Chapter 46 Solomon
— · —
Solomon
She wasn’t in her room.
My jaw tightened. The entire infiltration plan had been built around reaching her room on the second floor.
But she wasn’t there.
I closed my eyes and reached for the bond.
It was still muted. The wall between us hadn’t dissolved, but proximity had thinned it to gauze. Her presence pulsed behind it, faint, directional, a compass needle pointing south and down.
I abandoned the planned route and followed the pull.
The bond tugged me around a corner and there she was.
Walking toward me down the hallway, a leather journal pressed against her chest with both arms, head down, moving fast. She didn’t see me until she was three meters away, and when she looked up, her entire body locked.
Mismatched eyes. Wider than I’d ever seen them.
“Solomon...”
“It’s me.”
Footsteps echoed from the corridor behind her. Two sets, moving with purpose, rounding the far corner.
She didn’t scream or freeze. Her hand closed around my wrist and she yanked me sideways, through the nearest door she could reach. Her keycard swiped the lock and we were through before the footsteps cleared the turn.
Mira pressed the door shut and leaned against it, breathing hard. Her eyes were still on mine, wide with adrenaline, when the footsteps passed outside and faded down the corridor.
Then she looked at the room. The color drained from her face.
“Oh no.” She pressed her hand over her mouth. “This is his office. This is Thiago’s office.”
I scanned the space. Security feeds on a mounted screen, the images cycling between perimeter views. Filing cabinets with combination locks.
A framed photograph on the desk: Thiago and a woman with copper hair, smiling. Not her, but they do have a resemblance. So it can only be one person.
Mira’s mother.
“He’s not here,” I said.
“He’s leading whatever’s happening outside. He always does. Hands on.” She was still pressed against the door, the journal held against her chest, and her intense gaze moved over me, making my skin burn.
“You need to leave,” she said.
“No.”
“Solomon, if they find you...”
“They won’t.”
“You don’t know that. This place has cameras, patrols, and my father isn’t stupid. He’ll figure out the eastern breach was a distraction and redirect. You have minutes, not hours.”
“Then let me use them.” I took a step toward her. “The commotion outside is Percival running the diversion, he’ll make sure to buy me at least an hour. Lucian is injured but stable. We came to check on you, and the other two would be standing here with me if they could.”
Her jaw clenched. The journal tightened against her chest.
“I didn’t ask you to check on me.”
“I know.”
“I’m handling this. On my own. I have a plan, I have access, I have...” She trailed off. Her chin lifted with the familiar stubbornness. “I don’t need you to rescue me.”
“I’m not here to rescue you.” My voice came out quieter than I intended. “I’m here because I owe you more than I can say. And because you’re carrying our children and I needed to see with my own eyes that you’re alive.”
The word children hit the room. Her hand twitched toward her stomach before she caught herself.
“You heard,” she said.
“Three heartbeats. During the trial. We all heard them.”
Her entire body went still. The journal slipped an inch against her chest before she caught it.
“Three?” The word came out strangled. She stared at me then at her stomach. Then back at me. “You said three. As in... three separate heartbeats. As in not one baby. Three babies.”
“Yes.”
“Right. I just had to be three.” A laugh escaped her, wild and unhinged at the edges. “Of course it is. Because one baby in a hunter compound would be too simple. Too manageable. The universe looked at my situation and said, you know what this girl needs? Triplets.”
Her hand pressed against her stomach. “I’m going to kill all three of you. Your fathers. Not you. You three I’m keeping.”
The mask she’d been wearing since the clearing had cracked wide open, and underneath was the woman I’d crossed a portal to find. Terrified and furious.
Her eyes closed. When they opened, the humor had drained away.
“I found out alone. On a bathroom floor. While you were in another world.”
The words drove into my chest the same as the blade she’d buried in Lucian’s.
“I know,” I said.
“Do you?” She pushed off the door. The journal ended up on Thiago’s desk, abandoned, and she crossed her arms. “Because out of the three of you, Solomon, you were the one I expected it from the least.”
My lungs stopped working.
“Percival would follow Lucian into a fire. That’s who he is.
And Lucian is the king. He carries a crown that weighs more than any of us can measure.
I expected their reasons even when I hated them for it.
” Her voice trembled but didn’t break. “But you? You were the one I always depended on. Who understood me even in silence. And yet.”
She uncrossed her arms. Her hands were shaking.
“You delivered the rejection with anger at me. As if I’m to blame for whatever your reason was.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“Like you actually hated me,” she continued. “A task to be handled. Efficiently.”
“You’re right.”
The admission came before I could soften it. No deflection. No strategic framing.
“It wasn’t cold. It was worse than cold. I was angry, and I directed it at you because the alternative was directing it at myself.” My hands curled at my sides.
“My father went on an expedition here twenty-four years ago and never returned. I realized it might be The Order, as crazy as it was. I had to be angry at something, anything. I thought he was dead and killed.”
I took a step toward her. She didn’t retreat.
“When the council ordered the rejection, every wound I’d ever carried from the Order tore open.
And you...” My voice faltered. “You carry hunter blood. Your father was part of the organization that took mine. The logic was poisoned, Mira, but it was the only logic my grief understood. All I could see was the bloodline.”
Her eyes were shining. She held the tears back through what looked like an act of pure will.
“So I was angry. At you, for making me love you. At myself, for not being strong enough to separate you from it.” My voice dropped. “I made you feel hated by the person you depended on. That is the worst thing I’ve ever done, and I have done terrible things.”
A tear slipped down her cheek. She wiped it away with the back of her hand, fast, angry at herself for letting it fall.
“But you have nothing to do with that. And he was alive after all. He saved us this morning.”
Her mouth opened, closed. “That was your father?”
“He’s been hiding near this compound for over a decade. Watching the Order. Gathering intelligence.” I paused.
Mira’s gaze shifted. She didn’t say anything.
“These hunters are evil, Solomon.” Her voice was different now. Stripped of the anger, left with the exhaustion underneath.
“I’ve seen the sublevels. I’ve seen what they do to your people.” She wrapped her arms around herself again. “And my mother worked here. I found her journal tonight and the first page was her questioning everything this place stands for.”
She was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t categorize. A rawness that had no name, the face of a woman standing between two versions of the truth and trying to find solid ground.
I crossed the remaining distance between us. Her chin tilted up. My hand came to her face, thumb tracing the hollow beneath her eye where the dark circles lived.
“You should have eaten today,” I said.
She laughed. Broken, wet, catching in her throat. “That’s what you’re going with? I bare my soul and you comment on my nutrition?”
“Someone has to.”
“God, you’re insufferable.”
“I know.”
She kissed me.
Her mouth hit mine with the accumulated fury of weeks of betrayal and isolation, her fingers fisting in the front of my tactical vest, pulling me down to her height.
My hands found her waist. Lifted her onto the edge of Thiago’s desk.
Papers scattered. A pen holder toppled. The framed photograph of her parents slid sideways and I didn’t care. Mira’s legs parted to make room for me and her hands were already dragging the zipper of my vest down, shoving the tactical layer off my shoulders.
“This is my father’s desk,” she breathed against my mouth.
“I’m aware.”
“Good. He’d hate this.”
“I know.”
Her grin was feral. The first real expression I’d seen from her since the rejection, and it shot through me with more force than any weapon the Order had developed.
Outside, another volley of gunfire cracked across the eastern perimeter. Shouts carried through the walls. The diversion was holding, but the clock was running.
I should have stopped. Cataloged the exit routes or the time remaining before Thiago redirected resources.
Instead, my mouth pressed to her throat and inhaled until my lungs burned. Her pulse hammered against my lips, fast and alive, and the bond surged behind the wall. Testing the barrier with an insistence that matched the way her body arched into mine.
“Don’t you dare be gentle with me,” she said. Her nails raked down my chest. “Not tonight. Not after everything.”
I wasn’t gentle.
I pulled her roughly to the edge of Thiago’s massive oak desk. Her ass hit the polished wood with a soft thud, and I spread her thighs wide, stepping between them.
This was forbidden territory, fucking his daughter right here on the surface where he’d signed deals in blood, but that only made my cock throb harder against my zipper. Her eyes locked on mine, a storm of fury and hunger, and I gripped her hips tight enough to leave marks.
Her hands fumbled with my belt, trembling fingers yanking it open, and I let her for a moment, watching the way her chest heaved under that thin blouse.
“You’re a naughty girl, Mira,” I murmured, my voice low and rough. “Doing this in his office when he can come back anytime and kill me.”
“Are you scared?” She asked me, teasing.
I grabbed her cheek. “No.”