The archive room was behind the study, through a door I hadn’t noticed during my first visit. Climate-controlled, rows of filing cabinets and shelved boxes marked with dates. Thiago navigated with the familiarity of a man who’d spent years organizing this collection.
He didn’t start with history. He started with her.
“Your mother was the Order’s chief researcher,” he said, pulling a file with the care of a man handling a sacred text. “Brilliant. Dedicated. She believed in what we do.” He set the file on the table. “She was working in our east wing facility when they breached the perimeter.”
Inside: an incident report. Photographs of a lab, overturned equipment, claw marks gouged into the walls. And a journal. Handwritten entries in the neat penmanship of a researcher accustomed to lab notes.
‘They’re closer. I can hear them at night. T says the security will hold, but I’ve seen what these creatures can do. If they breach the facility, none of us will survive.’
My mother’s handwriting. Or what Thiago presented as my mother’s handwriting. I had no reference point to verify.
“A lycan who’d escaped our custody broke out the facility.” Thiago’s voice had lost its strategic smoothness and arrived at a register that sounded, for the first time, genuinely human. “A prisoner we’d been studying. Feral. Vengeful.”
The wordescapedsnagged in my brain, but Thiago kept talking.
“We found her in the east corridor. She’d tried to run.” He closed his eyes for a half-second. When they opened, the grief looked almost real. “You were barely a year old. She’d left you with a caretaker that morning. If she’d brought you to the facility that day...”
He let the sentence hang. The implication was clear. My mother died in a building where they studied lycans, killed by a lycan who’d broken free, and the only reason I survived was the accident of a schedule.
I closed the file.
“This escaped prisoner,” I said. “What was his name?”
Thiago’s expression shifted. Barely perceptible, the slight tightening around the eyes.
“The records identify him as a male lycan of significant rank. We never recovered a name from our files, but the evidence suggested he held a position of considerable authority in their hierarchy.” His voice dropped. “He destroyed our facility’s east wing during the breach and killed four of our people, including your mother. Then he vanished. We’ve been looking for him for twenty-four years.”
The description was specific enough to paint a picture but vague enough to leave room. Thiago wasn’t giving me a name because giving me a name would let me verify. And verification was the last thing he wanted.
I filed it. The way I filed everything in this compound. Quietly. For later.
“I need a minute,” I said.
“Take all the time you need.” He stepped back. Just enough to give me the illusion of space while maintaining proximity.
I stood at that table and thought about Lucian. His formal cadence and his trembling hands and the way he’d looked at me before he said the words that ended us. Solomon, who’d gone first, who’d met my eyes. Percival, who’d turned his head because he couldn’t look at me and say it at the same time.
They were lycans. Their species had killed people. Had killed my mother, if Thiago was telling the truth.
And they’d hurt me.
Maybe not with claws but with words. With the decision to collapse our bond because a council of strangers deemed my blood too dangerous.
The doubt didn’t crash over me. It crept in. Finding the cracks the rejection had left and widening them with questions I didn’t have answers to.
Were they different? Maybe. Did it matter? I wasn’t sure anymore.
“Ms. Maxwell?”
The voice came from the doorway. Not Thiago’s. I turned.
A man stood at the threshold, mid-twenties, tall enough that the doorframe framed him with authority he didn’t seem to notice. Sandy brown hair fell across his forehead in a way that suggested he’d stopped trying to control it years ago.
He wore tactical pants and a fitted shirt, the same quasi-military aesthetic as the compound guards, but his posture was different. Still, grounded, with the quiet awareness of someone who’d catalogued the room before he’d finished his sentence.
“Sorry to interrupt.” His eyes moved from me to Thiago and back. “You said to come by at ten.”
“Mira, this is Wyatt,” Thiago said, circling back into the room. “One of our best field operatives.”
