Chapter 34 Mira
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Mira
I didn’t sleep that first night.
The bedroom Thiago gave me was nicer than my room at the cabin. Queen bed with a cream duvet, a nightstand with a single lamp, and a window overlooking the grounds that opened exactly four inches before a latch stopped it. Enough for ventilation. Not enough for escape.
I counted the ceiling tiles. I thought the floor above was Thiago’s office, if the layout I’d memorized during the walk to my room was accurate.
Lycans killed your mother.
The words played on loop. A grinding repetition of a fact that wouldn’t stop rearranging everything I thought I’d already accepted.
My mother was dead. She’d been dead my entire life. That part wasn’t new. I’d grown up with the shape of her absence pressed into every room, every holiday, every school form that asked for a mother’s name and got a blank line instead.
Thiago had never hidden the cause. Monsters, he’d told me when I was old enough to ask. Monsters took her before you could remember.
I’d spent twenty-four years filing that under tragedy. The randomness of the world, the cruelty of chance, the fact that people you loved could be ripped away without reason. I never questioned it because there was never a version of my life where questioning it would have changed the answer.
But Thiago hadn’t been speaking in metaphors. He’d been speaking literally. And the monsters who took my mother were the same species as the three men who’d claimed me, bonded me, and then decided I was expendable.
The muted bond pulsed in the dark. Heartbeats that should have made me feel connected and instead made me feel sick.
The screaming started in the morning at two.
Distant. Muffled through layers of concrete and insulation, buried deep enough beneath the building that I might have missed it if I’d been asleep.
But I wasn’t asleep, and the sound was unmistakable.
It wasn’t pipes, ventilation, or the settling of an old building.
A voice. Anguished, rising and falling for eleven minutes before it stopped.
I lay in the dark and added another entry to the growing list of things this compound was hiding beneath its polished surface.
By the second morning, I’d figured out the rhythm of the place.
It was the old foster kid survival playbook: look lost, harmless, and pay attention to everything.
The south garden had a stone bench near the perimeter wall. I sat there on day two with a cup of coffee I didn’t want, watching shift change happen at six on the dot.
A woman crossed the courtyard, early thirties in tactical gear. She clocked me on the bench and slowed. Not quite stopping. Just enough to look.
“You’re Thiago’s daughter,” she said.
“Unfortunately.”
Her eyes dropped to my throat and the claiming marks. She didn’t bother hiding it. “And you were bonded. To… lycans.”
“Is there a question in there, or are we just stating facts?”
She held my gaze for a beat, then walked on without answering. The judgment hung in the courtyard after she left.
Near the locked building by the tree line, a man saw me coming up the path and stepped aside. Three full feet, his back pressing against the wall.
“Just walking,” I said.
He didn’t answer or look at me again, either.
At the vehicle garage, a younger guy was less subtle. He stared at the marks on my throat while pretending to check a tire pressure gauge he was holding upside down.
“Take a picture,” I said. “It’ll last longer.”
He dropped the gauge.
I memorized them the same way I catalogued everything else. Four buildings, two guard stations. Shift changes at six and six, skeleton crew between midnight and four. The basement door at the end of the east corridor, triple-reinforced steel with a keypad, never unguarded.
Nobody offered conversation.
Thiago’s daughter was an object of curiosity, but Thiago’s daughter who’d been mated by the enemy was an object of suspicion.
I could work with that. Suspicion meant they’d watch me, but it also meant they wouldn’t get close. And distance was exactly what I needed to move through this place without someone breathing down my neck.
On the third morning, Thiago summoned me to the study.
The map on the wall had new pins since my last visit. Silver ones clustered near the mountain range, and two red ones pushed into a region northwest of the compound. I didn’t ask about them.
“Sit down,” Thiago said.
I sat in the leather chair across from his desk and waited.
“You’ve been quiet,” he said. “Processing, I assume.”
“You told me that supernatural creatures killed my mother. I’m allowed a processing period.”
The faintest trace of amusement crossed his face. It vanished as quickly as it appeared. “Your sarcasm is your mother’s. She had the same defense mechanism.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Tell me I’m her. You lost that privilege when you disappeared.”
Thiago accepted the rebuke with a nod that was too graceful to be genuine. He opened a drawer and pulled out a weathered leather-bound book, its cover embossed with a crescent moon bisected by a blade.
“Your mother was a Maxwell,” Thiago said. “I married into the name. But you were born into it.”
He set the book on the desk between us.
“This family didn’t stumble into the Order, Mira. We built it.”
The book was a genealogy. Records of Maxwell names in varying scripts, each generation annotated with roles. I didn’t need to read every entry to understand the pattern. The women’s names carried the weight. Founders, commanders, researchers. Generation after generation.
My mother’s name sat in the last entry. Sienna Maxwell, chief researcher. With a death date penned beside it in red. Beside her name, a smaller notation: spouse, with no family lineage of his own listed. Just a man who’d attached himself to a bloodline and held on.
“The legacy passes through the eldest daughter,” Thiago said.
“Your grandmother led before me. Your mother was meant to lead after.” His hands rested flat on the desk.
“When Sienna was killed, I took over. I was never the intended heir. I’ve been holding this position since you were an infant, Mira. Waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“For you.” His blue eyes held mine with bedrock conviction. “You are the last Maxwell daughter. The heir to an organization that has protected humanity.”
I wanted to laugh.
A twenty-four-year-old former bookshop owner with an abusive ex and three supernatural claiming marks on her throat being told she was destined to lead a centuries-old hunter organization.
If my life were a novel, this would be the chapter where the reader threw the book across the room.
But the genealogy was real, and my mother’s name was in it, and the claiming marks on my throat throbbed with muted bonds that belonged to men who’d rejected me because of the blood running through my veins.
“I want to know what happened to her,” I said. “Specifically.”
Thiago stood. “Follow me.”
***
The archive room was behind the study, through a door I hadn’t noticed during my first visit. Climate-controlled, rows of filing cabinets and shelved boxes marked with dates. Thiago navigated with the familiarity of a man who’d spent years organizing this collection.
He didn’t start with history. He started with her.
“Your mother was the Order’s chief researcher,” he said, pulling a file with the care of a man handling a sacred text. “Brilliant. Dedicated. She believed in what we do.” He set the file on the table. “She was working in our east wing facility when they breached the perimeter.”
Inside: an incident report. Photographs of a lab, overturned equipment, claw marks gouged into the walls. And a journal. Handwritten entries in the neat penmanship of a researcher accustomed to lab notes.
‘They’re closer. I can hear them at night. T says the security will hold, but I’ve seen what these creatures can do. If they breach the facility, none of us will survive.’
My mother’s handwriting. Or what Thiago presented as my mother’s handwriting. I had no reference point to verify.
“A lycan who’d escaped our custody broke out the facility.” Thiago’s voice had lost its strategic smoothness and arrived at a register that sounded, for the first time, genuinely human. “A prisoner we’d been studying. Feral. Vengeful.”
The word escaped snagged in my brain, but Thiago kept talking.
“We found her in the east corridor. She’d tried to run.” He closed his eyes for a half-second. When they opened, the grief looked almost real. “You were barely a year old. She’d left you with a caretaker that morning. If she’d brought you to the facility that day...”
He let the sentence hang. The implication was clear. My mother died in a building where they studied lycans, killed by a lycan who’d broken free, and the only reason I survived was the accident of a schedule.
I closed the file.
“This escaped prisoner,” I said. “What was his name?”
Thiago’s expression shifted. Barely perceptible, the slight tightening around the eyes.
“The records identify him as a male lycan of significant rank. We never recovered a name from our files, but the evidence suggested he held a position of considerable authority in their hierarchy.” His voice dropped.
“He destroyed our facility’s east wing during the breach and killed four of our people, including your mother.
Then he vanished. We’ve been looking for him for twenty-four years. ”
The description was specific enough to paint a picture but vague enough to leave room. Thiago wasn’t giving me a name because giving me a name would let me verify. And verification was the last thing he wanted.
I filed it. The way I filed everything in this compound. Quietly. For later.
“I need a minute,” I said.
“Take all the time you need.” He stepped back. Just enough to give me the illusion of space while maintaining proximity.
I stood at that table and thought about Lucian. His formal cadence and his trembling hands and the way he’d looked at me before he said the words that ended us. Solomon, who’d gone first, who’d met my eyes. Percival, who’d turned his head because he couldn’t look at me and say it at the same time.
They were lycans. Their species had killed people. Had killed my mother, if Thiago was telling the truth.
And they’d hurt me.
Maybe not with claws but with words. With the decision to collapse our bond because a council of strangers deemed my blood too dangerous.
The doubt didn’t crash over me. It crept in. Finding the cracks the rejection had left and widening them with questions I didn’t have answers to.
Were they different? Maybe. Did it matter? I wasn’t sure anymore.
“Ms. Maxwell?”
The voice came from the doorway. Not Thiago’s. I turned.
A man stood at the threshold, mid-twenties, tall enough that the doorframe framed him with authority he didn’t seem to notice. Sandy brown hair fell across his forehead in a way that suggested he’d stopped trying to control it years ago.
He wore tactical pants and a fitted shirt, the same quasi-military aesthetic as the compound guards, but his posture was different. Still, grounded, with the quiet awareness of someone who’d catalogued the room before he’d finished his sentence.
“Sorry to interrupt.” His eyes moved from me to Thiago and back. “You said to come by at ten.”
“Mira, this is Wyatt,” Thiago said, circling back into the room. “One of our best field operatives.”
Wyatt extended his hand. “Nice to meet you.” Firm grip, brief, professional. But the warmth behind it wasn’t strategic. Just genuine.
“Mira.”
“I know who you are.” A half-smile. “Maxwell descendant. I’ll try not to make it weird.”
Thiago watched the exchange with an expression I couldn’t fully read. His gaze moved between us, the way a man looked at pieces on a board when the game was starting to take shape.
“Wyatt has been with the Order since he was seventeen,” Thiago said. “Recruited, trained, tested. Everything this organization demands of its people, he’s given.”
He turned to me. “But he chose this life. You were born into it.”
The distinction landed with intent. I had the right blood, the right surname, the right dead mother. Thiago’s hand settled on my shoulder.
“You’re a legacy, Mira.”
A pause.
“It’s time you learned what you were born to do.”