The bedroom Thiago gave me was nicer than my room at the cabin. Queen bed with a cream duvet, a nightstand with a single lamp, and a window overlooking the grounds that opened exactly four inches before a latch stopped it. Enough for ventilation. Not enough for escape.
I counted the ceiling tiles. I thought the floor above was Thiago’s office, if the layout I’d memorized during the walk to my room was accurate.
Lycans killed your mother.
The words played on loop. A grinding repetition of a fact that wouldn’t stop rearranging everything I thought I’d already accepted.
My mother was dead. She’d been dead my entire life. That part wasn’t new. I’d grown up with the shape of her absence pressed into every room, every holiday, every school form that asked for a mother’s name and got a blank line instead.
Thiago had never hidden the cause.Monsters,he’d told me when I was old enough to ask.Monsters took her before you could remember.
I’d spent twenty-four years filing that under tragedy. The randomness of the world, the cruelty of chance, the fact that people you loved could be ripped away without reason. I never questioned it because there was never a version of my life where questioning it would have changed the answer.
But Thiago hadn’t been speaking in metaphors. He’d been speaking literally. And the monsters who took my mother were the same species as the three men who’d claimed me, bonded me, and then decided I was expendable.
The muted bond pulsed in the dark. Heartbeats that should have made me feel connected and instead made me feel sick.
The screaming started in the morning at two.
Distant. Muffled through layers of concrete and insulation, buried deep enough beneath the building that I might have missed it if I’d been asleep.
But I wasn’t asleep, and the sound was unmistakable.
It wasn’t pipes, ventilation, or the settling of an old building.
A voice. Anguished, rising and falling for eleven minutes before it stopped.
I lay in the dark and added another entry to the growing list of things this compound was hiding beneath its polished surface.
By the second morning, I’d figured out the rhythm of the place.
It was the old foster kid survival playbook: look lost, harmless, and pay attention to everything.
The south garden had a stone bench near the perimeter wall. I sat there on day two with a cup of coffee I didn’t want, watching shift change happen at six on the dot.
A woman crossed the courtyard, early thirties in tactical gear. She clocked me on the bench and slowed. Not quite stopping. Just enough to look.
“You’re Thiago’s daughter,” she said.
“Unfortunately.”
Her eyes dropped to my throat and the claiming marks. She didn’t bother hiding it. “And you were bonded. To… lycans.”
“Is there a question in there, or are we just stating facts?”
She held my gaze for a beat, then walked on without answering. The judgment hung in the courtyard after she left.
Near the locked building by the tree line, a man saw me coming up the path and stepped aside. Three full feet, his back pressing against the wall.
“Just walking,” I said.
He didn’t answer or look at me again, either.
At the vehicle garage, a younger guy was less subtle. He stared at the marks on my throat while pretending to check a tire pressure gauge he was holding upside down.
“Take a picture,” I said. “It’ll last longer.”
He dropped the gauge.
