The Wolf Who Forgot

MIRA POV

"Mira."

I didn't look up.

"Mira, that's the third time I've refilled your mug and you haven't touched it."

Dani was leaning against the doorframe of my office .. well, not my office, it was a shared room with two desks and a filing cabinet that didn't close properly, the bottom drawer forever stuck halfway open .. and she had that look on her face. The one she got when she'd been holding something back and was about to stop holding it.

"I'm fine," I said.

"You've been staring at that file for forty minutes."

"I'm reviewing it."

"Mira." She pushed off the frame and crossed the room and sat on the edge of the other desk with her arms folded. "It's a two-page file. What exactly are you reviewing?"

I put it down. Face down, so I didn't have to look at his name on the tab anymore.

"Nothing," I said. "I'm done."

She watched me for a second. Dani had been in the healer centre for eight years and she had a real talent for knowing when people were lying but also a talent for knowing when to leave it alone. She picked up my cold mug, swapped it out for the warm one she'd brought, and patted my shoulder once on her way back to the door.

"He came in yesterday, you know," she said, like it was nothing. Like she was just mentioning the weather. "For his post-mission check. He sat right there, exactly where you're sitting."

My chest did something tight and stupid and I did not react. I had gotten very good at not reacting.

"Good to know," I said.

"He's huge," she said. "Like, I knew Alphas were generally big but that man is genuinely.."

"Dani."

"Right. Sorry. I'm going."

She went. And I picked the file back up.

Caius Dray. Alpha of the Ashveil Pack. Age thirty-two. Returned from a five-year undercover infiltration mission three days ago. Physically healthy. No injuries beyond what the years had already left on him. Bloodwork clean. Wolf stable.

Memory gap: five years. Cause: unknown.

Unknown.

I pressed two fingers to my temple. The file was thin .. that was the thing that kept snagging me every time I looked at it. Two pages and a blood panel and a note from the senior healer that said further psychological evaluation recommended, underlined, like they'd pressed the pen down hard when they wrote it. Two pages for five missing years. Nobody had thought to look inside a Memory Wolf. Nobody knew to.

I knew. I was the reason the file was thin. I was the reason there was a gap at all.

He asked me to take everything. And I said yes. Because I loved him and he asked and it made sense at the time, the way things make sense when the person you love looks at you and says this is the only way and you believe them, because you do, because you always have. Six months, he'd said. His voice had been so steady. I'll be back in six months.

That was five years ago.

The memory of that morning sat in me the way all the other memories sat in me .. heavy and too clear. The grey light through his kitchen window. The smell of coffee that neither of us touched. Him standing in front of me in a jacket I'd never seen before, holding a phone that wasn't his real phone, already halfway into a person he wasn't. He kissed my forehead. Not my mouth .. my forehead, slow and careful, like he was making sure it stuck. And then he pulled back and he looked at me and he said: six months, Mira. That's it. I'll come back for all of it.

And I nodded. Like six months was nothing. Like I wasn't already quietly doing the math on how long I could carry another person's whole emotional life inside my body before it started doing damage.

Stupid. Not for saying yes. I'd say yes again and that's the part I hated most. I was stupid for believing the timeline.

The mug Dani had brought was peppermint tea. I hated peppermint tea with a specific and personal dislike that I had mentioned to Dani at least four times. I drank it anyway because it was warm and my hands needed something to hold and the alternative was sitting there doing nothing, which I couldn't do, because doing nothing left too much space for everything I was trying not to think about.

Outside the office glass, the healer centre was running its usual mid-morning routine. Two pack members sitting in the chairs by the door, one of them with her leg bouncing, the other half-asleep. A junior healer moving between rooms with a tablet tucked under his arm. The radio at the front desk on low, playing something with too much bass and not enough melody. The overhead light above the second chair buzzing faintly the way it had been buzzing for three weeks and nobody had replaced the bulb yet.

Normal. Everything normal. Except for the five years of someone else's life sitting inside my skull like furniture in a house I'd been borrowing, warm and heavy and right now, specifically today, louder than usual.

Because he was close.

Not this building. The pack hall, two streets over. But the bond .. the thing that had lived in my chest like a low hum for five years .. had been getting louder since yesterday. Since he actually came home. Like it had been patient about the distance but was done being patient about the proximity.

I pressed my palm flat on the desk.

Breathed.

I had a system. I had a routine. I went to work and I did the job and I went home and I did not let myself crack, not even at the kitchen table at two in the morning when the memories got loud and his voice was so clear in the back of my head that I turned around half-expecting to see him standing there. I had been doing this for five years. I could keep doing it.

"Mira."

Dani. Again, at the door. I looked up.

"Sorry. There's a man at the front asking for you."

Everything in me went still.

"What man?"

"Pack admin. Young, a bit nervous. He said it's official business."

Not him. Okay. Not him. I let the air out of my chest.

"Send him in," I said.

The man from admin was maybe twenty-five, with a lanyard and a work tablet and the look of someone who'd already had a long morning and it wasn't even eleven yet. He stopped in the doorway and looked at me.

"Mira Voss?"

"Yes."

"I've got a notice from the Alpha's office." He held the tablet out toward me. "He's doing a round of meet-and-greets. Pack members he doesn't have a face to for the missing years. You're on the list."

Something went cold in my chest. Fast.

"A meet-and-greet," I said.

"Yes, ma'am. Informal. He just wants to put names to faces before the.."

"When?"

He looked at his tablet. "Tomorrow morning. Nine o'clock. Pack hall, third floor conference room." He scrolled a little. "Your name is number eleven on his list."

Number eleven.

I had been carrying everything he was for five years. Every memory he'd trusted me with. Every feeling. Every quiet moment he'd let himself be a person instead of an Alpha. And tomorrow morning I was going to walk into a conference room and be number eleven on a list of strangers.

"Ma'am? Do you need me to.."

"No," I said. "I'll be there. Thank you."

He nodded and left. I sat there and looked at the file on my desk and his name on the tab and I thought about nine o'clock and a third-floor conference room and the expression that was going to be on his face when he looked up and saw me walk in.

The expression of someone who had never seen me before.

I picked up the peppermint tea and finished it. Cold, awful, vaguely medicinal. I needed something in my mouth other than all the things I couldn't say out loud. Like his name. Like the fact that I already knew exactly how he took his coffee and what his voice sounded like at two in the morning and what it felt like to sit next to him when he finally let himself relax.

Tomorrow. Nine o'clock.

I had until then to figure out how to walk into a room and meet Caius Dray for the very first time.

MIRA POV

"You've been standing out here for like four minutes."

I turned around. A woman I didn't recognise was sitting on the bench across the corridor with a coffee cup in one hand and her phone in the other, not even looking up from the screen when she said it.

"I'm early," I said.

"Door's not locked."

I know that. I knew that. I just hadn't been able to make my hand reach for the handle yet.

I'd practised in front of my bathroom mirror this morning. Not what to wear, not what to say exactly .. just my face. What my face should look like walking into a room and seeing someone for the first time. Neutral. Open. Slightly friendly but not too friendly. The kind of face that has absolutely no history behind it.

I'd practised for twenty minutes and I still wasn't sure I had it right.

The woman on the bench glanced up finally. "You're number eleven, right? He's running on time. You're up."

I pushed the door open and went in.

He was already there.

Of course he was already there. Caius was always early. I knew that. I'd known that for years, stored in me the way I stored everything else .. his punctuality, his coffee order, the particular way he sat in chairs that were slightly too small for him, always with one arm on the table and his weight shifted left. He was sitting exactly like that right now, at the head of the conference table, writing something on a notepad, and he looked up when the door clicked shut behind me.

Everything I'd practised fell out of my head completely.

He was the same. That was the first thing that hit me. Same jaw, same dark eyes, same hands .. God, his hands, I'd been carrying memories of those hands for five years and there they were, right there on the table in front of me, wrapped around a pen. He was broader than I remembered. Something around his eyes had gone a little harder. But it was him. It was completely, entirely him.

And he looked at me like he'd never seen me before in his life.

"Mira Voss?" he said.

His voice.

I'd been carrying the memory of his voice for five years and I thought I knew it perfectly. I thought there was nothing he could say that would surprise me. But hearing it in the actual air of an actual room with him actually sitting three feet away from me was a completely different thing and my chest did something I was absolutely not prepared for.

"Yes," I said. My voice came out normal. I don't know how.

"Sit down." He gestured at the chair across the table. Not warm, not cold. Professional. "This won't take long. I'm just trying to put names to faces."

I sat. I put my bag on the floor and my hands flat on the table and I looked at him and he looked at me and there was nothing on his face except polite attention. The face of a man doing a job.

"How long have you been with the pack?" he asked. He had the notepad in front of him. He was actually going to write this down.

"Five years," I said.

He wrote something. "And what's your role?"

"Healer's assistant. I work out of the centre on Reeve Street."

"Good." He wrote that too. "Any issues I should know about? Anything that came up during the five years that didn't get flagged properly?"

A laugh tried to come out of me. I kept it down.

"No," I said. "Nothing like that."

"Good." He looked up from the notepad and the full weight of his attention landed on me and I had to work very hard not to look away. "You joined right around when I left, then."

"Around that time, yes."

"Where were you before?"

"Outside the city. Small pack. I transferred in."

He nodded. Wrote something else. The scratch of the pen on the paper was the loudest thing in the room. The conference room smelled like old coffee and the cleaning product they used on the floors .. something sharp and citrus that didn't quite cover the underneath smell of a room a lot of people had sat in over the years. The window behind him was showing a grey sky. One cloud moving slowly across it. I was watching the cloud because it was safer than watching him.

"Anything you want to ask me?" he said.

I looked back at him.

"No," I said.

"Most people ask something. Even just out of politeness." There was the smallest thing in his voice. Not quite amusement. Close to it.

"How are you settling back in?" I said, because he was clearly waiting for something and I needed him to stop looking at me with that much focus.

"Fine."

"Good."

"You don't actually want to know," he said. "You're asking because I pointed out that you weren't asking."

I looked at him. He looked back. He was right and he knew he was right and there was something almost like a dare in it.

"Is that a problem?" I said.

"No." His mouth moved. Just barely. "I appreciate the honesty."

Inside my head, the version of him I'd been carrying for five years was warm. Close. Saying my name the way he used to say it, with the weight on the first syllable, like it mattered. Like I mattered. Like I was the only person in whatever room we were in.

The version of him sitting across from me was writing on a notepad and moving on.

"Is there anything the healer centre needs that it's not getting?" he asked. Back to business. Pen ready.

"The supply requests have been a bit slow. About a three-week delay on some of the standard stock."

"I'll have someone look at it." He wrote that down too. "Anything else?"

"No."

"Alright." He set the pen down and sat back slightly and looked at me in a way that was different from the professional attention he'd been giving me for the last ten minutes. It was quieter than that. More personal. Like he was actually seeing me for the first time instead of just clocking number eleven on his list. "Thank you for coming in."

"Of course." I picked up my bag. "Thank you for.."

"How long have we met?"

I stopped.

"Sorry?"

"You and I." He was frowning, just slightly, like he was listening to something I couldn't hear. "Have we met before? Before today?"

My whole body went careful. Every single part of me at once.

"No," I said. "We haven't."

"You've been looking at me like we have."

"I've been looking at you because you've been asking me questions," I said. Even. Flat. Completely believable, I hoped.

He held my gaze for a beat too long. "Right." He picked up the pen again. "Sorry. That was.. never mind. You can go."

I stood. Pushed the chair back. I had three steps to the door. Three steps and I was out and I could breathe and then I could figure out how to survive the next time I had to be in a room with him.

One step.

Two.

His hand closed around my wrist.

Not hard. Not like he'd grabbed me. More like his arm had moved before he'd decided to move it and his fingers had just .. landed. On my wrist. Warm and certain and immediately wrong because a second later he pulled back like he'd touched something hot.

"Sorry," he said, fast. "I'm sorry. I don't know why I.." He stopped. He was staring at his own hand like it had done something without permission. "Sorry," he said again.

I hadn't moved.

I was standing completely still with my back half to him and my wrist where he'd touched it feeling like the skin there was paying attention in a way skin normally didn't. And deep in the back of my head, in the part where I'd been storing five years of him, something had shifted. A flicker. Small and fast, like a light turning on in a room at the end of a very long hallway.

His wolf had felt something.

He didn't know what. He wouldn't know what. There was no memory attached to it for him, no context, nothing to grab onto. Just a reflex his body made that his brain couldn't explain.

But I felt it. I felt it move through everything I was carrying like a key turning in a lock it had been searching for a long time.

"It's fine," I said. My voice was still steady. I didn't know how. "Don't worry about it."

I walked out and I did not look back and the door clicked shut behind me and the woman on the bench looked up from her phone and said something I didn't hear because I was already moving down the corridor with one thought running on a loop in my head.

His wolf just recognised something.

And now everything was going to get so much harder.

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.