He set the tablet on the bench between us.
“The rogue that killed my parents. October twelfth, fourteen years ago. I memorized that date when I was eleven years old.” His throat moved. “There’s a Purifier trial logged six weeks before it. The containment failure is documented. Subject designation PF-19. Released into the northern corridor, same geographic zone as my parents’ farm.”
The training room was quiet. Just the ventilation overhead and the sound of a man’s world restructuring itself around a truth he couldn’t unfeel.
“They made it.” Wyatt pressed his palms flat against the bench on either side of the tablet. “The Order created the wolf that killed my mother and father. Then they showed up at the grouphome where I’d been placed, told me lycans were monsters, and asked if I wanted to fight back.”
I didn’t touch him. Didn’t reach out or offer comfort. Wyatt wasn’t a man who needed comfort right now. He needed space to be furious, and he needed someone who wouldn’t flinch when the fury hit.
“I was seventeen.” His voice cracked on the number. Just the edge, before he sealed it back. “I’d been in the system for three years. No family. No direction. And they gave me both. A purpose and a home. All I had to do was hate the right enemy.”
“Wyatt.”
“Fourteen years.” He looked at me. His eyes were dry but the devastation behind them was total. “I’ve killed for them, Mira. Missions I volunteered for because I believed I was protecting people from the monsters that took my parents. And every single one of those missions was built on a lie they designed.”
The silence stretched between us. I let it.
Then Wyatt straightened off the bench. Squared his shoulders. Folded the devastation into a compartment and locked it with the discipline the Order had trained into him, which was its own kind of cruelty.
“What do you need me to do?”
Six words. The same ones I’d been waiting for since I planted the seed in our training session. But hearing them out loud, watching a man dismantle his entire identity and rebuild ittoward me in the span of minutes, the weight of it pressed against my ribs.
“I need people,” I said. “Hunters inside who’ll turn when the moment comes. Not in weeks. In days.”
“I know who to talk to.”
“How many?”
“Three for certain. Reese, Damon, and Kaia.” He didn’t hesitate. He’d already been thinking about this. “Reese lost a sister to a rogue attack. Same pipeline pattern. Damon’s been questioning the sublevel protocols for months, asking why we keep wolves in cages instead of killing them. And Kaia...” He paused. “Kaia just doesn’t trust Thiago. Gut instinct. She’s been keeping her distance.”
“Can you bring them to me? Tonight?”
“Give me two hours.”
He picked up the tablet and walked toward the door. Halfway there, he stopped.
“The wolf that killed my parents.” His back was to me. “PF-19. Is it still alive?”
The question sat between us with the weight of fourteen years.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But if it is, it’s not the enemy. It was a victim too.”
Wyatt didn’t respond. His hand found the door handle, and he left the training room without looking back.
He brought them at midnight.
Three hunters in a storage room off the eastern corridor, sitting on supply crates while I laid out the evidence on a tablet propped against a water jug. Wyatt stood beside the door with his arms crossed, watching their faces reading the data in real time.
Reese was the first to break. Twenty-two, freckles across her nose, hands that shook when I showed her the recruitment pattern matched to her sister’s death. She pressed those hands flat against her knees and breathed through it with a control that said she’d been taught to manage grief by the same people who caused it.
Damon took longer. Thirty, built solid, the skeptic of the group. He challenged every data point until Wyatt pulled up the raw archive files and let him cross-reference them himself. The moment Damon’s skepticism collapsed was visible. A shift behind his eyes, the ground falling away beneath a man who’d trusted the floor.
Kaia said the least. Mid-twenties, dark hair pulled back tight, and an expression that never fully opened. She studied the evidence, studied me, studied Wyatt, and after fifteen minutes asked a single question.
“When?”
“Days,” I said. “Not weeks.”
