Chapter 71 Mira #2
“No matter what happens in the next forty-eight hours, you play your part.” I held his gaze. Steady. Deliberate. “Whatever changes, whatever goes sideways, you do what we discussed. All of it.”
His jaw tightened. The look he gave me carried more weight than the words between us.
“I trust you,” I said.
He nodded once. Turned back to his screen.
We were seventeen minutes into the prep when the door opened.
Thiago walked in.
The measured stride of a man entering a room he’d expected to find occupied. He wore the tactical vest he favored during compound rounds, sidearm holstered, silver hair combed back. The patient expression and the fatherly warmth.
“Interesting place for a meeting,” he said.
My hands were still on the keyboard. Wyatt’s were frozen mid-keystroke. The screen behind me showed the grid’s routing architecture, half-stripped of its redundancy protocols, displayed in full for anyone standing at the door to read.
“It’s not what it looks like,” I said.
“No?”
“We were...” My brain sprinted through options and landed on the worst possible one. Which made it the most believable. “Wyatt and I were trying to find somewhere private.”
Wyatt’s head turned toward me with an expression of a man watching his own execution being scheduled.
“Private,” Thiago repeated.
“We didn’t want people to talk.” I forced heat into my cheeks. Looked at the floor. “It’s embarrassing.”
Thiago studied me. Then Wyatt. Then the terminals with their exposed wiring and half-executed commands.
“Ah.” The warmth returned to his face. Indulgent. The father catching his daughter in a minor scandal. “I did wonder, when the logs showed your keycard accessing the lower sublevel at this hour.”
He believed it. The tension in his shoulders eased a fraction. He shook his head, almost amused, and I could’ve collapsed with relief.
“The heart wants what it wants,” he said. “Though I’d suggest finding a more romantic venue. Server rooms lack ambiance.”
He gestured for us to stand. Casual, almost dismissive.
We stood.
The gunshot was so close the sound didn’t register as a gunshot. Just a crack that split the room in half and a burst of red from Wyatt’s side that sent him crashing into the terminal behind him.
Wyatt hit the floor. His hand went to his abdomen, fingers pressing against the wound, blood spreading through his shirt in a pattern that my brain cataloged with numb precision. His eyes were wide. Shocked. Still conscious.
I lunged toward him.
“Don’t.” Thiago’s voice hadn’t changed. Same warmth and patience. The gun in his hand was still raised, barrel pointing at the space Wyatt’s body had occupied a second ago. “Stay where you are, sweetheart.”
“He needs medical...”
“He needs to understand consequences. As do you.” Thiago tilted his head. “Did you think I didn’t know? About Wyatt? About Kaia, Damon, Reese? About your rotations through the tunnel? About every word you’ve fed him and every word he’s fed back to you?”
My blood turned cold.
“The surveillance systems in this compound predate your birth, Mira. I watched every conversion. Every whispered plan. Every time you crawled through my drainage tunnels and thought you were clever.”
The grid. The terminals. Wyatt’s intel about rotation schedules and monitoring gaps. All of it filtered through whatever Thiago wanted me to believe. Every step I’d taken since the first rotation was a step he’d measured and allowed.
“You thought you were ahead of me.” He lowered the gun slightly. His eyes dropped to my stomach and stayed there.
The indulgent expression calcified into a stillness I hadn’t seen before.
“Elaine mentioned her suspicions weeks ago. I dismissed them. Wishful thinking from a doctor who sees pregnancies everywhere.” His gaze moved over my body with the clinical detachment of a man reassessing data.
“But you’re showing now, aren’t you? The weight.
The glow. The way you kept dodging bloodwork. ”
My hand drifted toward my belly unconsciously.
“Lycan children,” he said. The words came out measured, tasted, as if he were testing their composition. “Inside my daughter.”
“Don’t.”
“The first lycan offspring born in human custody. Do you understand what that means? What can be learned from them? From you?”
The warmth was gone now. Replaced by the focus of a man who’d spent his life studying a species he wanted to eradicate, and who’d just discovered a new specimen.
“Your mother gave me twenty years of research when she helped that wolf escape. The guilt, the surveillance, the control. All of it fed data I couldn’t have gathered otherwise. And now you’re giving me lives I can study from conception.”
“You’re insane.”
“I’m a scientist. There’s a difference.”
I bolted.
Not toward the door. Thiago was blocking it. Toward the maintenance corridor behind the server racks, the secondary exit that Wyatt had shown me during our first grid session, the one that connected to the eastern stairwell.
Thiago’s laugh followed me through the gap between the servers. Not a villain’s laugh. Worse. A father’s. Tired, almost fond, the sound of a man watching his child make a predictable mistake.
“Where are you going to go, Mira? The eastern exits are sealed. The tunnels are locked. Every door in this compound answers to me.”
I hit the stairwell. Took the steps two at a time, legs burning, my belly pulling me off-balance with every stride. The babies kicked in protest, three tiny objections to their mother’s cardio choices.
Second floor. Third floor. The stairwell opened onto a corridor that ran the compound’s eastern wing, and at the far end, the observation balcony that overlooked the training courtyard. Open air. Direct sightline to the sky.
I crashed through the balcony door. Cold pre-dawn air hit my face and the compound spread beneath me, concrete and chain-link and the forest beyond.
Footsteps behind me followed in multiple sets.
I turned. Thiago stood in the balcony doorway. Behind him, two hunters with rifles raised. The guns tracked my center mass with professional steadiness.
“Step away from the railing,” Thiago said. “We can discuss this reasonably.”
“Reasonably.” My hand was in my jacket pocket.
My fingers closed around the flare gun I’d carried through the tunnel, through the service entrance, through every rotation for the past month. The weight of it was a promise.
“You shot Wyatt. You want to experiment on my children. Your definition of reasonable needs work.”
“Put your hands where I can see them.”
I pulled the flare gun from my jacket. Held it with both hands. Pointed it directly at Thiago.
His expression didn’t flinch. He assessed the weapon, assessed the distance, assessed the two rifles behind him that could drop me before I pulled the trigger.
“You can’t fire at all three of us before one of them fires back,” he said. “You know that.”
My arms were steady. The wind cut across the balcony and pushed my hair into my eyes and I didn’t blink.
“Who says I’m shooting you?”
I raised the flare gun above my head and pulled the trigger.
The red charge screamed into the dawn sky. A streak of fire that punched through the gray morning and hung above the compound, burning, visible from the forest and the tree line and the camp beyond.
Thiago’s face changed. The composure, the patience, the calculated warmth. All of it fell away, and what remained was the raw fury of a man who’d designed a chessboard and just watched a pawn flip the table.
“Take her,” he said.
The hunters moved forward. The balcony door was behind them. The railing was behind me. And above us all, the flare burned red against the sky, painting the compound in the color of war.
They were coming.