Chapter 80 Mira
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Mira
The portal deposited me in the Glowwood clearing and the human world dissolved behind me into the violet haze of a Veyndral afternoon.
I adjusted the bag on my shoulder.
Three new picture books from the shop, a jar of the blackberry jam that Percius would fight his siblings for, and a handwritten letter from Wyatt that I’d read on the walk home.
His organization was growing. Forty-seven members across six countries, human and supernatural alike, watching for the real threats and leaving everyone else alone. He’d signed it the same way he always did: Still playing my part.
Mira’s Pages was thriving.
I’d named it six months after the coronation, standing in the doorway of the rebuilt shop with a paintbrush in one hand and Lucian holding the ladder steady because he refused to let me climb anything higher than a step stool.
The letters went up in copper paint and the moment I stepped back to look at the sign, the name that had taken me years to commit to, a knot behind my ribs settled into place.
My pages. My story. Written in a shop that had survived fire and war and the complete restructuring of my understanding of the world.
All the while, Altun and Rheda treated babysitting as a competitive sport. Rheda maintained a color-coded calendar. Altun simply showed up early and refused to leave.
Farmon just sat in the nursery reading to Solian in a low voice, and Solian, who rejected every other babysitter, climbed into his grandfather’s lap and stayed for hours.
The Kaelwyn butler, Cedric, visited weekly with estate provisions and toys. He’d held Percius once and said, “Rowson and Diera would have loved their grandchildren.”
The Glowwood path curved through the bioluminescent trees. My wolf senses picked up the castle before I saw it along with the sound of six heartbeats.
Three small. Three familiar.
The courtyard gate opened before I reached it. By a shadow hound the size of a small horse, its smoke-dark body pressed against the iron bars.
“Hello, Nox.”
The shadow hound’s tongue found my face before I could dodge. He slept at the foot of the triplets’ bed. He followed Mireille everywhere.
He once ate an entire roasted boar from the kitchen and Percius had taken the blame because, in his words, “Nox was hungry and I’m a good brother.”
He was four. He had Percy’s moral compass and Solomon’s stubbornness and my inability to let anyone I loved face consequences alone.
A raven landed on my shoulder.
“Hello, Edgar.”
Edgar clicked twice. The original Edgar, Lucian’s “professional relationship,” had fathered a small dynasty of ravens who treated the royal family as their personal jurisdiction.
This particular Edgar, Edgar the Third according to Percy’s naming system, had bonded with Solian on the boy’s second birthday and hadn’t left his side since.
The courtyard was chaotic. The standard state of any space that contained my children.
Mireille was on the training yard wall. Four years old, copper-haired, one brown eye and one blue, and absolutely no fear of heights. She perched on the stone ledge with her legs dangling over a twelve-foot drop, eating an apple, watching her brothers with evaluative calm.
“Mama!” she called.
“Get down from the wall.”
“Papa said I could sit here.”
“Which papa?”
“The one who says yes to everything.”
Percy. Of course.
Solian sat cross-legged in the courtyard center with an actual book in his lap. He was four. He couldn’t read yet, not fully, but he studied the pages with silver eyes that tracked the text with the same intensity Solomon applied to intelligence reports.
Edgar the Third perched on his knee, and boy and bird maintained a companionable silence that would’ve been unsettling if it weren’t so profoundly Solomon.
“Hi, Mama.” He didn’t look up.
“Hi, baby. What are you reading?”
“Papa’s war book.”
“Which papa?”
“The one who doesn’t say yes to everything.”
Solomon. Obviously.
Percius was nowhere visible. This was standard. Percius operated on the principle that if you couldn’t see him, you couldn’t stop him, and he applied this philosophy to everything from stealing kitchen scraps to attempting to ride Nox at full gallop through the Great Hall.
“Percy.” I found my mate in the courtyard archway, leaning against the stone with his arms crossed and a grin that told me he knew exactly where Percius was and had decided to let the chaos unfold. “Where is your son?”
“Which one?”
“The one who’s missing.”
“He’s not missing, don’t worry.”
A crash from inside the castle was followed by a shriek that was more excitement than distress and Nox bolting through the archway with Percius on his back. The boy’s fists tangled in the shadow hound’s mane, his face split by a grin so wide it showed every tooth.
“I’m riding!” Percius announced.
“You’re grounded,” I said.
“You can’t ground me. I’m a prince!”
“I’m the queen. I outrank you. Get off the hound.”
He dismounted with grudging acceptance. Nox immediately lay down and rested his massive head on Percius’s feet, tail wagging, an accomplice with zero remorse.
Solomon appeared from the study. Solian’s book, I now realized, was one Solomon had left on the lower shelf deliberately, testing whether the boy would reach for it. He caught my eye across the courtyard and his mouth shifted by approximately two millimeters.
“Your son is reading your war correspondence,” I said.
“He’s reviewing historical records.”
“He’s a kid.”
“Solian is precocious. Age is irrelevant.”
“You left that book there on purpose.”
The smile didn’t waver. “The placement was coincidental.”
“You are cultivating a tiny version of yourself.”
Lucian descended the main staircase into the courtyard. The king of Veyndral, dressed in council attire, obsidian crown catching the fading light, looking every inch the ruler of an ancient kingdom. Mireille saw him and launched herself off the wall without warning.
My heart stopped.
Lucian caught her, opened his arms mid-step and absorbed his daughter’s free fall as though it was their routine. Mireille wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her apple-sticky face to his cheek.
“Papa, I sat on the wall but Mama said get down.”
“Mama is correct.”
“But you said...”
“I said you could sit on the bench. The wall is not the bench.”
“It’s a tall bench.”
Lucian looked at me over Mireille’s copper head. I raised an eyebrow. He raised one back. Our daughter, balanced on his hip, watched the exchange with the focused interest of a child who was learning, very early, exactly how to play her parents against each other.
“She gets that from you,” Lucian said.
“She gets the climbing from you.”
He crossed the courtyard and kissed me. Brief, possessive, the automatic gesture of a man who’d been waiting for me to come home and marked my return the same way every time.
The bond vibrated between all four of us: Lucian’s steady gold, Solomon’s silver current, Percy’s warm amber. And mine, copper-threaded and wolf-bright, woven through theirs.
The evening gathered around us. Dinner was a catastrophe.
Mireille refused anything green. Solian ate in silence while studying the table’s grain pattern.
Percius fed half his plate to Nox under the table and thought no one noticed.
Percy burned the pancakes and I ate them with genuine pleasure while Lucian watched with an expression of aristocratic suffering.
After, when the children were in bed, Mireille’s hand in Lucian’s, Percius sprawled across Nox’s back, Solian already asleep with Edgar the Third perched on his headboard, the four of us stood on the balcony where I’d been crowned.
The kingdom spread before us, torches dotting the streets, wolves running the forest perimeter, the eternal hum of a civilization that had existed for a thousand years in isolation.
“The council approved the resolution today,” Lucian said.
I looked at him. Solomon’s posture shifted beside me. Percy leaned forward on the railing.
“Veyndral will open its borders,” Lucian continued. “Formally. To Lytopia and the allied kingdoms. To the human world. Trade, diplomacy, cultural exchange. The isolation ends.”
A thousand years.
A kingdom built by refugees who’d hidden from a world that hunted them, protected by mountains and mist and stubborn independence that separation meant safety.
Now, because of a war that had exposed the cost of that separation, a cure that had healed the damage, and a human woman who’d walked through a portal and refused to let two worlds stay divided, the doors were opening.
“Scared?” Percy asked.
“Terrified,” Lucian admitted. “But it’s time.”
Solomon said nothing. His hand found mine on the railing, squeezing once.
I looked at the kingdom.
At the three men standing beside me who’d started as mysterious firefighters in a small town and turned out to be the other half of my heartbeat.
The world stretched beyond the mountains, human and lycan and everything in between, waiting for a bridge that had taken a thousand years to build.
“I used to hide,” I said. “From anything that might hurt me if I stood still long enough for it to find me.” The pendant caught the starlight. “But now, I stopped hiding,” I said.
Percy’s arm settled around my waist. Lucian’s hand found the small of my back. Solomon’s grip tightened on my fingers.
“Veyndral hid too,” I said. “For a thousand years. And now it’s stepping into the light, the same way I did. Scared, ready. Choosing to be seen.”
The Glowwood pulsed and the sea glimmered. Somewhere in the castle behind us, Percius murmured in his sleep and Mirielle adjusted her position and Solian slept peacefully.
I leaned into my mates. All three of them.
The bond carried us in a current that would run for centuries, connecting a bookshop owner from Ashvale to a king, an enforcer, a knight and three children.
To a kingdom that was about to discover what the rest of the world had to offer.
The doors open tomorrow.
Finally, I am home.
THE END