Chapter 49 Mira
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Mira
My mother’s handwriting got worse toward the end.
The first entries in Sienna’s journal were measured. Clinical language.
I flipped forward. Fifty pages in, the clinical language cracked.
“The subject became ‘the lycan,’“ I muttered, tracing her words with my finger. “Then ‘him.’ And then...”
I stopped on an entry dated three years before her death.
‘F refused food again today. The burns on his wrists have worsened. I told the guards the restraints needed adjustment for “research accuracy.” They believed me. I don’t know how much longer the excuses will hold.’
“F.” I read the initial aloud. Turned it over in my mouth. A prisoner she’d named with a single letter, the way you disguise someone you’re protecting. “Who were you, F?”
More pages. The handwriting tilting further, letters pressed harder.
‘They moved him to sublevel two. Restricted access. I had to fabricate a research proposal to justify the clearance. Thiago approved it without reading it. He never reads my research. He reads my schedule, my movements, my phone records, but never the actual work. He doesn’t care what I discover. He cares where I go and who I talk to.’
“Yeah.” I closed my eyes. “I know the type.”
Because I did. Not Thiago specifically, but the architecture of him. The partner who monitored your location but never asked about your day. I shook my head before I fully remembered my disgusting ex.
The next entry was dated six months before her death.
‘I’ve found the tunnels. Drainage system beneath sublevel two connects to the eastern forest. The guards don’t patrol them because officially they don’t exist. F is too weak to shift but he can walk.
If I can get his silver levels down enough for him to manage the distance, the eastern exit puts him two miles from the tree line along with some others. ’
“You were planning a prison break.” I stared at the page. “Mom, you absolute madwoman.”
The journal stopped four pages later. Mid-sentence, mid-thought, the ink trailing off.
‘I have to move tonight. T knows about the’
“T.” I didn’t need to guess that one. “Thiago.”
He’d found out. And four pages of silence told me everything the journal couldn’t.
I closed it and pressed it against my chest and sat on my bed and breathed until the urge to scream passed.
A knock interrupted the breathing exercise.
“Mira? It’s Elaine. I need to discuss your follow-up labs.”
I’d been dodging her lately, canceling the scheduled bloodwork twice, claiming training exhaustion the first time and a headache the second. I’d refused the bloodwork during my first visit weeks ago and hadn’t gone back.
To a doctor with fifteen years of experience, a patient who presented with nausea, fatigue, and elevated heart rate then refused labs and disappeared was a blinking neon sign.
I shoved the journal under my pillow and opened the door.
Elaine stood in the hallway with a tablet tucked under her arm and the expression of a woman who had been put off long enough.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just busy with the research Thiago assigned.”
“You said that before when you turned down the blood panel.” She didn’t move from the doorway. “If the symptoms are persisting, I need to understand why.”
“They’re not. I feel better.”
“You’ve lost weight. Your color’s off. And two of the training staff mentioned you’ve been dizzy during drills.” Her eyes dropped to my midsection for a fraction of a second. Professional instinct but my skin crawled. “I can’t treat what I can’t diagnose, Mira. One blood draw. Five minutes.”
She didn’t say the word. But the way her gaze lingered told me she was circling it.
“Tomorrow morning,” I said. “First thing. I promise.”
“That’s what you said last time.”
“This time I mean it.”
She held my gaze long enough to communicate that she didn’t believe me, then left. I closed the door and leaned my forehead against the wood and pressed both hands to my stomach where heartbeats pulsed in a rhythm that was getting harder to hide.
The nausea had eased slightly since Solomon’s visit. But the improvement was fading already, the absence returning now that he was gone, and the exhaustion underneath was getting worse.
The babies needed their fathers close. My body was telling me that in every way it knew how, and I was running out of time to pretend otherwise.
Thiago found me in the archive room at noon.
“You’ve been spending a lot of time in here.” He stood in the doorway, arms crossed, watching me the way he always did. Fond on the surface, calculating underneath. “Find anything interesting?”
“Your record-keeping is meticulous.” I held up a binder of Purifier research notes, the decoy I kept on the table for exactly this moment. “I’m trying to understand the science behind the formula.”
“And do you?”
“Some of it. The neural targeting mechanism is elegant. Cruel, but elegant.”
He smiled. The compliment landed the way I’d intended: confirmation that his daughter appreciated the sophistication of his life’s work. He walked to the desk and sat on its edge. Casual, relaxed, the posture of a father having a chat with his daughter.
“You look tired,” he said.
“I haven’t been sleeping well.”
“The bond?”
I let the hesitation read as vulnerability. “It still pulls. Less than before, but it’s there. Some nights it’s worse.”
“That will fade. The further the separation, the weaker the connection.” He studied me. “Unless you’re feeding it.”
My heart rate held steady through sheer force of will. “Feeding it how?”
“Thinking about them. Dwelling on the connection. The bond is a parasite, Mira. It feeds on attention. Starve it and it dies.”
“I’m trying.”
“Try harder.” The fondness in his voice didn’t waver but his eyes had gone flat. The same flat eyes my mother had described in her journal. “You’ve done remarkable work here. The trial proved that. I’d hate to see sentimentality compromise your progress.”
“It won’t.”
He held my gaze for three more seconds, then stood and squeezed my shoulder. “Good. I’ll have lunch sent to your room. You need to eat more.”
The door closed behind him and I exhaled until my lungs were empty.
Wyatt was waiting in the training yard at two.
We’d fallen into a routine over the past weeks: combat drills in the afternoon, intelligence sharing in the margins, trust built through repetition and proximity.
He was good at this. Patient, steady, the kind of man who showed up at the same time every day and did the work without needing to be asked.
The kind of man the Order didn’t deserve.
“You’re distracted today,” he said, blocking my strike with an ease that should have been insulting.
“I’m always distracted. You’re just getting better at noticing.”
He grinned. The scar on his jaw stretched with it, a remnant of a training accident he’d told me about during our third session.
Friendly, open, genuine. Everything about Wyatt was genuine, which was exactly what made him valuable and exactly what would make the truth devastating when he finally heard it.
Because I needed him. Not just as a training partner or a smuggling ally.
I needed Wyatt on my side when the compound fell.
The Order couldn’t be dismantled by three lycans and a pregnant woman alone.
I needed people inside who would choose the right side when the moment came, and Wyatt’s sincerity meant that once he saw the truth, he wouldn’t be able to unsee it.
I was sure he could convince other hunters too as they respect him.
But the timing had to be right. Too early and he’d panic, alert someone, get us both killed. Too late and the opportunity would pass. I also had to be sure that my assessment of him is correct.
“Elaine’s been asking about me,” I said, testing. Casual. Sparring partners trading gossip between rounds.
“She asks about everyone. It’s her job.”
“She’s persistent.”
“She cares.” Wyatt reset his stance. “Most of the medical staff here treat us as bodies to patch up and send back. Elaine actually reads the files. Follows up. She flagged a concussion I didn’t even know I had last year.”
Noted. Elaine was thorough and she cared. Both of those qualities were going to become a problem very soon.
We sparred for another forty minutes.
I let myself lean into the rhythm of it, the physical effort pushing the nausea down and the anxiety sideways. Wyatt corrected my footwork without condescension, adjusted my guard with the patience of a man who’d been teaching for years.
By the end of the session, I was breathing hard and he was barely winded, and the gap between our skill levels was obvious.
“Same time tomorrow?” he asked, tossing me a water bottle.
“Maybe earlier. I might have some schedule changes coming up.”
“Whatever works.”
I caught the water bottle and almost caught the second object that sailed toward me from a completely different direction. A small stone, wrapped in a scrap of fabric, arced from somewhere beyond the training yard’s eastern wall and landed at my feet with a soft thud.
Wyatt frowned. “What was that?”
“Bird probably dropped it.” I scooped it up before he could examine it, pocketing the stone with the practiced casualness. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I waited until I was back in my room to unwrap the fabric.
Solomon’s handwriting. Compact, precise, no wasted strokes.
‘The male you train with stands too close. Is this a strategic necessity or should I be concerned.’
I stared at the note. Read it again. A third time, because apparently the most feared enforcer in lycan history had just sent me a jealous love note via thrown rock while I was in the middle of a combat drill.
This was a Percival move. Not a Solomon move. Solomon didn’t do petty. The fact that Solomon had resorted to it told me those three had spent way too many centuries together.
A laugh escaped out of my control. The kind that came from the belly and surprised me with its warmth, because Solomon being petty about Wyatt’s proximity while I was building an intelligence network inside a torture compound was so absurd it circled back around to endearing.
I flipped the fabric over and found a pen in my desk drawer.
‘He’s an asset. I have a plan. Stop throwing rocks at me.’
Then, after a second of consideration, I added:
‘Also he doesn’t stand that close. You’re being ridiculous. Focus on your end.’
Getting the note back to him was harder. I couldn’t exactly launch a rock over a twelve-foot perimeter wall. But the eastern training yard bordered the tree line, and the gap between the wall and the nearest camera’s rotation was six seconds.
I tucked the fabric under a specific rock at the base of the wall during my evening walk. If Solomon was watching, and he was always watching, he’d find it.
The rest of the evening was the journal.
Page by page, entry by entry, my mother’s voice growing louder in my head until I could almost hear her speaking the words.
She’d questioned the Order’s methods. She’d advocated for humane treatment. She’d used her position to protect a prisoner and plan his escape and document everything because she’d known, on some level, that the documentation might outlive her.
The death report sat beside the journal on my bed. I’d pulled it from the archive three days ago.
Cause of death: killed during lycan containment breach, sublevel two.
I looked at the journal’s last entry. Then the death report. Containment breach, sublevel two. Same level she’d been sneaking into. Same tunnels she’d mapped for F’s escape.
The breach was her. She’d done it. She’d actually tried to free him.
Did you make it, F? Did she get you out before it all went wrong?
I photographed the report and added it to the growing file on the tablet Wyatt had smuggled me from the medical wing. I didn’t have the full picture yet, it was slowly falling into pieces.
At midnight, the compound settled into its overnight rotation. Reduced patrols, skeleton crew, the guards focused outward toward the perimeter where the real threats supposedly lived.
Wyatt had mapped the patrol gaps for me two weeks ago, back when he thought I needed the information for “personal space during evening walks.”
The eastern service corridor had a nine-minute window between sweeps. The maintenance exit beyond it opened onto a drainage path that connected to the forest two hundred meters from the wall.
My mother had used those same tunnels twenty years ago to save a lycan’s life. I was using them now to save my own.
I packed the journal, the tablet, and the keycard into the inner pockets of my jacket. Pressed both hands to my stomach.
“Okay, you three. Road trip. Try not to make me throw up.”
The bond pulsed. Faint, muted, but there. Three frequencies on the other side of the wall, waiting.
I stepped into the corridor and started walking.