“She was sneaking you better care,” I said. “Under the guise of research.”
“For months. She fabricated proposals, manipulated dosage records, redirected supplies. All while maintaining theappearance of a loyal researcher and leader. All while raising a newborn.” A pause. “She was extraordinary.”
My throat tightened. I pressed the journal harder against my chest.
“The escape plan came together fast. She prepared the escape route herself. Everything. Even the exact window needed to move a weakened lycan through a half-mile drainage system without detection.”
Farmon’s hands rested on his knees, palms up, open.
“The night of the breach, she sedated two guards, disabled the sublevel alarms, and walked me out through the tunnels.”
The same tunnels.
Over two decades apart, mother and daughter crawling through the same concrete and rust for the same reason: because the compound couldn’t be allowed to keep doing what it was doing.
“She made it to the eastern exit. Got me to the tree line. I was too weak to shift but I could walk, barely. She told me which direction to run and how far, and then she went back.”
“Back?”
“There were others. In the cells. She’d promised to create a diversion, trigger the containment breach to cover my escape and give the other captives a chance.” His voice didn’t waver but his hands closed. “Thiago intercepted her in the sublevel corridor. He’d discovered the sedated guards.”
Dread settled in my stomach.
“He killed her,” I said.
Farmon held my gaze. “I didn’t learn the details until years later. What I know is that the containment breach occurred, several captives escaped in the chaos, and Sienna did not survive the night. Thiago reported it as a lycan attack. He told the compound she’d been killed by the very prisoner she was studying.”
“He told me that too.” My voice came out strange. “He told a six-year-old that monsters killed her mother. Then he dropped me in the foster system and went back to work.”
The nausea hit without warning. Not the pregnancy kind or the bond-deprivation kind. The kind that came from the gut when your body processed a truth your mind couldn’t hold.
My father killed my mother. Staged it, blamed the victim. And then lied to my face about it, using her name against me.
I made it three steps from the fire before my knees buckled and everything I’d eaten came back up. Hands found my hair before it fell forward.
Percival had crossed the clearing without a sound, without a word, and gathered my hair at the nape of my neck while I heaved into the dirt.
He didn’t speak. Just held my hair with one hand and rubbed slow circles on my back with the other. His body remembered how to take care of me even when the rest of him had gone somewhere I couldn’t reach.
When it was over he pressed his palm flat against my spine for a moment, then let go and returned to his oak tree without a single word.
The silence from him was deafening. The Percival I knew would have said a dozen things by now, and the one beside me had said nothing, and the wrongness of it cut through my nausea and landed somewhere deeper.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Sat back on my heels.
Whatever was happening with Percy, it was bad.
I held his gaze long enough to tell him I saw it. He held mine long enough to tell me he wasn’t ready. And I let him have his silence.
Later. We’d get there later.
The information exchange continued. I laid out the evidence from the tablet: sublevel footage, Purifier research data, the death report discrepancies. Farmon confirmed timelines. Solomon cross-referenced with his own intelligence from Veyndral. The picture assembled itself piece by piece, a conspiracy twenty years deep with my father at its center.
Through it all, the nausea receded. The exhaustion eased. Sitting in this clearing with the fire between us and the bond humming through fractured walls, my body was doing what the compound had been starving it of for weeks: healing.
Farmon noticed.
“The pregnancy is bond-dependent,” he said during a lull. “Lycan offspring require sustained proximity to the sires. Prolonged separation causes maternal deterioration. Fatigue, nausea, weight loss, eventually compromised fetal development.”
