“Don’t worry about them. I’m the boss.”
Lucian made a sound that could’ve been a cough or a protest. Mira ignored it.
“Call if you need us,” she said. “I mean it.”
Wyatt nodded. The stretcher bearers resumed their path toward the medical convoy and Mira watched him go, her hand stillextended from the squeeze, fingers curling slowly back into her palm.
“He’s a good man,” she said quietly.
“He got shot for you,” I said. “That earns a baseline of respect.”
“Generous,” Solomon said flatly.
“I didn’t say I liked him. I said I respected him… sort of.”
Mira’s laugh was small and tired and the best sound I’d heard all day.
Farmon found us at the perimeter. He’d come in with Voss’s second wave, and the sight of Mira in my arms pulled a reaction from his face that I’d never seen before: relief so pure it cracked through the careful neutrality he wore. His ruined hands reached for hers and she gripped his fingers and neither of them spoke for ten seconds.
“The creature,” Lucian said to Farmon. “It needs transport to Veyndral. Maximum containment. The silver and wolfsbane knocked it unconscious but we don’t know the duration.”
“I’ll handle it.” Farmon’s eyes hadn’t left Mira. “The freed lycans need processing. Medical evaluation, identification, families notified. Some of them have been down there for years.”
“Take whatever resources you need. Voss answers to you until we return.”
Farmon nodded. Then looked at me. At Mira in my arms. At the bruise on her cheek and the blood on her wrists and the bellypressed against my chest where three heartbeats pulsed steady and strong.
“Thank you, Mira.” He paused, vulnerability in his voice. “You are Sienna’s true legacy.”
Mira gasped and bit her lip, holding back her tears and she couldn’t speak. Just smiled and nodded at Farmon.
“Take her somewhere quiet,” he said. “She’s done enough.”
Mira’s eyes were half-closed. The adrenaline had burned off somewhere between the sublevel stairs and the Wyatt conversation, and what remained was a woman running on willpower and pregnancy hormones and not much else.
“I can rest now,” she mumbled against my shoulder. “That was a very long day.”
“It’s not even noon,” Solomon said.
“Screw time and stupid clocks, I reject it.” She shifted in my arms, getting comfortable with the entitlement of a woman who’d earned the right to be carried for the rest of her natural life. “I want pancakes.”
“Pancakes,” Lucian repeated.
“With peanut butter. And pickles. And that cheese Farmon makes that smells terrible but tastes amazing.”
“That combination might actually be a different kind of war crime,” I said.
“I grew three humans while dismantling a paramilitary organization. I get whatever I want.”
Nobody argued. Not even the king.
Before we left, Lucian spoke with Voss one final time. Solomon ran through a checklist with Farmon that covered containment protocols, evidence preservation, and medical priorities in an order that only Solomon would consider logical.
I stood in the morning sun and held Mira and waited for the two men who’d been my brothers for centuries to finish being responsible so we could go home.
Home.The word landed and stayed.
We left the compound through the eastern tree line. The same path we’d walked her through at dawn, the same trees that had watched us escort her into danger and were now watching us carry her away from it.
