“Strong fundamentals. Quick learner.” Wyatt stood. Professional. “She’s having an off day physically but her technique is coming along.”
Thiago nodded, then turned to me with the smile I’d been cataloging for weeks. The warm one. The fatherly one. The one that saidI care about youwhile his eyes calculated a different angle entirely.
“Your mother had the same natural ability,” he said. “Sienna could outshoot half my team within a month of training. It’s in your blood, Mira.”
I stood, wiping my face with a towel. “You keep saying that.”
“Because it’s true. She was brilliant. Her research into lycan physiology advanced our understanding by decades.” He stepped closer. Lowered his voice, the way he did when he wanted intimacy instead of instruction. “She believed that knowledge was the best weapon. She would have wanted you to carry that forward.”
Every time he invoked my mother, he wrapped the Order’s work in her memory so rejecting one meant rejecting the other. I’d watched him do it for weeks now, peeling back the layers of my defenses with a dead woman’s name.
The worst part was that it worked.
Not the Order recruitment. That was transparent. But the hunger for information about Sienna, the woman who’d given birth to me and died before I could form a single memory of her face. That hunger was real and Thiago knew exactly how to feed it.
“I’d like to see her research,” I said. “The actual files. Not summaries.”
“Soon.” He touched my shoulder. “When you’re ready.”
When I’ve been conditioned enough to read them through the right lens, I translated silently. But I smiled and nodded because that was the playbook.
Thiago left. Wyatt watched him go and I couldn’t quite read his expression.
“You good to continue?” Wyatt asked.
“Yeah. Just give me a minute.”
The minute turned into fifteen. My stomach wouldn’t settle and the nausea had migrated upward into my throat. Not a bad day. A pattern.
***
The medical bay was quiet during lunch hour.
I’d timed it. Three weeks of eating meals in the cafeteria had taught me exactly when each section of the compound emptied. The staff took their break between twelve and one. Dr. Elaine usually stayed late, finishing paperwork.
She looked up when I knocked. Mid-fifties, graying hair pulled back, the kind of face that had seen too much to be surprised by anything.
“Mira. Training injury?”
“Nausea.” I stayed in the doorway. “It’s been a few days. I just need meds to settle my stomach.”
“Sit down, let me take a look.”
“I don’t need a look. I need meds.”
Elaine studied me over her glasses. “You’re pale. Have you been eating?”
“When I can keep it down.”
“Any dizziness? Fatigue?”
“Both. Which is why I’d love the meds before my next session.” I kept my voice light. The same voice I’d used on people when I needed them to stop asking questions. “Wyatt said a virus has been going around the lower barracks. Probably caught it during training.”
Elaine didn’t move. The assessing look stayed for a beat too long, and I could see the gears turning behind her eyes. Doctor’s instinct, maybe. Or just the observation skills of someone who’d spent fifteen years in a compound full of trained liars.
“I’ll give you an antiemetic,” she said finally. “If it persists past the week, come back. I’ll want bloodwork.”
“Deal.”
