Chapter Three

||Mira||

Pain came first.

A deep throb behind my eyes, constant and mean. My stomach lurched before memory did, and then it all came back and I wished it hadn’t.

The club, the drinks, and Kael.

He drugged me. The bastard took advantage of my trust and drugged me.

The thought sat in my chest numb and bitter. He had sat across from me and smiled and handed me a drink and I had taken it because I was an idiot, and now I was wherever this was, and I had no idea how long I’d been out.

I didn’t move. Zane’s voice came up from somewhere in my mind, strong and commanding.

Assess first, then move.

So I lay still and listened.

The silence was wrong. I didn't feel the thin hush of my dorm with city noise bleeding through the walls. This was sealed. As though the outside world had been cut off completely. No traffic. No voices. Not a sound.

I pulled a slow breath in through my nose and I wished I hadn't. The room smelled of dust, old wood, and an acrid chemical trace underneath it all. It was a room that had been closed for a long time.

I opened my eyes to meet total darkness. It was not the kind softened by light under a door. It was the Lunar eclipse kind.

I lay still and waited for my eyes to find anything and my fingers moved first, brushing the surface beneath me. It was old fabric, soft and dusty.

Minutes passed by and shapes came slowly. I first noticed the walls close on both sides, low ceiling. A dresser with no items on it. A chair in the far corner. And across from me, a window boarded up with thick planks nailed flush to the frame, with no gaps and no trace of light.

My stomach turned.

This wasn’t impulsive. Nobody boards up a window in a hurry. Someone had done this in advance. Someone had built this room and then gone and found me.

I sat up too fast. The room lurched and dark spots burst at the edges of my vision. I grabbed the mattress and held on until it passed.

“Damn it.”

My voice came out rough. Whatever he’d given me was still in my system, making my own body feel slow and strange.

Then another thing hit me. My Lycan, Anya.

I reached for her. I didn’t even think about it, I never had to think about it. She had been there every single day of my life, as constant and automatic as breathing. I reached for her the way you reach for the light switch in a room you’ve lived in for years.

The connection came back empty.

My hand flew to my chest.

I pushed harder, reaching into the place inside me where she had always been, the warm familiar space that was hers and had always been hers, and found it empty, as though I had walked into a room and knew before even looking that it had been cleared out.

“Anya?”

No trace of her came back.

I pressed my palm hard against my sternum and sat there and tried to breathe. She had always been there. Even in our worst fights. Even when she went deliberately mute to punish me for some slight. There was always a warmth underneath it, always the sense of her sitting just behind my ribs, sharp and stubborn and alive.

This wasn’t silence. This was absence.

She hadn’t gone mute. She had been taken.

I sat with that for a second. Just a second. Then I pushed it down hard because if I let it out fully, I was going to fall apart in this room, and I refused to do that. Not here. Not for him.

Fear is useful until it drives you, Zane had told me once. The second it takes the wheel, you lose.

So I moved.

I swung my legs off the bed and stood. The floor was bare and icy under my feet. I put one hand against the wall until the room settled, then looked around. I saw no personal items, no books, no pictures, no trace of anyone having ever been here by choice. It didn’t feel lived in. It felt set up.

I crossed to the door and tried the handle.

The door was locked. I pulled harder. The metal rattled against the frame.

“Help.” I hit the door with my palm. “Is anyone out there?”

No answer came.

“Please, help.”

I hit it again.

“Standing like that after waking up isn’t smart.” The voice came from directly behind me. “And no one is coming.”

I froze. My heart skyrocketing. “No.”

I spun. The room tilted. I caught myself against the wall and found him already there, sitting in the corner chair as though he’d been there the whole time.

Because he had been.

He’d sat in the dark while I panicked and called out and pressed my hand to my chest searching for what he’d taken from me. Four feet away, he sat mocking me without a word.

Son of a bitch.

He had the same jaw, the same honey-coloured eyes, the same mouth that had curved into an easy smile at the club. But whatever I’d read as warmth at the Vortex was gone. Completely gone. The man from the club didn’t exist. What was sitting in that chair was colder and harder, handsome the way a predator is handsome. You notice it and you don’t get closer.

I exhaled and demand for an answer.

“Where am I?”

He offered no response.

I pushed the shake out of my voice. “You drug me, bring me God knows where, sit in the dark watching me panic, and you can’t answer one question?”

He gave no answer.

“Is Kael even your real name?”

I made myself walk toward him. My legs wobbled but I moved anyway, one step then another, and stopped a few feet away. I was not going to stand against the wall shaking while he sat there watching me be afraid of him.

“Tell me who you are. Tell me what you want from me. Because I know what this is. You're one of my brothers’ enemies. You found a way to get to them through me. I'm not stupid don't treated me like one.”

A flicker moved in his eyes, almost like amusement.

He stood.

“You’re right,” he said. His voice was timeless and empty of everything except certainty. “I’ve been their enemy longer than they know. No scratch that. I am the enemy they don't know they have.”

A chill moved through me.

“Everything you felt these past months was real.” He took one slow step toward me. “The shadow on the running path. The footsteps behind you. The eyes on your window. The train station.” He paused. “All of that was me.”

I’d known. Part of me had known for months and I’d buried it every single time because knowing meant calling Zander and Zane, and calling them meant losing everything I’d built. But there’s a difference between knowing a truth quietly in the back of your mind and hearing it said out loud in a sealed room.

“You’ve been watching me for six months?” I asked in disbelief.

“Over a year.”

The correction landed in the room and sat there.

He kept moving toward me slowly. “I needed to understand you. Your routine. Your habits. The places you felt safe. Who you trusted. I needed to know how to get to you without your brothers seeing it coming.”

He stopped when the backs of my legs hit the mattress.

My mouth was dry.

“Why me?”

“You’re Mirabel Sloan.” He said my full name with revulsion. “The Alpha’s sister. The one they built walls around. The one they’d burn everything to protect.”

His voice dropped.

“Your brothers took everything from me.” A pause. “My father. My younger brother.” His jaw tightened. “They killed them both.”

“No.” It came out before I could stop it. “My brothers wouldn’t do that.”

He made a short sound like a snort.

“You weren’t there.”

“Neither were you.”

I said it before I could stopped myself and bit my lips.

Because whatever argument I had, the grief on his face was real. Whatever version of the story he carried, whatever was true and whatever wasn’t, the grief underneath it was real. I could see it.

“I buried them both,” he said. “My brother first. Then my father, months later.” Every word controlled and even, which was worse than shouting. “So I made a promise.”

He was close enough now that I could see the tension working through his throat.

“One day, Zane and Zander would know what it means to lose the person they’d tear the world apart to keep alive.” His eyes found mine and held. “That person is you, Mirabel.”

I felt it settle over me. All of it at the same time.

He wasn’t bluffing. There was no rage in it, no desperation. He’d been building toward this for years and he had arrived and he was completely calm about it. That was the most frightening thing in the room.

“They’ll know you’re gone,” he said. “They’ll know they failed you. And they’ll live with that every day.”

I made myself stand straight.

“They’ll find me.”

He nodded once. As though he’d been waiting for that exact answer.

“I know.”

The calm in it was worse than any threat.

He crossed to a small cabinet, came back, and dropped a water bottle and an energy bar on the mattress.

“Eat.”

“I’m not touching anything you —”

He moved fast. Faster than I was ready for. His hand locked around my wrist, icy metal snapped against my skin, the silver links biting in hard, and before I’d finished pulling away he had the other wrist, then my ankles.

The wolfsbane hit my nose a second later and turned my stomach.

“Stop —”

He stepped back. Completely unbothered by my pain.

“The windows are sealed. Guards outside. We’re nowhere near anyone who could hear you.” He picked up his jacket. “Scream if you need to.”

The door clicked shut.

I stared at the ceiling.

My breathing came too fast and then the tears arrived, sudden and hot and humiliating, and I let them come because I was alone and because Anya was gone and because the part of me that was always supposed to be there wasn’t, and for one minute I let myself feel exactly how frightening that was.

Then I stopped.

I reached for Anya one more time. The same hollow silence came back. The second time was worse than the first. It always would be.

I pressed the back of my hand against my face and held it there until the worst of it passed.

Then I lay in the stillness and made myself think.

I was my father’s daughter. Zane and Zander’s sister. Lycan blood ran in my veins and none of that had changed just because I was chained to a bed in a boarded-up room with Anya cut off and a man who had spent over a year planning to use me.

None of that had changed.

My hands were still shaking when I reached for the water bottle. They grew firm before I got it open.

I took one long sip. Then another.

Three things. That was all I needed.

His real name. The truth about what happened to his family. And a way to bring Anya back.

Everything else could wait.