“You need to leave,” Mira said. The urgency was back but the hostility wasn’t. The shift was small, barely perceptible to anyone.
I stood to get dressed. Checked the corridor through the gap beneath the door.
Mira was watching me.
“We need to meet,” she said, rebuilding the mask that made my chest ache. “All four of us. There’s too much that none of us have the full picture. I’m tired of fighting this war in fragments.”
“Where?”
“I’ll find a way to get out. Give me two days.” She picked up the journal and held it against her chest. “Two days, Solomon. Then I want all three of you in front of me.”
I nodded. Opened the window. The night breeze hit my face and the sounds of the compound settling back into order filled the gap between us.
“Solomon.”
I turned.
“Don’t mistake what happened on this desk for forgiveness.”
Her eyes held mine.
“I wouldn’t dare,” I said.
I dropped into the darkness and disappeared.
47
— • —
Mira
My inner thighs were going to be the death of my cover story.
Every lunge Wyatt called sent a reminder screaming through muscles that had been used in ways combat training didn’t account for. The soreness ran deep and every time I shifted my weight, my body delivered a very specific flashback of Solomon’s hands sinfully gripping my hips.
Fantastic life choices, Mira.Really stellar decision-making. The man rejects you, you stab his king, and then you let him bend you over your crazy father’s desk in a compound full of people who want their kind dead.
If there was an award for worst coping mechanisms, I’d win it every year.
Every romance novel I’d ever shelved had a version of this scene. The heroine sleeps with the man who broke her heart and then has to pretend her legs work the next morning. I used to judge those characters. Karma was a spectacular bitch.
I forced myself through another drill.
The nausea was better. That was the infuriating part.
Whatever the desk encounter had done to the muted bond, it had loosened the stranglehold the rejection and pregnancy had on my body. The morning sickness had dialed back. My hands were steadier. The veins on my forearms looked less translucent.
Solomon’s proximity had done what the herbs and the willpower couldn’t. My body responded to his and the babies responded to the bond, and the result was the first morning in weeks where I could stand up without bracing against a wall.
I hated how much I needed that. I hated that the relief came attached to a man who’d rejected me. It drives me insane and wounds my pride.
“Mira. You’re favoring your right side.” Wyatt adjusted his guard and circled. “Shift your weight. Whatever’s tight, work through it.”
“Just slept wrong.”
“You’ve been sleeping wrong a lot lately.”
“Bad mattress. Foam here has the give of a concrete slab.”
