Chapter 52 Mira
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Mira
Solomon and I drew the supply run because the universe had a sick sense of humor.
Camp rotation assigned pairs for the cache retrieval two miles northwest. Farmon had mapped the locations months ago, stashing emergency provisions in weatherproof containers buried beneath cairns he’d built during his years in hiding. The retrieval required two people: one to dig, one to watch.
Lucian couldn’t walk two miles without reopening the wound. Percy had taken the eastern perimeter with Giselle. Which left me and the man I’d been successfully avoiding direct conversation.
We walked in silence.
Professional, efficient silence. The kind Solomon was built for and I was faking. My boots found the trail Farmon had marked with notched trees and Solomon moved beside me, matching my pace without crowding, scanning the forest with mechanical focus.
A mile passed. The only sounds were footsteps, birds, and the occasional snap of a branch under my weight that Solomon never seemed to produce under his.
“You can talk, you know,” I said. “Silence isn’t a personality trait.”
“It’s efficient.”
“It’s annoying.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
I bit my cheek inwardly to keep the smile from forming. Absolutely not. I was not going to find Solomon’s dry humor endearing right now. Not after Giselle’s speech.
Sky had been gray all morning. By the time we reached the ravine path, the gray had darkened into a threat.
A drop hit my shoulder. Then twelve more. Then the sky stopped pretending and the rain arrived with a commitment that was almost personal.
Vertical, immediate, the kind of downpour that soaked through to skin in seconds and turned the ravine path into a brown river before I could process what was happening.
“The cache point is flooded,” Solomon said. Already assessing, already adjusting. “The ravine channels all surface runoff east. It won’t be accessible for hours.”
“So we’re stuck?”
“There’s an overhang. Thirty meters west.”
He moved and I followed because the alternative was standing in a forest being drowned by precipitation. The overhang was a rock formation jutting from the hillside, barely enough cover for two people if those two people didn’t mind being pressed together.
We pressed together. My back against the stone, his shoulder against mine, rain hammering the ground a foot from our boots. The canopy did nothing. Water poured through the leaves and turned the forest floor into a shallow current.
My clothes were soaked through. The cold settled into my bones in the places where pregnancy had already made me vulnerable, and a shiver ran through me before I could stop it.
Solomon’s jacket came off. Around my shoulders, wordless, automatic. The lining was dry and it smelled of him, cedar and iron, the scent my bond recognized before my brain and my body warmed against my will.
“I didn’t ask for that.”
“You were shivering.”
“I can shiver. Shivering is my choice.”
He didn’t respond. Because Solomon never argued with statements he considered irrational, which was somehow more infuriating than if he’d pushed back.
I pulled the jacket tighter. Cold and stubborn. Both true at the same time.
Giselle’s voice played in my head the way it had been playing for days. On a loop, uninvited, persistent. You haven’t forgiven them, you haven’t committed to them, and they’re still rearranging their entire world around you.
The flinch I’d hidden in that clearing hadn’t gone away. It had followed me into the drainage tunnels, into the compound, into Thiago’s office where I smiled through his lies while Giselle’s accusation sat in my ribs and pulsed.
Because she wasn’t wrong.
Not entirely. Not in the way I wanted her to be.
“Your soldier thinks I’m using you.”
Solomon’s head turned. “Giselle spoke out of turn.”
“She spoke out of turn. She was also partially right.”
The rain filled the gap between us. His jaw tightened but he didn’t correct me, which meant he was either giving me space to work through it or he agreed and wouldn’t say so.
“I’ve been trying to find the part where she’s wrong, Solomon. I’ve been turning it over for days and I can’t find it.” My voice sounded strange to my own ears.
“She is wrong.”
“She’s not. Lucian risked his throne and is bleeding from a wound I put there. You have to abandon your duty to the kingdom. Percival went rogue and starved in a forest for weeks. And I’m walking between your camp and my father’s compound, taking from both sides and committing to neither.”
“That’s not what’s happening.”
“Then what is happening? Because from where I’m standing, three men upended their lives to be here and I can’t even tell them I forgive them.” My hands were fists inside his jacket pockets. “What kind of person does that? What kind of person watches someone bleed for her and can’t say the words?”
“A person who was hurt.”
“Everyone was hurt, Solomon. Everyone in that camp has bled for this and I’m the one still holding a grudge because three men made a choice to protect me and I didn’t get a say in it.”
My voice cracked on the last word.
“Maybe she’s right. Maybe my anger isn’t worth what it’s costing all of you. Maybe I need to just get over it and commit and stop punishing you for a decision that was never going to have a good outcome either way.”
His hand reached for my arm.
“Don’t.” I shoved it off. Palm against his forearm, pushed hard. He let me. Just absorbed it the way he absorbed everything.
“Don’t touch me when I’m trying to figure out if I even have the right to be angry anymore.”
His hand dropped. Rain pounded the overhang. Neither of us moved.
Then Solomon did the last thing I expected.
“You have every right.”
I looked at him.
“Your anger is not a burden on us, Mira. It’s not a debt you owe or a punishment you’re inflicting. It is the correct response to what we did.” His voice was stripped to the foundation, formal cadence cracked open.
“We rejected you. We delivered those words knowing they would destroy the one person who trusted us enough to be destroyable. Your anger is the healthiest reaction in this entire situation and I will not allow you to talk yourself out of it because a soldier questioned your commitment.”
My throat closed.
“Giselle sees sacrifice and measures it in logistics. She doesn’t understand that walking back into your father’s compound carrying our children requires a kind of courage that none of us in that camp possess.
” His jaw was tight. “She doesn’t see what it costs you because you never let anyone see the cost.”
“Sol...”
“You are not selfish for being angry. You are not cruel for withholding forgiveness. And you are not using us by accepting help from men who owe you more than help will ever repay.” He swallowed. “If you forgive us in a year or in a decade or never, the debt remains ours. Not yours. Never yours.”
I stared at him through the rain. The scar from his temple to jaw, the set of his mouth. The way his hands hung open at his sides.
“Then why does it feel like I’m the one breaking all of you?”
“Because you care. That’s why.” A pause. “A person who was using us wouldn’t lose sleep over an accusation. Wouldn’t stand in the rain questioning whether her anger was valid or carry guilt for a wound she was right to inflict.”
The anger shifted into a space where it could exist alongside the other truths I’d been avoiding.
That I missed them. That the camp felt more alive than the compound ever had.
That three hands on my stomach and three kicks answering had rearranged the architecture of my chest in ways I couldn’t undo.
“You rehearsed the rejection,” I said. Not an accusation this time. A need to understand. “How many times?”
His eyes held mine. “Forty-seven.”
“Why that many?”
“Because my hands were shaking too badly to trust the delivery before attempt thirty-one. I broke a mirror after that one.” A breath. “Lucian replaced it without comment.”
“You were shaking.”
“I practiced because if you’d seen my hands trembling, you would have known how much I didn’t want to say the words. You would have fought it. The council would have used your resistance as grounds to classify you as a threat.”
The image restructured everything I’d built the rejection from.
“You could have told me that. Before.”
“Before, you wouldn’t have believed me. You needed to be angry first.” The corner of his mouth shifted. “The anger had to run its course before the truth could land.”
My fingers found the jacket pockets again. My hand closed around a piece of paper I hadn’t put there.
I pulled it out.
A fragment. Singed brown at the edges, barely the size of my palm. The paper was soft from weeks of being handled, creased from being pressed flat against a jacket lining.
My handwriting. Two words in smudged ink.
‘I miss’
My hands trembled.
“Where did you get this?”
“The pine tree. Outside the eastern perimeter. Third night of surveillance.”
The blind spot between the cameras where I sat and burned journals and pretended the act of destroying evidence would destroy the feelings too.
“You were there.”
“On the ridge. Thirty meters above.”
“You watched me burn them?”
“Yes.”
“The fragment survived in the ash after you left,” he said. “Two words. Your handwriting.”
“And you kept it.”
“It’s stayed there since that night.” His voice barely held.
I pressed the fragment against my chest. The gesture came without permission, the same one I’d made with Lucian’s raven note, and I was starting to see a pattern in the way these men broke me open from angles I wasn’t guarding.
“You carried this against your ribs for weeks.” I looked at the two words. “You just let me rage and carried this the whole time.”
“Your anger was justified. Is justified. Will continue to be justified for as long as you need it.” His eyes held mine. “The fragment doesn’t change that. It just means I had proof that beneath the anger, you missed me. And on the worst nights, proof was enough.”
I folded it. Put it back in the jacket pocket, over the left side, exactly where he’d been keeping it.
His eyes tracked the movement.
“It stays,” I said. “Keep carrying it.”
The rain eased. The downpour gentled into a steady fall and the light through the canopy shifted from dark gray to pale silver. The ravine was still flooded but the storm had passed its peak.
We stepped out from the overhang.
My foot caught a wet root. Balance tipped, arm swung out, and his hand was there. Catching my elbow, steadying me. His fingers released the moment I was stable, but my hand brushed his during the withdrawal.
I didn’t pull away.
We walked back toward camp through the mud, shoulder to shoulder, my hand close enough to his that our fingers grazed with every other step. Just existing in the same space without flinching.
Camp appeared through the trees. Farmon’s fire, Percy’s oak, Lucian’s cot.
Solomon stopped at the perimeter. I held the jacket for one extra second. Felt the weight of it, the warmth, the fragment pressed against the lining over his ribs.
“The fragment. Keep carrying it.”
I slipped the jacket off and placed it in his hands and walked into camp without looking back.