“Like you actually hated me,” she continued. “A task to be handled. Efficiently.”
“You’re right.”
The admission came before I could soften it. No deflection. No strategic framing.
“It wasn’t cold. It was worse than cold. I was angry, and I directed it at you because the alternative was directing it at myself.” My hands curled at my sides.
“My father went on an expedition here twenty-four years ago and never returned. I realized it might be The Order, as crazy as it was. I had to be angry at something, anything. I thought he was dead and killed.”
I took a step toward her. She didn’t retreat.
“When the council ordered the rejection, every wound I’d ever carried from the Order tore open. And you...” My voice faltered. “You carry hunter blood. Your father was part of the organization that took mine. The logic was poisoned, Mira, but it was the only logic my grief understood. All I could see was the bloodline.”
Her eyes were shining. She held the tears back through what looked like an act of pure will.
“So I was angry. At you, for making me love you. At myself, for not being strong enough to separate you from it.” My voice dropped. “I made you feel hated by the person you depended on. That is the worst thing I’ve ever done, and I have done terrible things.”
A tear slipped down her cheek. She wiped it away with the back of her hand, fast, angry at herself for letting it fall.
“But you have nothing to do with that. And he was alive after all. He saved us this morning.”
Her mouth opened, closed. “That was your father?”
“He’s been hiding near this compound for over a decade. Watching the Order. Gathering intelligence.” I paused.
Mira’s gaze shifted. She didn’t say anything.
“These hunters are evil, Solomon.” Her voice was different now. Stripped of the anger, left with the exhaustion underneath.
“I’ve seen the sublevels. I’ve seen what they do to your people.” She wrapped her arms around herself again. “And my mother worked here. I found her journal tonight and the first page was her questioning everything this place stands for.”
She was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t categorize. A rawness that had no name, the face of a woman standing between two versions of the truth and trying to find solid ground.
I crossed the remaining distance between us. Her chin tilted up. My hand came to her face, thumb tracing the hollow beneath her eye where the dark circles lived.
“You should have eaten today,” I said.
She laughed. Broken, wet, catching in her throat. “That’s what you’re going with? I bare my soul and you comment on my nutrition?”
“Someone has to.”
“God, you’re insufferable.”
“I know.”
She kissed me.
Her mouth hit mine with the accumulated fury of weeks of betrayal and isolation, her fingers fisting in the front of my tactical vest, pulling me down to her height.
My hands found her waist. Lifted her onto the edge of Thiago’s desk.
Papers scattered. A pen holder toppled. The framed photograph of her parents slid sideways and I didn’t care. Mira’s legs parted to make room for me and her hands were already dragging the zipper of my vest down, shoving the tactical layer off my shoulders.
“This is my father’s desk,” she breathed against my mouth.
“I’m aware.”
“Good. He’d hate this.”
