Chapter 65 Mira
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Mira
The camp moved around me with the efficiency of people who had somewhere to be and no interest in making eye contact with the pregnant woman who’d just shaken hands on her own death.
Voss’s soldiers integrated into the perimeter in tight formations. Council representatives clustered near the ravens, dictating notes that would reach Veyndral within hours.
Wyatt’s converted hunters held their ground at the eastern tree line, weapons visible, posture broadcasting that the alliance applied to them too, whether the newcomers accepted it or not.
Percy hadn’t come back from the forest. The bond channel pulsed with a fury so concentrated it made my ribs ache. Somewhere in those trees, he was either breaking his hand against bark or shifting into his wolf and running until the rage burned off. Possibly both.
Solomon’s channel had gone silent. Not closed. Silent. His version of a scream, turned inward. He’d vanished into the tree line seconds after the handshake, a blur of motion that even Voss’s soldiers tracked with unease.
I stood at the supply station and reorganized my jacket pockets because my hands needed a task and my brain needed a minute to catch up with what my mouth had agreed to.
If I fail, you can kill me.
Bold words for a woman who couldn’t keep her breakfast down most mornings.
Perhaps I have sniffed enough mud from the tunnel that I lost my mind.
Farmon appeared beside me. He didn’t speak. Just set a cup of herbal tea on the supply crate, pressed his ruined hand to my shoulder once, and returned to his station. The gesture said everything: I disagree with what you did. I understand why you did it. Drink the tea.
My fingers wrapped around the cup and the warmth seeped into my palms.
“Mira.”
Lucian’s voice. Behind me. Low enough that the soldiers twenty feet away wouldn’t catch it.
Turning, I found him at the entrance to the command tent, one hand holding the flap open, his expression carrying the controlled stillness that meant everything underneath was anything but still.
“Can I have a minute?”
“You’re a king. You can have several.”
The corner of his mouth moved. The ghost of a smile, haunting a face that had forgotten how to wear them.
The tea went back on the crate. I followed him inside.
The command tent was Solomon’s domain. Maps pinned to every surface, patrol schedules in his handwriting, the broken pen from three days ago still sitting in the supply kit because Solomon kept broken things close until he decided what to do with them.
The irony wasn’t lost on me.
Lucian let the flap close behind us. The sounds of camp were muffled to a murmur, and it was the first time since I’d arrived at the relocated site, we were alone. Fully alone.
No briefings to interrupt, no tactical updates to exchange across a fire pit, no war to manage from opposite ends.
Just a man and the woman he’d hurt standing in a tent full of someone else’s maps.
“The speech,” I said. “In front of the camp. The cowardice line.”
“Every word.”
“That was a lot, Lucian. In front of your soldiers. Your council. Voss.”
“It was the truth. The truth doesn’t require a private audience.”
I studied him.
The scar on his chest was hidden beneath his shirt but I knew exactly where it sat. The permanent reminder of the blade he gave me, the night I’d put a dagger in a king.
“You said you chose wrong. That you were afraid.” I kept my voice even. “Afraid of what?”
The composure cracked. Not the controlled fracture from the speech, calculated for public consumption. This was the real thing. The wall behind the wall, the one he’d maintained for two centuries because kings didn’t show the architecture of their fear.
“That choosing you meant abandoning them.” His voice dropped to a register I’d never heard from him. Stripped of every title and every century of practice. “Every person in Veyndral who depends on the crown to hold. If I chose you and the throne collapsed, those deaths would be mine.”
My chest tightened.
“So I told myself duty required the rejection. That a king who sacrifices his people for his mate isn’t a king at all.
” He swallowed. “But that wasn’t the whole truth.
The whole truth is that duty was easier than admitting I’d fall apart if you didn’t choose to abandon this world for the burden of the throne with me.
With us. So I hid behind a kingdom full of people to avoid being honest about one woman. ”
He stood three feet away. Close enough to touch, far enough to give me the space to walk out if I wanted to.
“You didn’t even let me say a word,” I said. “You didn’t hear my reasons.”
“I was too much of a coward.”
“You decided what I could handle before I had the chance to prove you wrong.”
“Yes. I was wrong for not trusting you.”
“And then you watched me almost die from it. Our children almost died. Because you were too afraid to let me choose you.”
His jaw clenched. The muscle worked beneath the skin and his hands trembled at his sides, fists that wanted to fix what fists couldn’t reach.
“Yes,” he said. No defense or justification. Just the word, laid bare.
The person standing in front of me with no armor left, waiting for the verdict, braced for the rejection they believed they deserved.
“Come here,” I said.
He didn’t move.
“Lucian. Come here.”
He closed the three feet between us. Stopped with his chest inches from mine, his height forcing me to tilt my head back, his scent flooding my senses with the familiar warmth that had been muted for months behind the wall he’d built.
I reached up and pressed my palm flat against the scar on his chest. His heart slammed into my hand, rapid and desperate, and the bond wall between us vibrated with the force of everything he was holding back.
“I forgive you, Lucian.”
The wall didn’t crack. It dissolved.
The third channel blazed open and the bond network completed. Three channels pouring into each other, Percy’s brightness, Solomon’s depth, and Lucian’s overwhelming warmth flooding through every connection.
My knees buckled. Lucian caught me. His arms wrapped around my waist and my hands gripped his shoulders and the sensation was so complete, so full, that for three seconds I couldn’t tell where my heartbeat ended and his began.
“I’m sorry,” he said against my hair. “For every day you spent unforgiven. For every night you carried alone.”
“Your Majesty, shut up and kiss me.”
He kissed me.
Lucian’s mouth claimed mine with two centuries of restraint snapping at the seams, one hand gripping the back of my neck, the other lifting me off my feet.
My back hit the map table. Patrol schedules scattered and Solomon’s broken pen clattered to the ground.
He pressed me against the surface with his hips pinning mine, and I fisted the front of his shirt and pulled him closer.
Kissing him back with the anger and the grief and the forgiveness all tangled together, my legs wrapping around his waist, grinding as the bond screamed and my body was following orders my brain hadn’t approved.
His hand slid beneath my shirt. Fingers spread across my ribs and the sound I made against his mouth was not dignified. His growl vibrated against my lips, hips rolling forward, and the friction made my spine arch off the table.
Somewhere in the forest, two alphas felt the third channel explode open and knew exactly what it meant.
Percy’s frequency erupted with relief. Solomon’s pulsed once. A single beat of acknowledgment that carried more emotion than most people expressed in a lifetime.
“Your Majesty.”
Voss’s voice. Outside the tent. The particular tone of a commander who didn’t care what his king was doing behind a closed flap.
Lucian pulled back. His forehead rested against mine. His breathing was ragged and his pupils were blown. His face wore the most unguarded expression I’d ever seen.
“Your Majesty, the perimeter assignments require your authorization before nightfall.”
“I will fucking kill him,” Lucian muttered.
“You literally just gave a speech about breaking cycles of violence.”
“I’m comfortable making an exception.”
I laughed. The sound surprised us both. It had been long since anything had pulled a real laugh out of me, and the way Lucian’s eyes softened when he heard it made my chest ache.
“Go,” I said. “Handle your commander before he comes inside and sees his king looking undone.”
“I am not undone.”
“Lucian. Your shirt is wrinkled, your hair is a mess, and you’re flushed. You are very much undone.”
He straightened. Ran a hand through his hair. The composure reassembled itself layer by layer, the king’s mask settling back into place, and watching the transformation was equal parts impressive and infuriating.
“I’ll be back,” he said. “Soon.”
“I’ll be here.”
He held my gaze for two more seconds. Then turned, pushed through the tent flap, and his voice shifted to the command register as he addressed Voss outside. The transition was seamless. The man gone, the king returned.
Alone in the tent, I let the three channels wash through me.
All three. Open, blazing, full. Percy’s joy is still radiating from somewhere in the forest. Solomon’s steady pulse moving back toward camp. Lucian’s warmth right outside, managing the logistics of an alliance while the taste of my mouth was still on his lips.
The babies responded. Heartbeats accelerating beneath my ribs, fed by a bond that was finally, completely intact.
The pregnancy glow that Farmon described as bond-dependent surged through me, warmth spreading from my chest to my fingertips. I finally felt whole.
Also, exhausted.
The compound rotations, the alliance negotiations, the confrontation with Annora and Giselle, the Voss deal, and now the emotional equivalent of a tidal wave from three restored bond channels.
My body was running on reserves that didn’t exist, held together by a supernatural connection and sheer stubbornness.
I sat on the bedroll in the command tent. Solomon’s den arrangement surrounded me, the blankets in their traditional pattern, the water within reach, the leveled ground. Safe. Warm.
The tea Farmon made was still at the supply station. I’d left it when Lucian called me into the tent.
Back through the flap, I grabbed it from the crate. Still warm. Farmon’s prenatal blend, the herbs Solomon ground and pretended he didn’t.
Settling back onto the bedroll, I sipped and let the exhaustion win.
The first swallow was fine. The second tasted slightly off, a bitter edge beneath the usual earthy flavor. The third hit my stomach and stayed there, settling into a warmth that didn’t feel right.
I looked at the cup. The color and scent was the same.
But the warmth in my stomach turned to heat.
Then the heat turned to burning.
The cup slipped from my fingers.
Pain exploded in my abdomen. Not the dull ache of pregnancy fatigue or the cramping from overexertion. This was targeted, precise, a burning that radiated outward from my core and wrapped around my belly with a viciousness that drove the air from my lungs.
I screamed.
The sound tore through the tent and into the camp beyond. My hands flew to my stomach and the three heartbeats beneath my palms stuttered, faltered, the rhythm disrupted by whatever was working through my bloodstream.
The bond channels surged. Three frequencies spiking at once, alarm and fury and terror flooding through the network as every alpha connected to me felt the pain hit.
My body doubled over. Vision blurred at the edges and the tent entrance swam.
Two figures stood in the gap where the flap had been pushed aside. Tall. Female. One with dark hair and aristocratic posture, the other with close-cropped hair and the build of a soldier.
Watching.
I blinked and they were gone.
The pain crested.
My knees gave out and I collapsed onto the bedroll, curling around my stomach, around the three lives inside me whose heartbeats were growing fainter beneath the burning.
“Farmon,” I gasped. The word barely made it past my teeth. “Someone... the tea...”
My vision narrowed to a pinpoint.
From somewhere outside, distant and muffled and getting farther away, Lucian’s voice. Shouting my name. The command register gone, replaced by something raw and broken that I’d never heard from a king.
“Mira!”
The last thing I registered before the darkness took me was the cup on its side, the herbal liquid pooling in the dirt, and the absurd, furious thought that punched through the agony.
I really needed to stop stupidly drinking tea.