Chapter 71 Mira
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Mira
I woke up tangled in three men and immediately knew we’d overslept.
The den was dark. The kind of darkness that meant hours had passed since anyone said “we’ll wake you” and nobody had.
Percy’s arm was draped across my waist. Solomon’s hand was still laced with mine over my stomach. Lucian’s chest was pressed against my back, solid and unmovable. Those things were the problem precisely because they made the alternative unbearable.
The alternative being: get up, get dressed, and crawl back into the place that wanted me dead. Before Wyatt’s cover story expired and Thiago started asking questions I couldn’t answer.
I eased out of the pile one limb at a time. Percy shifted, mumbled, buried his face deeper into the bedroll. Solomon’s fingers twitched against mine but didn’t tighten. Lucian’s breathing stayed even.
My clothes were folded on the supply crate where I’d left them. Jacket, the new boots Lucian had given me earlier, the keycard tucked into the inner pocket. I pulled the shirt over my head with my back to them, laced the boots, slipped the keycard into my jacket.
Farmon would be at the supply station by now. If I could reach him first, get the supplements, and make it to the tunnel entrance before any of the three woke up, I could avoid the conversation entirely.
I turned toward the tent flap.
Three alphas stood between me and the exit.
Arms crossed. Jaws set. A wall of muscle and barely contained fury that I had absolutely no memory of hearing get up.
“Hi,” I said. “How long have you been standing there?”
“Long enough to watch you try to sneak out,” Lucian said. “Which, for the record, you’re terrible at.”
“I was being very quiet.”
“You knocked over a canteen.”
“That could’ve been the wind.”
“We’re inside a tent.”
Percy didn’t have his usual warmth. The dimples were nowhere. His arms were crossed and his eyes tracked me intensely, a man who’d already decided how this conversation was going to end.
“You’re not going back,” he said.
“Percy.”
“You were just poisoned. Our children’s heartbeats were fading. One day of recovery doesn’t erase that, and you’re lacing up your boots in the dark and trying to slip past us.”
“I wasn’t slipping. I was strategically departing.”
“You were running.”
“I was avoiding this exact conversation because I knew you’d all do this.” I gestured at the wall of crossed arms. “The united front. The alpha blockade.”
Solomon hadn’t spoken yet. He stood at the center, silver eyes flat, watching me with the clinical focus he used on battlefield assessments. When he finally spoke, his voice was low.
“Give me one tactical reason.”
“I’ll give you four.” I pulled my jacket tighter and met his gaze.
“The security grid runs through three access points that require compound-level clearance. My clearance. The day before we breach, someone has to physically prep those systems so that when the signal comes, the grid drops in seconds instead of minutes. Minutes mean crossfire. Crossfire means dead wolves in cells who never asked to be there.”
The tent was quiet.
“Wyatt can help me with the prep, but he can’t do it alone.
The access points need two sets of hands on two different terminals simultaneously.
That’s the mechanical reality. Beyond that, I still need to feed Thiago a reason to leave with the bulk of his hunters on the day we move.
False intel that sends him chasing shadows while our converted hunters handle the skeleton crew left behind. ”
I stared at them with a serious look.
“I lock the grid, seal the Purifier stores in the sublevel, and fire the flare. You come in with everything we’ve got. The lycans downstairs, every cell, every level, I’ll have mapped before you breach. You won’t be walking in blind.”
I paused. Let the plan sit in the space between us.
“And when it’s over, the converted hunters help me destroy every vial of Purifier in that compound while you three deal with Thiago. That’s the endgame. That’s why I’m going back.”
Solomon’s jaw worked with the muscle tic. I knew what it meant: the tactical argument was sound and he hated that.
“We can’t pull back now. Even with Annora and Giselle’s unexpected poisoning,” I said. “We have to get ahead of Thiago before he gets ahead of us, and every hour I’m standing in this tent is an hour he’s using to prepare for the attack he knows is coming.”
“He doesn’t know when,” Lucian said.
“He will. Men with that much paranoia always figure out the when. The question is whether we’re ready before he does.”
Silence again. Longer this time.
“There is no going back on this,” I said. “We all agreed. The operation is greenlit. Altun and Rheda sanctioned it. The alliance is assembled. Pulling out now because I got hurt doesn’t protect me. It just gives Thiago more time.”
Nobody moved or spoke. Three men processing three different arguments and arriving at the same conclusion they didn’t want to reach.
I stepped forward. Kissed Percy on the left cheek. He closed his eyes and his hand came up to grip my elbow, holding me there for two extra seconds before letting go.
Lucian got the right cheek. His jaw was clenched so tight I felt the tension through my lips. He didn’t close his eyes. Just watched me pull back wearing the expression of a king swallowing a command he wanted to give.
Solomon required logistics. I stood on my toes and aimed for his cheek but the height difference was unreasonable, and my mouth landed closer to his chin.
He frowned. Bent at the knees until his face was level with mine, turned his cheek toward me, and waited with the rigid patience of a man submitting to an indignity he refused to acknowledge as affection.
I kissed his cheek properly. He straightened. The frown stayed but his ears were red.
“Was that so hard?” I asked.
“Move. Before I change my mind.”
Farmon’s supplements took ten minutes. Percy hovered while I swallowed the vials. Solomon reviewed the tunnel route with me for the fourth time this month. Lucian spoke with Voss at the perimeter, and when I started toward the eastern tree line, all three of them fell into step behind me.
“I don’t need an escort.”
“You’re getting one,” Lucian said.
“Through the forest?”
“To the compound.”
I stopped walking. “You’re not serious.”
“One sniff of danger,” Percy said. “One thing that feels off. And the plan is gone. We pull you out and we don’t go back.”
“Percy.”
“This is not a discussion, love.”
Lucian’s hand landed on my shoulder. Not possessive. Final.
“It’s not negotiable, Mira. We walk you to the perimeter. We watch you enter. And if anything goes wrong between here and those walls, we are taking you away from this place and nothing you say will change that.”
I looked at each of them. Immovable. A mountain range in human form that I did not have the energy or the time to erode.
“Fine.”
They walked me through the forest. Not the tunnel. The surface route that skirted the eastern perimeter, using the tree coverage that Solomon had mapped weeks ago. Percy on my left, Lucian on my right, Solomon ahead, clearing the path.
We reached the tree line at the compound’s eastern edge. The perimeter floodlights swept across the grounds in rotation, painting the concrete in white bands that moved with mechanical regularity.
I turned toward the light. The compound loomed against the night sky, industrial and gray, the place where my mother died and my father built an empire on her corpse.
“Forty-eight hours,” I said without turning around.
No answer.
I closed my eyes. Just for a second. The bond pulsed once, three points of warmth so distinct I could name them. Then I opened my eyes, blinked against the floodlight glare, and looked behind me.
The tree line was empty. No movement, no sound, no trace that three alphas had been standing there seconds ago.
Just the forest and the dark and the fading pulse in my chest that said we’re here, we’re watching, come back.
I turned toward the compound and walked through the eastern service entrance.
The compound was quieter at night. Skeleton crew on rotation, corridors empty, the surveillance cameras sweeping their usual arcs. I slipped through the halls I’d memorized months ago and found my bunk. Set an alarm for an hour before dawn. Closed my eyes without expecting sleep.
Sleep came anyway. Apparently my body had decided that rest was non-negotiable, regardless of what my brain thought about the situation.
The alarm pulled me out at 4 AM. I dressed, pocketed the keycard, and moved through the pre-dawn corridors to the lower sublevel.
Wyatt was already waiting in the grid room.
A windowless box filled with server racks and access terminals and the particular hum of electronics that made my teeth buzz. He’d already pulled the first terminal offline and had the maintenance cover removed, wires exposed.
“You look terrible,” he said.
“That’s like the only compliment you tell me.”
I dropped my pack and pulled the chair to the second terminal. My fingers found the keycard slot and the screen lit up, rows of system codes scrolling in green text.
“Access point one,” Wyatt said. “I’ll run the routing override from here. You strip the redundancy on the failsafe. When the signal comes, both terminals need to execute within the same three-second window or the grid reboots.”
“Three seconds. Got it.”
We worked in silence for ten minutes. The kind of focus that didn’t allow for conversation, fingers moving through command prompts, disabling layers of the security infrastructure one by one.
The compound’s grid was old but thorough.
Cameras, door locks, comms, the sublevel containment seals.
All routed through this room. All killable from these two terminals if the prep was done right.
At the twelve-minute mark, I stopped typing.
“Wyatt.”
He looked up.