Chapter 25 Mira
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Mira
Solomon brought boxes.
Three of them, cardboard, taped shut, carried into the cabin’s study. He was quiet which I deduced meant that he’d spent the morning doing things he didn’t want to talk about. He set them on the desk and stepped back.
“Found where Hudson was staying,” he said. “A weekly rental paid in cash. The landlord hadn’t been inside since the lease started.”
I stood in the doorway and stared at the boxes.
My name wasn’t on them, but they might as well have been addressed to me. Everything inside those containers belonged to the man who destroyed my life.
The fact that I was about to sift through his belongings while standing in a cabin full of my mates was a narrative twist even my scandalous romance novels wouldn’t have attempted.
“You cleared the whole place?” Lucian asked from the armchair. He’d been reading, or pretending to, with the focus of a man who’d been waiting since Solomon left at dawn.
“Every room. The landlord cooperated.” Solomon paused. “With encouragement.”
“Did you threaten the landlord?” I asked.
“I used a firm tone.”
“Solomon.”
“He was very understanding.”
Percy was already at the desk, pulling the tape off the first box. His jaw was set and his eyes moved over the contents. The dart wound on his shoulder had healed weeks ago, but the memory of it sat behind his expression.
“Right.” I rubbed my palms against my jeans and crossed to the desk beside him. “Let’s see what my dead psychotic ex-boyfriend was hoarding.”
The first box was personal effects. Clothes, toiletries, a burner phone with a cracked screen. Solomon had already checked the phone and found nothing useful. No contacts saved, no call history, no texts. Wiped clean or never used.
Percy turned the burner phone over in his hands, checked the battery compartment, then set it aside and reached for the next layer without comment.
The second box held surveillance materials. A folder with photographs around the town. I wasn’t in the photos, but they were places I’d been, shot from the tree line, timestamped over several weeks. Maps of the town with routes marked in pencil.
A schedule, handwritten, documenting our movements. Mine, specifically. My walks to the bookshop site. My grocery runs. The times I left the cabin alone.
Percy pulled one of the maps toward him and traced a pencil line with his finger. His mouth pressed into a thin line. “This route. It’s the path between the station and the inn. The one I took the night of the fire call.” He looked up at Solomon. “The time he got to her.”
The guilt in his voice was quiet but unmistakable.
My stomach turned, but I kept going. I’d seen worse from Hudson. The man had kept a journal of my daily activities for six months before I escaped him the first time. Stalking was his baseline, not his ceiling.
“Here.” Solomon pulled a folder from the third box and opened it on the desk. “This is what concerns me.”
The folder held papers I didn’t expect.
Technical documents, printed, not handwritten. Chemical compound formulas with notations in the margins. Diagrams of devices that meant nothing to me but made Lucian straighten in his chair. Cross-referenced timelines of patrol routes from the fire station.
Percy went still. His fingers hovered over a page of chemical notations, and I watched recognition register on his face.
The compound. The one that had been on the dart buried in his shoulder.
“These aren’t Hudson’s work,” Lucian said. His voice carried the measured calm that meant the opposite. “Hudson doesn’t seem educated enough. He couldn’t have produced this.”
“He didn’t.” Solomon’s jaw was tight. “These were given to him. Instructions. Someone was feeding him information, including our patrol schedules, the layout of the cabin grounds, and the chemical composition of the dart compound.”
“This formula.” Percy tapped the page, his voice flat. “Whoever wrote this designed what hit me.”
The dart compound is designed to suppress lycan healing. My chest constricted as the implication landed.
“Someone gave Hudson the tools to hurt you,” I said.
“And the intelligence to find us,” Solomon finished.
I turned back to the box. Pushed past the technical documents, the surveillance photos, the maps.
At the bottom of the third box, I found a journal.
Cheap, spiral-bound, the cover bent and coffee-stained. I flipped it open and Hudson’s life spilled across the pages in his usual disaster of a scrawl.
Slanted letters crammed together, smudged where his hand dragged through wet pen strokes, words misspelled and scratched out and rewritten worse.
I recognized it instantly. The passive-aggressive fridge notes and bedroom door rules had burned his handwriting into my brain permanently.
More surveillance logs. Dates, times, locations. But less organized and detailed. More personal with annotated threats. It was my schedule mapped out in his impatient, messy hand. Each entry pressed so hard the pen had grooved the paper beneath.
I turned another page and stopped.
My fingers hovered over the handwriting and my pulse kicked.
“The photo,” I said.
Three heads turned.
“The one you found in your locker at the station. The one with the red ink on the back.” I looked at Lucian. “Do you still have it?”
“My study drawer.”
“I need to see it.”
He was gone before I finished the sentence. One second standing by the armchair, the next a blur of motion toward the stairs that confirmed supernatural speed would never stop being unsettling. Percy’s eyebrows shot up. Solomon didn’t flinch.
Lucian reappeared with the photograph in his hand. The whole trip had taken maybe four seconds.
I took it from him and flipped it over.
Two words in red ink, steady and precise.
“I’m watching.”
I set it on the table beside the open journal and the other more clinical documents of formula. The red ink message in the middle. Percy leaned in over my shoulder. Solomon stepped closer on my other side.
The handwriting was identical.
But not with Hudson’s journal.
The mysterious documents.
Same letter formation. Same deliberate strokes. Same disciplined hand that had nothing in common with Hudson’s frantic scrawl.
“This isn’t Hudson’s.” My voice came out quiet. “The message on the photo. He didn’t write it.”
Nobody spoke. The realization settled through the room in stages, rearranging everything we’d assumed until now.
Percy straightened behind me. Solomon’s jaw went tight. Lucian stared at the two documents on the desk, and I watched the recalculation happen behind his eyes.
“The photo was left in our locker,” he said. “Ours.”
I looked at him. The gravity in his expression made my stomach drop, because I could see where he was going before he got there.
“So it’s not a threat to me.”
The quiet stretched. Percy’s hand found the low of my back. Solomon’s arms crossed over his chest. Lucian’s gaze moved from the photograph to me and held.
I was the leverage.
The photo wasn’t a warning that someone was watching me.
It was a message to the three of them. A picture of the one thing they’d burn the world to protect, delivered to the one place only they would find it.
Whoever wrote those words knew about the bond.
Knew about the relationship and exactly what I meant to them. Had framed it in red ink and slid it into their locker.
The most effective threat wasn’t violence.
It was the promise of loss.
“It’s a threat to us,” Lucian said.