.
“My name is Farmon,” he said. As if giving it to me mattered. “Lord Farmon Theron.”
The initial had a name now. And the name belonged to the man sitting across from the daughter of the woman who’d died saving him.
“Sienna saved my life.” He didn’t look away from me.
I realized he wasn’t going to. That he’d been waiting for this conversation for two decades and he was going to hold my gaze through every word of it.
“I was captured on my expedition. Imprisoned. Tortured. The Order’s methods were... thorough. By the time your mother found me in sublevel two, I’d been there for a while.”
Solomon went rigid beside me. I felt it through the bond, fracturing another inch as his father’s story cut through the static.
“She was a researcher. Officially, her access to my cell was for data collection.” Farmon’s voice was calm, the way you spoke about old wounds.
“But the treatments improved after she was assigned. The burns healed faster. The silver doses decreased. Small changes, invisible to anyone not paying attention.”
I glanced at his hands as he spoke. The fingers of his right hand curled at an odd angle, the joints misaligned. Whatever the Order had done to him, they’d made sure he’d carry it in his grip for the rest of his life.
“She was sneaking you better care,” I said. “Under the guise of research.”
“For months. She fabricated proposals, manipulated dosage records, redirected supplies. All while maintaining the appearance of a loyal researcher and leader. All while raising a newborn.” A pause. “She was extraordinary.”
My throat tightened. I pressed the journal harder against my chest.
“The escape plan came together fast. She prepared the escape route herself. Everything. Even the exact window needed to move a weakened lycan through a half-mile drainage system without detection.”
Farmon’s hands rested on his knees, palms up, open.
“The night of the breach, she sedated two guards, disabled the sublevel alarms, and walked me out through the tunnels.”
The same tunnels.
Over two decades apart, mother and daughter crawling through the same concrete and rust for the same reason: because the compound couldn’t be allowed to keep doing what it was doing.
“She made it to the eastern exit. Got me to the tree line. I was too weak to shift but I could walk, barely. She told me which direction to run and how far, and then she went back.”
“Back?”
“There were others. In the cells. She’d promised to create a diversion, trigger the containment breach to cover my escape and give the other captives a chance.” His voice didn’t waver but his hands closed. “Thiago intercepted her in the sublevel corridor. He’d discovered the sedated guards.”
Dread settled in my stomach.
“He killed her,” I said.
Farmon held my gaze. “I didn’t learn the details until years later.
What I know is that the containment breach occurred, several captives escaped in the chaos, and Sienna did not survive the night.
Thiago reported it as a lycan attack. He told the compound she’d been killed by the very prisoner she was studying. ”
“He told me that too.” My voice came out strange. “He told a six-year-old that monsters killed her mother. Then he dropped me in the foster system and went back to work.”
The nausea hit without warning. Not the pregnancy kind or the bond-deprivation kind. The kind that came from the gut when your body processed a truth your mind couldn’t hold.
My father killed my mother. Staged it, blamed the victim. And then lied to my face about it, using her name against me.
I made it three steps from the fire before my knees buckled and everything I’d eaten came back up. Hands found my hair before it fell forward.
Percival had crossed the clearing without a sound, without a word, and gathered my hair at the nape of my neck while I heaved into the dirt.