Chapter 3 Haunted By Something I Cannot Name

CAIUS POV

"You've read that one already."

Orion said it from the doorway without looking up from his own stack of papers. He'd been standing there for two minutes doing exactly that .. not coming in, not leaving, just existing in the doorway the way he did when he had something to say and was deciding whether to say it.

"I know," I said.

"That's the third time."

"Orion."

"I'm just saying." He finally came in and sat in the chair across from my desk, dropping his papers on his knee. He didn't say anything else. He just looked at me with that face he'd been making since we were twenty-two, the one that meant he'd already figured out whatever I was still trying to figure out and was waiting for me to get there.

I put the file down.

"She's a healer's assistant," I said.

"Yes."

"Five years with the pack. Clean record. Nothing unusual."

"Also yes."

"So why does her file feel like it's missing something?"

Orion tilted his head. "What does your gut say?"

"My gut says I've lost my mind."

"You haven't lost your mind." He picked up his papers again. "But I will say this .. out of twenty-three people you interviewed today, you haven't mentioned a single other name. Just hers. That's either instinct or it's something else, and either way it's worth paying attention to."

I didn't answer that. Mostly because he was right and I didn't particularly want to confirm it out loud.

Twenty-three people. I'd sat in that conference room from nine in the morning until just past three in the afternoon and I'd shaken hands and asked questions and written things down and I couldn't tell you the name of a single person who'd walked through that door except the one who walked out of it without looking back.

Number eleven.

Mira Voss.

She'd sat across the table from me with her hands flat on the surface and answered every question I asked in this voice that was completely even and completely controlled, and the whole time she did it she looked at me like she was bracing for something. Not afraid. Not nervous in the way people got nervous meeting their Alpha for the first time. Something else. Like she was waiting for a thing she already knew was coming and was trying to get through the moment before it arrived.

People didn't look at strangers that way.

"Do me a favour," I said to Orion. "Pull everything on her. Not just the pack file. Transfer records, references from her previous pack, whatever brought her to Ashveil specifically."

Orion made a short sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "So we're doing this."

"We're doing this."

"Can I ask why?"

"No."

"Is it because she's pretty?"

"Orion."

"I'm asking professionally."

"Get out of my office."

He left. Still not laughing but close. I heard him talking to someone in the hall and then the outer door closing and then the building went quiet the way it went quiet at the end of a long day, all at once, like the walls were exhaling.

I leaned back in my chair and looked at the ceiling.

My wolf was doing something. It had been doing it since she walked into that room this morning and it hadn't stopped. Not loud, not urgent, just .. present. This low persistent feeling under everything, like a sound just below what you could actually hear. I'd had a version of it since I woke up in that hospital fourteen months ago with five years gone out of my head, but it had been quieter before. More background. Since this morning it had moved to the front.

I'd reached out and grabbed her wrist.

I still didn't fully understand why. She'd stood up to leave and my arm had just moved, completely without my input, fingers wrapping around her wrist before I even registered I was doing it. And then I'd pulled back and apologised like an idiot and she'd looked at me .. just for a second, before she got her face back under control .. with an expression I couldn't read. Not angry. Not scared. Something I didn't have a word for.

I picked up her file again and read it again. Same two pages. Same nothing.

Healer's assistant. Reeve Street centre. Five years. No flags. Transferred from a small pack outside the city whose name I didn't immediately recognise. References listed. Photo in the top right corner that the file's scanner had washed out slightly so her face was a little overexposed, her eyes coming out lighter than they probably were in person.

They'd been brown. Warm brown. The kind of brown that was almost amber when the light caught it right. I'd noticed that when she sat down. I'd noticed it and then I'd made myself stop noticing it because I was conducting an official meeting and I was her Alpha and that was not the kind of thing I needed to be clocking.

I put the file face down on top of my pile. Then I picked it back up and put it on the top of the pile face up, because I was apparently a person who did things like that now.

I ate dinner at my desk. Something from the kitchen that one of the pack staff had left in the small fridge by the door .. rice, something with vegetables, I ate it without tasting it while I read through border reports and tried very hard to think about border reports. The reports were fine. Everything was fine. There were no immediate threats, no unusual activity, nothing that needed my attention tonight specifically.

I went home at ten.

My apartment was the same as it had been when I'd moved back into it six weeks ago. Sparse. A few pieces of furniture, the stuff that had been in storage while I was gone. It didn't feel like home yet. I wasn't sure what it felt like. Empty in a way that wasn't just about furniture.

I showered. I checked the locks. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the wall and my wolf was still doing that thing, that low insistent thing, and I thought: okay. What is it. What are you trying to tell me.

Nothing. No answer. Just the feeling, steady as a heartbeat, not going anywhere.

I lay down and closed my eyes.

Sleep didn't come for a long time. When it finally did it was thin and restless, the kind where you're technically asleep but some part of you stays just below the surface the whole time. I kept almost waking up. Kept feeling like there was something I was supposed to remember and couldn't reach.

My wolf made a sound somewhere in that in-between place. Low and reaching. I'd heard it once before .. the morning I woke up in the hospital with no idea what year it was, tubes in my arm and a nurse who kept saying sir, sir, you need to stay still. My wolf had made that exact sound then, like something in it had been cut and was trying to find what was missing.

It was making it now.

But different. The morning in the hospital it had been pure loss, just the shape of a hole. Now it sounded like it had found the edge of something. Like a person in a dark room who'd reached out and their hand had just barely grazed a wall.

I woke up at two in the morning and I was staring at the ceiling and I was completely awake, not groggy, just suddenly and entirely conscious, and there was an image in my head that was so clear it felt wrong.

A pair of hands.

Brown skin. Slender fingers. Holding a mug the way she'd held her water glass in the conference room this morning .. both palms wrapped around it, thumbs crossed over the top, like the warmth of the thing was what mattered, not the drinking of it.

I lay there and looked at the ceiling and the image didn't go away. It sat in the front of my head with the weight and the texture of a memory. My own memory. Something that had happened to me.

Except it hadn't. I had never seen Mira Voss before she walked into that conference room. I was certain of that. As certain as I could be about anything involving the five years I didn't have access to.

I got up. I didn't bother with the lights. I crossed the apartment in the dark and went to the desk in the corner where I'd brought a stack of files home and I went through them until I found hers and I put it on top.

Then I stood there in the dark with her file in my hand and her hands still clear as anything in the back of my head and I thought: I have no idea what this is.

But I was going to find out.