The cup slipped from my fingers.
Pain exploded in my abdomen. Not the dull ache of pregnancy fatigue or the cramping from overexertion. This was targeted, precise, a burning that radiated outward from my core and wrapped around my belly with a viciousness that drove the air from my lungs.
I screamed.
The sound tore through the tent and into the camp beyond. My hands flew to my stomach and the three heartbeats beneath my palms stuttered, faltered, the rhythm disrupted by whatever was working through my bloodstream.
The bond channels surged. Three frequencies spiking at once, alarm and fury and terror flooding through the network as every alpha connected to me felt the pain hit.
My body doubled over. Vision blurred at the edges and the tent entrance swam.
Two figures stood in the gap where the flap had been pushed aside. Tall. Female. One with dark hair and aristocratic posture, the other with close-cropped hair and the build of a soldier.
Watching.
I blinked and they were gone.
The pain crested.
My knees gave out and I collapsed onto the bedroll, curling around my stomach, around the three lives inside me whose heartbeats were growing fainter beneath the burning.
“Farmon,” I gasped. The word barely made it past my teeth. “Someone... the tea...”
My vision narrowed to a pinpoint.
From somewhere outside, distant and muffled and getting farther away, Lucian’s voice. Shouting my name. The command register gone, replaced by something raw and broken that I’d never heard from a king.
“Mira!”
The last thing I registered before the darkness took me was the cup on its side, the herbal liquid pooling in the dirt, and the absurd, furious thought that punched through the agony.
I really needed to stop stupidly drinking tea.
66
— • —
Lucian
The ache registered before the pain did.
I paused mid-sentence with Voss, my hand stalling over the perimeter map.
Then every channel in my body ignited at once.
Percy’s frequency spiked red. Solomon’s shattered its controlled silence. And Mira’s, the channel that had been blazing whole for less than ten minutes, flooded with an agony so precise my composure evaporated.
Her scream reached me a second later. Tearing across the camp from the command tent, cutting through every conversation and every soldier and hitting my chest with a force that buckled the centuries of control I’d built my reign on.
“Mira!”
The word ripped out of me before my legs caught up. Voss called my name but I was already gone, sprinting across the clearing with every instinct in my body howling a single note.
Fuck. It was wrong. It felt fucking wrong.
I tore through the tent flap and the world reduced to the image on the ground.
Mira.
