Chapter 45 Mira
— · —
Mira
The woman in the mirror looked terrible.
I studied my reflection in the small bathroom attached to my room.
These days, I was getting worse even if I tried my best to cover it with concealers.
Hollow cheeks, dark circles carved into the skin beneath my eyes, lips bitten raw.
My hair hung past my shoulders in unwashed tangles, and the tactical gear from this morning still had blood on it.
Their blood. Dried brown now, flaking at the edges where the fabric creased.
My hands hadn’t stopped shaking since the clearing.
The performance started three days ago.
I sat on the edge of my bed and dragged my nails across the bond mark on my collarbone. Slow at first. Then harder, until the skin split and blood welled up beneath my fingertips, and the scream that tore out of my throat wasn’t entirely fake because it did hurt.
It hurt in a way that went deeper than skin, deeper than the mark itself, all the way down to the connection that pulsed underneath it.
The guards came first. Then the medical team with their sedatives.
Then Thiago.
He found me curled on the floor with blood under my nails and tears streaking through the mess on my face. I looked up at him with the expression I’d been rehearsing for hours: broken, desperate, stripped of every defense.
The daughter he wanted me to be.
“They’re close,” I whispered. Let my voice crack on the word. “I can feel them. Through the bond. They’re close and they’re going to take me back.”
Thiago knelt beside me. His arms wrapped around my shoulders, and I buried my face against his chest, suppressing the urge to recoil.
“They won’t touch you,” he said.
“You don’t understand.” I pulled back. Let him see the tears, the blood, the wild panic in my mismatched eyes. “The bond. It pulls. It’s in my head, telling me to go to them, and I don’t want to. I don’t want them.”
My voice went hollow, the way I’d practiced. “They left me. They rejected me. I hate them.”
The words tasted rotten. But Thiago’s expression softened, and his hand cupped the back of my head with a tenderness that made my stomach lurch.
“I know, sweetheart.”
“I want them gone.” I held his gaze unblinking. “I want to kill them myself.”
A pause. The calculation behind his eyes was almost visible, gears turning as he assessed whether his broken daughter was genuine or performing.
I gave him nothing to doubt. Every line of my body screamed surrender.
“I’m scared they’ll take me,” I added, quieter. Smaller. “Before I’m ready.”
His jaw set. The protective father, activated on cue. “I’ll handle it. You won’t have to face them alone.”
“I don’t want to face them with guards.” I shook my head. “I want to do it myself. I hate them and I am a legacy. I want to live up to my blood.” A pause. “Please, Dad.”
The word tasted rotten too. But it landed.
“I’ll arrange it,” Thiago said.
I opened my eyes in the bathroom mirror. The performance was over, and the cost was still hitting me in waves that came faster every time I blinked.
Lucian’s voice against my ear. I have ached for you every single day.
I turned the faucet on and scrubbed their blood off my hands. My fingers still trembled.
I wasn’t doing this for them.
That was the part I needed to be clear about, even to myself. I wasn’t some loyal spy reporting back to three men who’d shattered me.
I was inside this compound because I did remember what they told me about Veyndral’s history while my father insisted on the Order’s mission, about what happened to my mother.
And every version of every story had seams. Contradictions that didn’t add up. Details that shifted between tellings. I wasn’t sure which side was more true.
Lycans killed my mother. That was the story. The foundational truth my father had built his entire relationship with me on. And I’d nodded along and decided that if I was going to be trapped inside a hunter compound carrying lycan children, I was damn well going to find out if any of it was true.
Not for Lucian, not for Solomon, not for Percival.
For Sienna.
For the mother I never knew, who died when I was an infant and left me with nothing except a horrible father.
And for myself. Because I was tired of being the person who didn’t get to know the truth.
The mirror stared back at me. I pressed my hand against my lower belly, then pulled it away. Not yet. Not here, where the walls had eyes.
During the fight, they froze.
All three of them, mid-combat, locked in place with identical expressions of shock that no amount of training should have caused. Solomon’s mask had shattered completely. Percival had gone white. Lucian’s legs had buckled before I even touched him.
They heard it. I didn’t know what lycan hearing could pick up at this stage, but I knew what had stopped them.
The babies. My babies.
And now they knew.
Which meant they would come back. I’d like to believe they care about my pregnancy despite their reasons. Rejection, muted bond, an entire hunter compound between us.
None of it would matter now.
I’d seen the look in Lucian’s eyes when he’d pulled me against him with a dagger in his chest. That wasn’t a man who would stay away. Solomon and Percival wouldn’t stay back too.
My timeline just got a lot shorter.
A knock on my door. I wiped my face, checked the mirror one last time, and arranged the mask back into place.
Thiago stood in the hallway. Still in the tactical gear from the clearing, his expression carrying the satisfied warmth of a father at a graduation ceremony. Behind him, a guard held a tray with food and water.
“May I come in?”
I stepped aside. He entered the way he always did, scanning the room before settling into the chair by the window. The guard placed the tray on the desk and left.
“You exceeded my expectations this morning.” Thiago crossed one leg over the other. Comfortable. “The precision, the commitment, even your approach was clinical. I was impressed.”
“I meant every second of it.”
“I know you did.” His smile widened. “We miscalculated one factor. The wolf that intervened. Someone we’ve been tracking for years, a ghost operating in our perimeter.” His jaw tightened briefly before the pleasant expression returned. “We’ll deal with him. He’s been a thorn for too long.”
I had no idea who it could be but judging from how he saved the three, maybe a lycan from Veyndral too. They even came with a woman fighter, from what I’d gathered earlier.
I said nothing. Took a sip of water.
“Your mates are severely weakened.” Thiago’s tone shifted to clinical.
“The silver compound will keep the king incapacitated for days. The other two absorbed enough sedatives to limit their capabilities. We finally got to try it on stronger lycans. It seems to uphold quality. And their morale...” He tilted his head.
“Well. Watching the woman bonded to them try killing them will do more damage than any weapon I’ve developed.
It’s one major error for such monsters.”
The casual cruelty of it sat between us.
“You should rest,” he said. “Take the day. Sleep if you can.”
Thiago reached into his jacket and produced a keycard. White, unmarked, with a magnetic strip along one edge.
“You’ve earned full clearance. Research archives, sublevels, everything except the armory. I want you to understand the scope of our work, Mira. No more locked doors.”
I took the keycard. Kept my hand steady despite the electricity that shot through my chest.
This. This was what the trial bought.
“Thank you.”
Thiago stood. Paused at the door. “I’m proud of you, sweetheart. Your mother would have been too.”
The door clicked shut behind him.
I counted to sixty. Then I locked the door, crossed to the bed, and sat on the edge.
The mask fell.
My hands found my stomach. Flat still, barely a whisper of change that only I could notice. I pressed my palms against the skin beneath my shirt and curled forward until my forehead nearly touched my knees.
“Hey,” I whispered. “It’s me. Your mom. I know I keep saying that and you probably can’t hear me yet, but I’m going to keep saying it because apparently I’ve become the kind of person who talks to her own belly.”
Silence. Obviously.
“I did a bad thing today. A really bad thing for a really good reason, but your dads are probably bleeding and confused and I’m going to need a few minutes before I can process that without falling apart.” I pressed harder against my stomach. “But we’re okay. You and me. We’re okay in here.”
The bond pulsed. Faint, barely a flutter through the wall that separated me from them. Not words or emotion. Just a single beat of acknowledgment, of presence, filtering through from the other side.
Lucian.
My eyes burned because I had to hurt him the most. He was their king. My father would appreciate having to weaken the king.
I swallowed it down, pressed my forehead to my knees, and breathed until the burning passed.
Then I stood up. Picked up the keycard. And went to work.
The sublevels were worse than the screaming had suggested.
Growling. Whimpering. A low, constant moan from the cell at the far end that hadn’t stopped since I’d stepped off the elevator.
I’d suspected since the first night.
The screaming through the floors, the triple-reinforced doors, the way Thiago’s eyes went flat when I asked about storage. Suspicion was one thing. Confirming it with my own eyes was a different kind of horror.
I swiped the keycard. The first door opened.
The lycan inside was conscious.
Male, mid-thirties in appearance, though with lycans that could mean centuries. He sat on a metal bench bolted to the wall. His eyes tracked me as I entered, and recognition moved across his face.
Not of me specifically. Of what I carried. His nostrils flared and his pupils dilated and the sound that came out of his throat was a low keen of grief.
He could smell the bond. The pregnancy. Both.
“I’m documenting everything,” I said quietly. “I’m going to get you out.”
He didn’t respond. Just watched me with eyes that held too much understanding for a man in chains.
I moved through the cells.
The device I’d smuggled from the medical wing, a small tablet Wyatt had helped me swipe during a training session, captured images of each cell, each restraint, each subject file pinned to the door.
The coherent ones watched me pass. The feral ones threw themselves at the doors, snarling. Their eyes were wrong, blank. Pupil-blown, animal, stripped of the intelligence that separated a lycan from a wolf.
These were the Purifier subjects. The successful ones, according to the files.
The “cured” ones were in the last row. I made it through two cells before I had to stop and press my back against the wall and breathe.
They were empty. Not feral, not aggressive, not anything. They sat or stood or lay on the floor with no expression and no recognition and no response to stimulus. The files called them “fully processed.”.
My hand moved to my stomach without thinking.
The corridor stretched ahead. At the far end, past the cells, a door marked RESEARCH ARCHIVES. My keycard worked on this one too.
The room beyond was part lab, part library. Shelves of files, equipment I didn’t recognize, and a workstation that held decades of documentation. I moved through the stacks, scanning labels, looking for the name I’d come here to find.
An alarm shrieked through the compound.
I froze. The sound was distant, coming from the upper levels, followed by the thunder of boots moving fast. Guards mobilizing toward the eastern perimeter. Through the reinforced walls, I caught the faint pop of gunfire and shouts that carried the particular urgency of a breach.
I didn’t know what was happening out there. Sometimes the alarm goes off that way. A patrol encounter or an animal incursion. But the timing was convenient enough that I didn’t question it. Instead, I moved faster through the stacks.
The skeleton crew left on the sublevels paid me no attention. My keycard gave me legitimacy. Just the boss’s daughter, doing research. Nothing to report.
At the back of the third shelf, behind rows of bound experiment logs, my fingers found a different binding. Leather, not plastic. Soft from years of handling.
Initials pressed into the leather in faded gold.
S.M. Sienna Maxwell.
I pulled it from the shelf. The leather was warm in my hands, and the weight of it was wrong for a research document. Too personal, too worn from years of being carried and opened.
A journal. With handwriting that looped and pressed hard into the paper, the penmanship of a woman who wrote fast because her thoughts outpaced her hand.
I opened the first page.
The date was twenty-five years ago. The ink had faded to brown, but the words were clear.
‘They brought another one in today. Young. Terrified. Silver burns on his wrists and the look in his eyes that I’m starting to recognize. The look that says he had a life before this. A family. A home.
I’m not supposed to care. Thiago says caring compromises the work.
But I’m starting to think the work is what’s compromised.’
My hands trembled. I closed the journal and pressed it against my chest.
And it was the first time since I’d walked into this compound that my mother was in the room with me.