Chapter 28 Mira
— · —
Mira
The memories came crashing in a flood.
It wasn’t just fragments anymore. This time, the dam broke and everything poured through at once, playing behind my eyelids in a rush of sound and color and feeling.
The beginning was the lantern festival, just as I already remembered. But now it continued past the dancing.
Percy had his jacket over my shoulders before I’d even shivered. Solomon walked at my left, close enough that his arm brushed mine. Lucian trailed three paces behind, the distance of a man who didn’t trust himself closer.
We reached my door. Three men on my steps, looking at me with expressions that should’ve sent me running.
“Goodnight,” I managed. “Thank you for the dancing.”
I closed the door, locked it, and slid down the wood until I hit the floor. I’d wanted all of them, and Hudson’s voice filled the silence. Pathetic. Desperate. The wanting didn’t stop. It just learned to carry shame alongside it.
Day after day, they came back.
Percy at 9:07. Reading my romance novels aloud with a rating system he’d invented. “Three flames out of five. Not as spicy as promised.”
Solomon at 2:30. No announcement. Just appeared with a screwdriver and fixed the register drawer that had been sticking for months. “I didn’t ask you to do that.” “It was broken.” “So is half the building.” “I know. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
Lucian invited me to their cabin. The craziest thing was that I felt safe enough to agree. We argued about books the entire walk, and when we arrived, he stood in the doorway and said, “Come inside, Mira.”
As days passed, I started waiting for their visits. Considered them more than acquaintances. But the desire growing in my chest continued to eat me up.
I’d needed air that evening. The forest trail behind the shop had always been where I went to think. My father used to take me hiking when I was small, so I found myself exploring the woods to get my mind off things.
Thunder rolled in the distance. The sky had darkened faster than I’d expected, and the wind carried the smell of rain. I should head back.
Then I heard it. Whimpering, about a quarter mile off the path.
A massive wolf caught in a rusted trap. Silver-lined teeth biting into its front leg. Fur matted with blood, muscles trembling. Its eyes found mine. Storm gray with flecks of gold.
I dropped to my knees and worked the mechanism. The metal sliced my palms. Blood and rust. My hands shook, but I didn’t stop.
“I’ve got you. Just hold still.”
The trap sprang open. Lightning flooded the clearing, and I watched fur recede into skin. Bones cracked and reformed. Paws became fingers.
Where the wolf had been, a man knelt. Naked, bleeding.
“Lucian?”
“...Mira.”
He collapsed.
I dragged him back to my apartment. Solid muscle, dead weight, the trail dark and my hands bleeding. I cleaned his wounds and watched them heal on their own within the hour. Found the biggest shirt I had. Sat on the floor beside the couch and waited.
He woke after midnight. His gaze dropped to the bandages, then to my hands holding his, then to my face.
“You stayed.”
Lightning flashed outside. “Where else would I go?”
A knock and yelling followed. Percy’s voice cut through the rain. “Mira! We can sense him. We know he’s hurt. Please.”
I opened the door. Percy and Solomon, drenched, wild-eyed. Percy saw Lucian and the relief on his face was raw. Solomon crouched beside the couch, fingers finding Lucian’s pulse.
“An old poacher’s trap,” I said. “He shifted in front of me.”
Percy stared at me. “You saw. And you dragged him home.”
“Was I supposed to leave him in the mud?”
They told me everything. Lycans. Veyndral. Fated mates. All three of them. The words came between thunder cracks, Percy filling silence with warmth, Solomon with facts, Lucian adding fragments from the couch in a voice rough with pain.
I ended up in the corner of my kitchen. Knees to chest, back against the cabinet. Percy found me there. Didn’t ask why. Just sat on the floor beside me.
“Your heartbeat was a hundred and forty when I sat down,” he said. “It’s at a hundred and twelve now.”
“You can hear my heartbeat?”
“It’s my favorite sound in this room.”
He leaned toward me, slow, giving me every chance to pull away. I didn’t. His kiss was warm. Gentle. The kind that cracked you open on a kitchen floor during a storm.
Hours later, the candles were burning low.
Solomon sat on the couch, still and steady, and I’d ended up beside him with my head against his shoulder.
I poked his cheek. His hand caught mine, lifted my knuckles to his mouth, and pressed his lips against them.
Soft, deliberate. A gesture from another century.
Near dawn, I found Lucian in the kitchen. Upright, healing, drinking water from my chipped mug.
“You should be dead,” I said.
“I’m difficult to kill.”
My hand found his chest. Palm flat over the bandage, his heartbeat hammering through the cotton. “Your pulse is elevated.”
“Is it?”
“Lucian.”
“Mira.”
Storm gray eyes with gold bleeding through. My tongue darted out to wet my lower lip and his gaze tracked the movement, jaw tightening.
“This is a terrible idea,” I whispered.
By morning, the storm had passed. I stood at my door and looked at all three of them.
“I need a day. Just one. To sit with this.”
“Take what you need,” Solomon said.
They left. I sat at my desk and opened my journal. The pages filled fast, messy, my hand barely keeping up with my brain. Entries about the bond, about shifting, about eyes that glowed gold and silver.
The last entry was steadier. I’d slowed down, taken my time.
“I’m not sure about the supernatural parts. But I’m sure about the ordinary parts. The floor. The knuckles. The counter. I believe them now after seeing it with my own eyes and I-”
The pen dragged across the page. A long streak of ink trailing off the edge, because the tea had hit and my hand had stopped working before the sentence could finish. The chamomile had tasted bitter beneath the honey.
My legs gave out on the stockroom floor. Smoke curled beneath the door.
The last thought before the darkness: I was going to say yes.
Then nothing.
Seven days, erased.
Until now.
“Mira.”
Percival’s voice.
“Love, wake up. You’re thrashing.”
My eyes flew open. Morning light in the cabin bedroom. Three bodies surrounded mine, the sheets tangled around my legs from whatever my sleeping body had been doing.
Percy’s face hovered above me, brow creased, his hand on my cheek. Solomon was propped on one elbow, silver eyes alert, already scanning me for injury. Lucian’s arm tightened around my waist from behind, his chest pressed against my back.
“You were shifting in your sleep,” Lucian said. “Your heart rate spiked.”
My pulse was still hammering. Tears tracked down my temples and into my hair, and I couldn’t tell if they were grief or relief or both.
“I remember everything,” I said. “The whole week. All of it.”
Percy’s thumb wiped a tear from my cheekbone. “The bond unlocked them?”
“Yes… Everything.” My voice cracked. “The journal. I wrote that I was choosing to hope, and then someone drugged my tea and burned my shop and stole it all.”
Solomon’s hand found mine.
“It’s back now,” he said. “No one can take it again.”
I pressed my face into the pillow and let the completeness wash through me.
Percy’s thumb traced my cheekbone again. “You alright, love?”
“Yeah.” I exhaled. Long, deliberate. “Yeah, I’m alright.”
“Pancakes?” he offered. It was Percy’s solution to every emotional crisis.
I laughed. Wet and shaky, but real. “Pancakes.”
An hour later, I stood at the kitchen counter drinking coffee, watching Percy attempt to flip a pancake that was roughly the size of a dinner plate. Him and his stupid obsession with pancakes never failed to amuse me.
Solomon sat at the table with a newspaper he wasn’t reading, his eyes obviously tracking my movements instead. Lucian leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed, watching the pancake situation with the particular brand of skepticism he reserved for Percy’s cooking.
The claiming mark on my throat throbbed in calmness.
I guess this is really my life now.
Supernatural mates, a bookshop under renovation, an investigation into a magical threat, and pancakes the size of hubcaps.
And I was absurdly, terrifyingly happy.
But of course, what’s my life without the drama?
The knock came at 11:14 AM. Measured knocks echoed at the front door.
My mates reacted before I did. Lucian straightened from the doorframe, every line of his body shifting from relaxed to alert. Solomon set down his newspaper and stood. Percy abandoned the pancake without a second glance, which was how I knew it was serious.
“Stay here,” Lucian said.
“I live here too.”
“Mira.”
“Lucian.”
He gave me the look. I gave him one back. The standoff lasted two seconds before he turned and walked to the front door with Solomon flanking his right side and Percival falling in behind.
I followed anyway. Obviously.
Lucian opened the door.
The man on the porch was in his sixties. Gray threaded through dark hair at his temples, lines carved into a face that might have been handsome thirty years ago. He wore a tailored coat over a button-down shirt. His posture was straight, his hands clasped in front of him.
His eyes were blue. The same shade of ocean blue as my left eye, the one I’d hidden behind a brown contact for years.
My heart stopped.
“I’m looking for my daughter,” he said. His voice was calm, measured, with a tremor beneath it that could have been genuine emotion or expertly performed vulnerability.
Lucian didn’t move. He filled the doorway, one arm braced against the frame, his body a wall between the stranger and the interior of the cabin.
“Who are you?”
“Thiago Maxwell.”
The man’s eyes moved past Lucian’s shoulder, scanning the hallway behind him.
“I’m Mira’s father. Is she here?”