Thiago’s voice from the radio was warm, paternal. The voice of a horrible man wrapped in the language of a caring father.
Mira pressed the transmit button. “Quiet. No activity past the tree line. I walked the full route at oh-six-hundred.” She smiled while she said it. The practiced, perfect smile.
Her eyes found mine across the clearing.
“Good. Wyatt mentioned you’ve been improving on the hand-to-hand drills. Said you dropped him twice last session.”
“He’s being generous. Once and a half.”
“Don’t sell yourself short.”A pause. Pride in his voice, genuine and misplaced and nauseating.“I need you ready for the next rotation. We’re shifting the perimeter grid south and I want you running point on sector four.”
“I’ll study the new grid tonight.” Her gaze stayed locked on mine while she spoke to the man who’d destroyed my father’s hands. The man whose organization had driven a wedge through my bond and sent me into a rejection I’d spend the rest of my life atoning for.
She was looking at me and talking to him and the dual reality of it settled into my chest with a weight that recalibrated everything.
“That’s my girl. Stay alert out there, little bird.”
“Always, Dad.”
The radio went silent. Mira set it down and the smile collapsed. The muscles in her face simply released the performance, and what remained underneath was the exhaustion of a woman maintaining two identities while growing three children.
She caught me still watching.
“Stop looking at me with that expression.”
“What expression?”
“The one where you’re calculating how many bones you’d break in Thiago’s body if you were in the same room.”
“Two hundred and six. I’ve already decided the sequence.”
Her mouth moved to a smile. The real one, small and involuntary, the version she rationed because giving it freely still felt dangerous.
Training rotations began after breakfast. Wyatt ran the hunters through formations near the eastern tree line. Percival joined them, the rapport he’d built over the past days turning drills into collaborative exercises rather than hostile proximity tests.
Mira moved to the sparring area. Stretching, warming up, the combat fundamentals Wyatt had drilled into her at the compound now visible in the economy of her movements.
Giselle appeared at the edge of the clearing.
She’d been running perimeter for an hour. Her amber eyes tracked Mira’s warmup with a professional assessment that carried personal weight.
“Your guard drops on the left pivot,” Giselle said.
Mira glanced up. The two women regarded each other across ten feet of cleared ground with the particular attention of femaleswho understood each other’s threat level without needing to discuss it.
“It does,” Mira agreed.
“Wyatt hasn’t corrected it because he compensates for you instead of forcing the adjustment.”
“You noticed that from the perimeter?”
“I notice everything about how the people in this camp fight. It’s my job.”
A beat. Giselle stepped onto the sparring ground.
“I can show you the correction. If you want.”
The offer was professional but the undertone was not.
