The containment level opened into a wider room at the corridor’s end. Control station. Monitors. A chair in the center.
Thiago sat in the chair.
Rocking it on its back legs, casual, his eyes on the ceiling. The gun in his right hand dangled at his side, barrel pointed at the floor, and his left hand rested on his knee with the relaxed posture of a man waiting for a meeting he’d scheduled himself.
Mira was on the floor beside him. Hands bound behind her back with zip ties with a gag in the mouth. A bruise darkening on her cheek. Her jacket torn at the shoulder. She was conscious, eyes burning, but the gun’s proximity to her head kept her still.
My entire body ignited.
“Ah.” Thiago lowered his gaze from the ceiling and looked at us. The smile spread slowly, warm, paternal, as wrong on his face as a funeral in sunlight. “There they are. Record time, boys. I’m impressed.”
Lucian’s growl filled the corridor. Unbroken, the sound of a king’s wolf pressing against human skin, demanding release.
“I have to say,” Thiago continued, rocking the chair forward until all four legs touched the ground, “the pregnancy was a surprise. Not an unwelcome one, though. Three lycan offspring.” His eyes moved to Mira’s belly. “Thank you for the new research subjects.”
I lunged.
Lucian moved at the same second. Solomon a heartbeat after. We were crossing the distance between the door and the chair with singular intent.
Thiago cocked the gun and pressed it to Mira’s temple.
We stopped.
Every muscle in my body screaming forward while my feet cemented themselves to the concrete. Mira’s eyes met mine. Steady, furious. Telling me a message I couldn’t read because the panic was louder than the meaning.
“There it is.” Thiago hadn’t flinched. “The mating bond. The most elegant leash ever designed by nature. Three of the most dangerous wolves, and all I need is one gun and one girl to keep them on their heels.”
“Take the gun off her,” Lucian said. Every word pulled from somewhere deep and controlled.
“Or what? You’ll kill me? You’ll try, certainly. But the bullet moves faster than any of you, and you know it.” He pressed the barrel harder against Mira’s temple. She didn’t close her eyes. “So we’re going to have a conversation instead.”
“We’re not here to talk,” Solomon said.
“You’re here because she fired a flare and your biology did the rest. Predictable. Exploitable.” Thiago stood from the chair, gun still pressed to Mira’s head. “Did she tell you about her mother?”
Nobody answered.
“Sienna was brilliant. The most gifted researcher even amongst legacies. Her work on lycan physiology advanced our understanding by decades. And she repaid that investment by spending six months sneaking into a prisoner’s cell, fabricating medical records, redirecting compound resources, and ultimately helping a lycan escape through the tunnels beneath this facility.”
He stopped circling. Faced us.
“My wife. In his cell. Night after night. And when I discovered the truth, she chose him. The wolf over her husband. Over her daughter. Over everything we’d built.”
Farmon’s voice surfaced in my memory. A conversation by the fire during one of the preparation nights, his ruined hands wrapped around a cup, his eyes fixed on a distance that spanned twenty-four years.
“He convinced himself it was an affair,” Farmon had said. “Because he needed a reason to make us evil and Sienna’s sympathy a sin. It was easier to call it betrayal than to accept that his wife simply had a conscience.”
Thiago was confirming every word.
The jealousy contorted his features into a mask that he wore as righteousness, and the man standing in front of us believed, truly believed, that helping a tortured prisoner escape was an act of romantic betrayal rather than basic decency.
“I killed her,” Thiago said. Matter-of-fact. No remorse, no triumph. A data point. “And I told our six-year-old daughter that monsters were responsible. Which, in a sense, they were. Sienna became a monster the day she chose a wolf over her own family.”
Mira’s jaw clenched. The zip ties cut into her wrists.
“But her death gave me a gift. Her research. Her formula. Twenty years of data that she’d gathered. I refined it. Perfected it.” He gestured at the cells around us. “The Purifier.”
“You turned people into weapons,” I said.
