‘Also he doesn’t stand that close. You’re being ridiculous. Focus on your end.’
Getting the note back to him was harder. I couldn’t exactly launch a rock over a twelve-foot perimeter wall. But the eastern training yard bordered the tree line, and the gap between the wall and the nearest camera’s rotation was six seconds.
I tucked the fabric under a specific rock at the base of the wall during my evening walk. If Solomon was watching, and he was always watching, he’d find it.
The rest of the evening was the journal.
Page by page, entry by entry, my mother’s voice growing louder in my head until I could almost hear her speaking the words.
She’d questioned the Order’s methods. She’d advocated for humane treatment. She’d used her position to protect a prisoner and plan his escape and document everything because she’d known, on some level, that the documentation might outlive her.
The death report sat beside the journal on my bed. I’d pulled it from the archive three days ago.
Cause of death: killed during lycan containment breach, sublevel two.
I looked at the journal’s last entry. Then the death report. Containment breach, sublevel two. Same level she’d been sneaking into. Same tunnels she’d mapped for F’s escape.
The breach was her. She’d done it. She’d actually tried to free him.
Did you make it, F? Did she get you out before it all went wrong?
I photographed the report and added it to the growing file on the tablet Wyatt had smuggled me from the medical wing. I didn’t have the full picture yet, it was slowly falling into pieces.
At midnight, the compound settled into its overnight rotation. Reduced patrols, skeleton crew, the guards focused outward toward the perimeter where the real threats supposedly lived.
Wyatt had mapped the patrol gaps for me two weeks ago, back when he thought I needed the information for“personal space during evening walks.”
The eastern service corridor had a nine-minute window between sweeps. The maintenance exit beyond it opened onto a drainage path that connected to the forest two hundred meters from the wall.
My mother had used those same tunnels twenty years ago to save a lycan’s life. I was using them now to save my own.
I packed the journal, the tablet, and the keycard into the inner pockets of my jacket. Pressed both hands to my stomach.
“Okay, you three. Road trip. Try not to make me throw up.”
The bond pulsed. Faint, muted, but there. Three frequencies on the other side of the wall, waiting.
I stepped into the corridor and started walking.
50
— • —
Mira
The forest swallowed me whole the moment I cleared the drainage tunnel.
My feet found the path by instinct, or maybe the bond was doing the navigating because I sure wasn’t.
Every step away from the compound walls loosened a knot in my chest I hadn’t realized was strangling me. My lungs filled deeper. The nausea pulled back. The heartbeats beneath my ribs steadied from their frantic flutter into a calmer rhythm.
The babies knew. Somehow, they knew we were going toward their fathers.
“Traitors,” I muttered. “All three of you. Already picking sides.”
A woman found me at the tree line before I found the camp. Lycan. I’d seen her at the trial but we’d never spoken. She materialized from the shadows as if she’d been tracking my scent.
“This way,” she said. No greeting, no introduction. Just the direction and the expectation that I’d follow.
