Chapter 30 Mira
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Mira
Three days.
For three days, my father has been taking me to lunch in town, showing me photographs of a mother I barely remembered. Three days of filling a hole that had been open since I was six years old.
Three days of my mates being too busy to join us.
Lucian had council and captain matters. Solomon was running surveillance. Percival picked up extra shifts at the station. The excuses arrived separately, delivered through the bond in pulses of reassurance that felt increasingly rehearsed.
‘We’re fine. Just busy. We’ll be home tonight.’
They were always home by the time I got back. But the quality of their presence had changed.
Lucian held me at night with arms that felt deliberate instead of instinctive. Solomon’s silences, usually comfortable, had developed an edge I couldn’t name. Percy smiled, but the dimples didn’t crease as deep.
I told myself I was imagining it. Told myself the bond was still new and I was still learning to read its signals. Told myself that three ancient men had complicated lives that didn’t always revolve around me.
I was getting very good at telling myself things.
Thiago’s rental car pulled into the cabin’s gravel drive. He’d driven me back from town, where we’d spent the afternoon walking the main street while he asked about my childhood.
“I’ll see you at dinner,” he said through the open window. “Seven o’clock? I found a place on the east side of town.”
“Seven works.”
He smiled warmly. “I’m glad we’re doing this, Mira.”
I watched his car disappear down the road before turning to the cabin.
It was quiet.
My key turned in the lock and the door swung open to silence.
For a moment, I thought no one was home.
Then the bond pulsed.
Faint, muffled, three heartbeats that had been a constant drumline in my chest since the triple claiming now reduced to distant echoes. I reached for them through the connection.
I hit resistance.
The bond was there. They were there. But a barrier sat between us that hadn’t existed a week ago, dampening the signal, reducing three vivid presences to shadows of themselves.
I didn’t know if that was possible. I wasn’t lycan. The mechanics of the bond were still territory I navigated by feeling rather than understanding, and I had no framework for what an ordinary connection is.
Maybe bonds faded sometimes. Distance could affect them. Or maybe it was just the self-destructive thoughts I was used to.
But the part of me who’d learned to read a room before she could read a book knew exactly what a dwindling connection meant.
They were pulling away.
Their scents led me to Lucian’s office. The door was closed. I pushed it open without knocking.
They had their backs to me, facing the window. The raven was there. The same black bird that had been appearing on windowsills and porch railings these days. It perched on the frame of the open window before launching itself into the fading afternoon light.
“That raven’s been coming by a lot lately,” I said from the doorway, forcing the lightness into my voice. “Should I be concerned we have a stalker? Is that a thing in Veyndral? Raven harassment?”
No one spoke or turned around.
Lucian’s shoulders were a rigid line beneath his shirt. Solomon stood to his left, arms crossed, his entire body a closed fist. Percival sat in the chair by the bookshelf, elbows on his knees, head bowed, staring at the floor between his feet.
The joke died in my throat.
I was done telling myself I was imagining things. My denial built on the desperate hope that the people who’d claimed me weren’t capable of what I was suddenly, horribly certain they were about to do.
“Do we have a problem?” I asked.
Lucian turned first. His face was a mask I’d never seen before, controlled and completely absent of the man who’d held me before. His gray eyes, always shot through with gold when he looked at me, were dull.
They were the eyes of a king.
Percival still hadn’t looked up. His hands were clasped between his knees, knuckles white, and the stillness of him was wrong.
“Lucian.” My voice came out smaller than I wanted. “What’s happening?”
He crossed the room and took my hands. His were trembling.
“We can’t do this anymore, Mira.”
No preamble, no cushion. Just the blade, presented handle-first, as if he expected me to admire the craftsmanship before it gutted me.
“Can’t do what?” I held his hands tighter. “What are you talking about?”
“This. The bond. Us.” His jaw worked once. “It was a mistake.”
The word cracked through the room.
“A mistake,” I repeated. “You’re breaking up with me?”
“We’re correcting an error that should have never happened.”
I yanked my hands back. “An error. That’s what I am?”
“Your father is a hunter, Mira.”
The sentence came from Solomon.
“What?” I turned to face him. “What are you talking about?”
“The symbol on his wrist. It’s the mark of the Order of the Silver Dawn, the organization that burned our kind. Your father belongs to them.” Solomon’s pale eyes held mine with a cruelty that felt personal. “He didn’t come here for you. He came here for us. And you led him right to our door.”
“That’s insane.” My voice pitched higher. “He’s my father! He came because he wanted to find me.”
“He used you.” No hesitation, no room for argument. “Everything from the start, him showing up, the timing, all of it was a strategy. And you were the access point.”
“You’re wrong. You don’t even know him.”
“I know his bloodline.” Solomon stepped forward. “I know what that mark represents and what the people who wear it have done to mine. That blood runs in your veins, Mira. His blood. And now it sits inside our bond.”
My stomach dropped.
“You’re disgusted by me.” The words came out hollow. “That’s what this is.”
He didn’t deny it.
“Percival.” My voice pitched toward the chair, desperate. Searching for the one person in this room who always had a grin that promised everything would be fine. “Percy, come on. Tell me this isn’t real. Tell me you don’t believe this.”
He didn’t look up. His jaw worked once, fingers laced tighter between his knees.
He said nothing.
“Percy, please.” I hated the way my voice cracked.
His shoulders flinched. A micro-movement, there and gone. But his head stayed down, his eyes fixed on the floor between his feet, as if I was a problem he could solve by not looking at it.
“He agrees with the decision.” Solomon’s voice again. “We all do.”
I turned to face him. He was the angriest of the three. I could feel it even through the muted bond, fury vibrating beneath his stillness.
“This isn’t a discussion, Mira.” Solomon adds. “The decision is made.”
“Your decision.” The words tasted bitter. “About my bond. My body. My life.”
“We don’t owe you this. Our connection is done. We took you because you had nowhere to go,” Lucian said. His voice was measured. “Now the arrangement has run its course.”
“You pitied me.” The realization crawled up my throat. “This whole time... that was pity?”
Nobody corrected me.
“Even if it’s true,” I said, grasping. Bargaining. “Even if my father is what you say he is, that’s him. Not me. I didn’t know. I would never hurt you.”
Lucian’s expression didn’t change. “It doesn’t matter.”
“How can it not matter?”
“Because the risk is the same regardless of your intentions. We can’t afford the vulnerability. The bond has to end.”
“So I’m guilty by blood.” My voice is shaking now. “I’m being punished for a man I just reconnected with.”
Nobody answered. The silence was the verdict.
“I’m sorry.” The words ripped out of me and I hated myself for saying them. But the part of me that had spent years apologizing for being too much, took over. “If I did this to you, I’m sorry. Just tell me how to fix it.”
“You can’t fix what you are.” Solomon, again. Quiet enough to kill.
I flinched. The kind that came from years of hearing a version of that sentence.
You can’t fix what’s wrong with you, Mira. You’ll always be too much and not enough.
“Sol.” Percy’s voice. Barely a whisper from the chair, a warning or a plea.
“The bond rejection will hurt less if you’re not fighting it.”
The room went very still.
Solomon stepped forward. He met my eyes with a direct, unflinching gaze.
Every wall he’d ever lowered for me had been rebuilt.
Every crack I’d found in his armor had been sealed.
His jaw was set the way it set when he was completing an assignment, and I realized with a nauseating clarity that’s exactly what this was to him.
A task to be handled efficiently.
“I reject you, Mira Maxwell.”
The first heartbeat in my chest stuttered. Solomon’s fierce rhythm, the one that had lived beside my own, went quiet. I gasped. My knees buckled.
“Stop.” The word came out strangled. I reached for Solomon’s wrist, grabbed it, gripped it. “Take it back. Solomon, please.”
He pulled his wrist free. A single, deliberate motion that removed my hand from his body and left it hanging in empty space.
Then he walked to the window and stood with his back to the room.
Percival spoke next. He hadn’t moved from the chair. His head was turned away, his face angled toward the bookshelf, and I realized he couldn’t look at me.
“I reject you, Mira Maxwell.”
His voice broke on my name. A splintering sound that didn’t match the words carrying it, and for one horrible second I thought he might take it back. His fingers were gripping his knees so hard the tendons stood out, and a tremor ran through his shoulders.
But he didn’t take it back.
The second heartbeat went silent. Percy’s warm pulse muffled itself behind the same wall. Two presences, gone.
“Percy.” I stumbled toward the chair and grabbed his forearm. “Don’t do this. Not you. You said you’d stay. You promised me.”
He stood. My hand was still on his arm, and he looked down at it. At my fingers wrapped around his sleeve. His jaw clenched once, twice. Then he peeled my hand off, gently, carefully, as if handling a bird with a broken wing.
He set my hand back at my side and stepped past me without a word.
My legs gave out.
Lucian caught me again and held me up. His hands moved from my arms to my shoulders, supporting my weight, and his face was inches from mine.
“Please.” I grabbed the front of his shirt. Fisted the fabric the way I used to when I pulled him in to kiss me. “Lucian, don’t. Don’t break it. Please don’t break it.”
He stared at me with those stormy eyes. I waited for the mask to slip.
But it didn’t.
“I reject you, Mira Maxwell.”
His hands released my shoulders and I crumbled. The floor met my knees, then my palms, and the third heartbeat slammed shut behind a wall so absolute that the silence in my chest was deafening.
Three bonds. Gone in under two minutes.
I stayed on the floor, palms flat against the hardwood, forehead pressed to the cold grain, and I couldn’t make a sound.
The pain wasn’t a scream or a sob. It was an absence.
A void where three heartbeats used to live, and the void swallowed everything, my voice, my breath, my ability to process the fact that I was on my knees in a house that no longer belonged to me.
Lucian’s footsteps. Solomon’s. A pause near the door where Percy’s breath caught once before his boots joined the others on the hardwood.
The front door opened. Closed.
I stayed on the floor.
Time passed.
The afternoon gold deepened to amber to the gray of early evening, shadows stretching across the floorboards until the room was more dark than light.
The phone rang in an empty house with no one left to answer.
They said my father orchestrated everything.
And the men I’d given everything to, the ones who’d promised me the world, who’d held me through pain and desires, forever marking my skin, had just discarded me. The way everyone in my life eventually does.
The knock came at seven.
Thiago stood in the doorway with concerned expression and worried eyes.
“Mira?” He stepped inside, scanning the room. I don’t know how he entered.
He found the empty coat hooks where three jackets used to hang. The cleared surfaces and the absence that lived in every corner. “What happened? Where did they go?”
I looked at him.
“They left me.” My voice was hollow. “They’re gone.”
Thiago’s arms wrapped around me. The hug of a parent comforting a child. Warm, encompassing, the kind of embrace I’d spent years imagining.
“Then come home with me,” he said into my hair. “Let me take care of you.”
I closed my eyes and couldn’t find it in myself to move away. I don’t know what to believe but I didn’t have anyone anymore. Again. Like always.
I was wrong to even hope again.