He nodded once. Turned back to his screen.
We were seventeen minutes into the prep when the door opened.
Thiago walked in.
The measured stride of a man entering a room he’d expected to find occupied. He wore the tactical vest he favored during compound rounds, sidearm holstered, silver hair combed back. The patient expression and the fatherly warmth.
“Interesting place for a meeting,” he said.
My hands were still on the keyboard. Wyatt’s were frozen mid-keystroke. The screen behind me showed the grid’s routing architecture, half-stripped of its redundancy protocols, displayed in full for anyone standing at the door to read.
“It’s not what it looks like,” I said.
“No?”
“We were...” My brain sprinted through options and landed on the worst possible one. Which made it the most believable. “Wyatt and I were trying to find somewhere private.”
Wyatt’s head turned toward me with an expression of a man watching his own execution being scheduled.
“Private,” Thiago repeated.
“We didn’t want people to talk.” I forced heat into my cheeks. Looked at the floor. “It’s embarrassing.”
Thiago studied me. Then Wyatt. Then the terminals with their exposed wiring and half-executed commands.
“Ah.” The warmth returned to his face. Indulgent. The father catching his daughter in a minor scandal. “I did wonder, when the logs showed your keycard accessing the lower sublevel at this hour.”
He believed it. The tension in his shoulders eased a fraction. He shook his head, almost amused, and I could’ve collapsed with relief.
“The heart wants what it wants,” he said. “Though I’d suggest finding a more romantic venue. Server rooms lack ambiance.”
He gestured for us to stand. Casual, almost dismissive.
We stood.
The gunshot was so close the sound didn’t register as a gunshot. Just a crack that split the room in half and a burst of red from Wyatt’s side that sent him crashing into the terminal behind him.
Wyatt hit the floor. His hand went to his abdomen, fingers pressing against the wound, blood spreading through his shirt in a pattern that my brain cataloged with numb precision. His eyes were wide. Shocked. Still conscious.
I lunged toward him.
“Don’t.” Thiago’s voice hadn’t changed. Same warmth and patience. The gun in his hand was still raised, barrel pointing at the space Wyatt’s body had occupied a second ago. “Stay where you are, sweetheart.”
“He needs medical...”
“He needs to understand consequences. As do you.” Thiago tilted his head. “Did you think I didn’t know? About Wyatt? About Kaia, Damon, Reese? About your rotations through the tunnel? About every word you’ve fed him and every word he’s fed back to you?”
My blood turned cold.
“The surveillance systems in this compound predate your birth, Mira. I watched every conversion. Every whispered plan. Every time you crawled through my drainage tunnels and thought you were clever.”
The grid. The terminals. Wyatt’s intel about rotation schedules and monitoring gaps. All of it filtered through whatever Thiago wanted me to believe. Every step I’d taken since the first rotation was a step he’d measured and allowed.
“You thought you were ahead of me.” He lowered the gun slightly. His eyes dropped to my stomach and stayed there.
The indulgent expression calcified into a stillness I hadn’t seen before.
“Elaine mentioned her suspicions weeks ago. I dismissed them. Wishful thinking from a doctor who sees pregnancies everywhere.” His gaze moved over my body with the clinical detachment of a man reassessing data. “But you’re showing now, aren’t you? The weight. The glow. The way you kept dodging bloodwork.”
