My hand drifted toward my belly unconsciously.
“Lycan children,” he said. The words came out measured, tasted, as if he were testing their composition. “Inside my daughter.”
“Don’t.”
“The first lycan offspring born in human custody. Do you understand what that means? What can be learned from them? From you?”
The warmth was gone now. Replaced by the focus of a man who’d spent his life studying a species he wanted to eradicate, and who’d just discovered a new specimen.
“Your mother gave me twenty years of research when she helped that wolf escape. The guilt, the surveillance, the control. All of it fed data I couldn’t have gathered otherwise. And now you’re giving me lives I can study from conception.”
“You’re insane.”
“I’m a scientist. There’s a difference.”
I bolted.
Not toward the door. Thiago was blocking it. Toward the maintenance corridor behind the server racks, the secondary exit that Wyatt had shown me during our first grid session, the one that connected to the eastern stairwell.
Thiago’s laugh followed me through the gap between the servers. Not a villain’s laugh. Worse. A father’s. Tired, almost fond, the sound of a man watching his child make a predictable mistake.
“Where are you going to go, Mira? The eastern exits are sealed. The tunnels are locked. Every door in this compound answers to me.”
I hit the stairwell. Took the steps two at a time, legs burning, my belly pulling me off-balance with every stride. The babies kicked in protest, three tiny objections to their mother’s cardio choices.
Second floor. Third floor. The stairwell opened onto a corridor that ran the compound’s eastern wing, and at the far end,the observation balcony that overlooked the training courtyard. Open air. Direct sightline to the sky.
I crashed through the balcony door. Cold pre-dawn air hit my face and the compound spread beneath me, concrete and chain-link and the forest beyond.
Footsteps behind me followed in multiple sets.
I turned. Thiago stood in the balcony doorway. Behind him, two hunters with rifles raised. The guns tracked my center mass with professional steadiness.
“Step away from the railing,” Thiago said. “We can discuss this reasonably.”
“Reasonably.” My hand was in my jacket pocket.
My fingers closed around the flare gun I’d carried through the tunnel, through the service entrance, through every rotation for the past month. The weight of it was a promise.
“You shot Wyatt. You want to experiment on my children. Your definition of reasonable needs work.”
“Put your hands where I can see them.”
I pulled the flare gun from my jacket. Held it with both hands. Pointed it directly at Thiago.
His expression didn’t flinch. He assessed the weapon, assessed the distance, assessed the two rifles behind him that could drop me before I pulled the trigger.
“You can’t fire at all three of us before one of them fires back,” he said. “You know that.”
My arms were steady. The wind cut across the balcony and pushed my hair into my eyes and I didn’t blink.
“Who says I’m shooting you?”
I raised the flare gun above my head and pulled the trigger.
The red charge screamed into the dawn sky. A streak of fire that punched through the gray morning and hung above the compound, burning, visible from the forest and the tree line and the camp beyond.
Thiago’s face changed. The composure, the patience, the calculated warmth. All of it fell away, and what remained was the raw fury of a man who’d designed a chessboard and just watched a pawn flip the table.
