Chapter 57 Mira
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Mira
The compound looked different when you knew you were on a kill list.
Same corridors and fluorescent buzz overhead. With guards rotating at the same intervals. But the walls pressed closer now, and every hunter I passed became a question mark instead of background noise.
Fourteen days and forty soldiers. My name on a scroll sealed with lycan wax, classified under “threats to be neutralized.”
The council of Veyndral wanted me dead, and the organization my father built wanted me compliant, and I was walking between both of them with triplets in my belly and a flare plan in my head.
Mornings were the worst. Especially now that there’s distance between me and my three crazy mates.
The nausea had shifted from predictable to creative, finding new ways to ambush me between briefings and training rotations. Today it waited until I was halfway through the eastern corridor before my stomach rolled and I had to press my shoulder against the wall until the world stopped tilting.
A hand steadied my elbow. Elaine, appearing from the medical bay with her clipboard and her concern.
“You’re pale again.”
“Morning coffee didn’t agree with me.”
“You don’t drink coffee. I’ve watched you avoid it for weeks.” Her eyes moved to my face with the thoroughness of a woman who’d spent decades reading bodies. “I told you we need bloodwork.”
“I’m good. Just need air.”
“Mira.”
“Elaine, I promise. Bad sleep and worse food. That’s the whole diagnosis.” I straightened off the wall and gave her a smile I’d perfected over six months of lying to everyone. “Thank you, though. Really.”
She didn’t believe me. The clipboard lowered a fraction and her gaze held mine long enough to say so. But she let me go as usual, and I filed the interaction under the growing category of problems with expiration dates.
It was only a matter of time before she realized the truth. If Thiago caught wind of my pregnancy, the entire operation collapsed.
I needed to move faster.
The security hub sat on the second floor of the administrative wing, behind a door that required Level 3 clearance. My keycard was Level 2. The gap between those numbers was going to be the difference between a flare signal that worked and one that got me killed.
I walked the corridor twice during the morning shift change, counting cameras, noting which guards left first, how long the overlap lasted before the replacement arrived.
By noon, I had the security grid’s exterior access mapped.
I photographed the closet’s lock mechanism and the relay panel through the vent above the door. Added it to the file. Kept walking.
Training with Wyatt was scheduled for two o’clock. I got to the yard early and stretched alone, working through the sequence he’d taught me while my mind ran scenarios for the Purifier lockdown.
The Purifier itself was in sublevel three. I’d seen it during my last rotation.
A chamber with reinforced walls and a containment system designed for the feral wolves Thiago manufactured. Locking it down meant either destroying the equipment or cutting its power feed.
Diera Kaelwyn’s journal sat in the inner pocket of my jacket. I’d skimmed the first twenty pages before leaving camp, enough to recognize that Percy’s mother wrote neatly.
Wyatt didn’t show at two.
By two fifteen, the yard was still empty. The afternoon patrol had rotated past three times and each time I adjusted my stretching to look purposeful instead of abandoned.
By two thirty, there is a different knot in my stomach.
Wyatt was never late.
In weeks of training together, the man operated on a precision that rivaled Solomon’s, which was the highest compliment and the most irritating comparison I could make. His absence was a signal, and the signal said one of two things: either he’d been compromised, or he was making a decision.
I was packing up my gear when the training room door opened.
Wyatt stood in the frame. No training clothes or pads. He wore his tactical uniform, the one reserved for field operations, and he held a tablet in his right hand.
His face stopped me.
Not anger or grief or the fractures I’d seen building over weeks. This was a man who’d already fallen and was standing in the wreckage trying to figure out which direction was up.
He closed the door behind him and leaned against it.
“My parents,” he said.
Two words. My chest clenched.
“Wyatt...”
“I pulled the files.” He held up the tablet. “After what you said. Come to my door if I have doubts.” His jaw worked. “I had doubts. So I pulled the recruitment pipeline data from the archive you pointed me to. Cross-referenced the Purifier trial dates against the rogue incident reports.”
Percy’s discovery. The pattern that had been sitting in the Order’s own records for twenty years, invisible to anyone who wasn’t looking for it.
“A Purifier trial. A containment failure. A rogue attack on civilians. A recruitment wave.” Wyatt continued. His voice was flat in a way that wasn’t calm.
He set the tablet on the bench between us.
“The rogue that killed my parents. October twelfth, fourteen years ago. I memorized that date when I was eleven years old.” His throat moved.
“There’s a Purifier trial logged six weeks before it.
The containment failure is documented. Subject designation PF-19.
Released into the northern corridor, same geographic zone as my parents’ farm. ”
The training room was quiet. Just the ventilation overhead and the sound of a man’s world restructuring itself around a truth he couldn’t unfeel.
“They made it.” Wyatt pressed his palms flat against the bench on either side of the tablet. “The Order created the wolf that killed my mother and father. Then they showed up at the group home where I’d been placed, told me lycans were monsters, and asked if I wanted to fight back.”
I didn’t touch him. Didn’t reach out or offer comfort. Wyatt wasn’t a man who needed comfort right now. He needed space to be furious, and he needed someone who wouldn’t flinch when the fury hit.
“I was seventeen.” His voice cracked on the number. Just the edge, before he sealed it back. “I’d been in the system for three years. No family. No direction. And they gave me both. A purpose and a home. All I had to do was hate the right enemy.”
“Wyatt.”
“Fourteen years.” He looked at me. His eyes were dry but the devastation behind them was total.
“I’ve killed for them, Mira. Missions I volunteered for because I believed I was protecting people from the monsters that took my parents.
And every single one of those missions was built on a lie they designed. ”
The silence stretched between us. I let it.
Then Wyatt straightened off the bench. Squared his shoulders. Folded the devastation into a compartment and locked it with the discipline the Order had trained into him, which was its own kind of cruelty.
“What do you need me to do?”
Six words. The same ones I’d been waiting for since I planted the seed in our training session. But hearing them out loud, watching a man dismantle his entire identity and rebuild it toward me in the span of minutes, the weight of it pressed against my ribs.
“I need people,” I said. “Hunters inside who’ll turn when the moment comes. Not in weeks. In days.”
“I know who to talk to.”
“How many?”
“Three for certain. Reese, Damon, and Kaia.” He didn’t hesitate.
He’d already been thinking about this. “Reese lost a sister to a rogue attack. Same pipeline pattern. Damon’s been questioning the sublevel protocols for months, asking why we keep wolves in cages instead of killing them.
And Kaia...” He paused. “Kaia just doesn’t trust Thiago.
Gut instinct. She’s been keeping her distance. ”
“Can you bring them to me? Tonight?”
“Give me two hours.”
He picked up the tablet and walked toward the door. Halfway there, he stopped.
“The wolf that killed my parents.” His back was to me. “PF-19. Is it still alive?”
The question sat between us with the weight of fourteen years.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But if it is, it’s not the enemy. It was a victim too.”
Wyatt didn’t respond. His hand found the door handle, and he left the training room without looking back.
He brought them at midnight.
Three hunters in a storage room off the eastern corridor, sitting on supply crates while I laid out the evidence on a tablet propped against a water jug. Wyatt stood beside the door with his arms crossed, watching their faces reading the data in real time.
Reese was the first to break. Twenty-two, freckles across her nose, hands that shook when I showed her the recruitment pattern matched to her sister’s death.
She pressed those hands flat against her knees and breathed through it with a control that said she’d been taught to manage grief by the same people who caused it.
Damon took longer. Thirty, built solid, the skeptic of the group.
He challenged every data point until Wyatt pulled up the raw archive files and let him cross-reference them himself.
The moment Damon’s skepticism collapsed was visible.
A shift behind his eyes, the ground falling away beneath a man who’d trusted the floor.
Kaia said the least. Mid-twenties, dark hair pulled back tight, and an expression that never fully opened. She studied the evidence, studied me, studied Wyatt, and after fifteen minutes asked a single question.
“When?”
“Days,” I said. “Not weeks.”
“I’m in.”
No follow-up or emotional processing. Just a woman who’d already made her exit plan and was waiting for someone to hand her the key.
By one in the morning, I had four converted hunters and a window to get them out.
“I need to take you somewhere tonight,” I said. “A camp in the forest. And I need you to trust me when I say that what you’re about to see will test every instinct the Order trained into you.”
Reese stood first. “Whose camp?”
“Lycans.”
The word detonated quietly. Damon’s jaw locked. Kaia’s eyes narrowed. Reese sat back down.