3…

•Shaun•

The hospital room smelled like antiseptic and something under it I could not name, sharp and clinical, nothing at all like the woods and rain and warm skin I’d been breathing in since I picked her up off that road. I hated it here. I hated the beeping monitor tracking her heartbeat like it had any right to know something about her before I did, and I hated the doctor who kept using words like “concussion” and “retrograde amnesia” like he was reading off a chart instead of talking about my mate.

But she was awake. She was awake, and her eyes were open, and every part of me that had spent the drive here convinced I was about to lose her before I even got her name finally unclenched.

I pulled the plastic chair closer to the bed and sat down slow, like she was something that might startle and run if I moved too fast. Which, given everything, might not have been far off.

“Hey.” I kept my voice low. “You remember your name, right?”

She blinked at me, and for a second something flickered behind her eyes, there and gone so fast I almost convinced myself I’d imagined it. Then her face went soft and lost again.

“Hmm.” She drew the sound out like she was actually searching for it, digging through fog that wasn’t there. “I think… no. I’m Faye. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.”

Faye. My wolf said the name like it was something sacred, rolling it around like he wanted to keep it somewhere safe. I felt the same pull, if I was honest, that stupid instinct to memorize the shape of her mouth when she said it, even secondhand from her own voice.

“Faye,” I repeated, testing it. It fit her. I didn’t know how I knew that, but I did.

I studied her for a long moment, the mud washed off her skin now, the dark hair someone had brushed back from her face, the curve of her jaw that made my chest ache in a way I didn’t have language for yet. Human doctors had checked her over top to bottom and found nothing broken that a few weeks wouldn’t fix, which should have made this easier. It didn’t. Because there was still the matter of what she was, and I needed to know before I let myself fall any further into this.

“Do you think you’re human? Or a werewolf?”

She stared at me like I’d started speaking a different language entirely, brows pulling together, mouth parting on nothing. “I don’t understand.”

I believed her confusion. That was the strange part. Whatever else was going on in that head of hers, whatever gap the accident had carved out, her confusion at the question felt real enough to touch. My wolf, though, he wasn’t so sure, and he’d been pacing the inside of my skull since the second we walked into this room, restless in a way I hadn’t felt from him in years.

“It’s alright,” I said, and reached over to fold my hand around hers where it rested on the blanket, careful, waiting for her to pull away. She didn’t. If anything, her fingers curled into mine like she’d been waiting for someone to do exactly that. “We’ll figure it out. Do you remember anything? Family? Anyone who might be looking for you?”

Something shifted in her face at that. Her eyes went glassy fast, too fast, and her breath hitched in a way that made every protective instinct I had stand up at once.

“I don’t think I have anyone.” Her voice cracked right down the middle of the sentence. “I feel it. I don’t know how I know it, I just do. I feel like an orphan. Like there’s nobody out there who’s going to come looking.”

“Hey.” I tightened my hand around hers. “Don’t cry, sweetheart. I’m going to look into it, alright? I have people who can find out if you’ve got family somewhere, run your face, see what comes back, before I decide where you should go. I just want to make sure I’m not taking you away from somebody who’s worried sick.”

That was the wrong thing to say. I knew it the second the words left my mouth, because her face crumpled entirely, and she pushed herself up in the bed like the mention of an investigation had lit something under her.

“No. Please.” She grabbed my arm with both hands now, grip startlingly strong for someone who’d been hit by a car six hours ago. “Please don’t look into anything. Just take me home. I don’t want to know what’s out there right now, I just want somewhere safe. Home. You said home, you said Luna, please, just take me home and do all of that later. I can’t sit here waiting to find out I don’t matter to anyone. Please.”

The tears spilled over while she said it, and my wolf howled somewhere behind my ribs, some ancient part of him that could not stand the sight of our mate crying and would have burned down the hospital itself if he thought it would stop it. I felt my resolve go with it, crumbling the same way hers had, because how was I supposed to sit here and watch her fall apart over the idea of being alone in the world and tell her no.

But then I remembered the road.

The words she had whispered before losing consciousness.

Don’t let them find me.

Someone had been chasing her. I had no idea who, and until I knew, leaving her at a human hospital was not an option either. If whoever had followed her found her here, they could start asking questions. Worse, if they discovered anything about the pack, the treaty I had spent years protecting could collapse overnight.

Taking her home was dangerous.

Leaving her here might be worse.

“Okay.” I lifted her hand and pressed my mouth to her knuckles, slow, letting her feel it. “Okay, I’ll take you home. Tonight. But until I know what happened to you, you stay under my protection. Nobody outside my pack gets access to you without my permission. We’ll figure the rest out later, I promise you that. You’re not going to be alone. Not anymore.”

She sagged back against the pillows like the words had physically taken weight off her, and something in her expression, relief so sudden it looked almost like victory, snagged at the back of my mind before I let it go.

Grief did strange things to people.

Fear did too.

I told myself that was all it was.

I stayed with her until her breathing evened out and her eyes slid shut, exhaustion finally winning out over whatever had been keeping her wired since she woke. Only once I was sure she was asleep did I ease my hand out of hers and step into the hallway, pulling the door shut soft behind me.

I reached for Luke through the mindlink before I’d even made it three steps.

‘Luke.’

‘Alpha. How’s Luna?’

‘Asleep. Convinced she’s an orphan, crying about it, begging me to take her home tonight instead of letting me investigate first.’ I dragged a hand down my face. ‘I told her I would.’

There was a pause on the other end, and I could feel Luke chewing on something before he said it.

‘Alpha, no offense, but doesn’t that seem… convenient? She loses her memory the same night she gets hit by a car, and the memory she’s missing just happens to be exactly the parts that would tell us who she is or if anyone’s looking for her.’

‘I thought the same thing.’ I kept my voice level even as something cold settled low in my stomach. ‘Watched her face when I asked if she remembered family. It looked real, Luke. It looked like actual grief.’

‘People are good liars when they need to be.’

‘I know that.’ I looked back at the door, at the sliver of her visible through the narrow window, curled small under the blanket, mate bond humming steady and warm even from here like nothing in the world was wrong. ‘But there’s something else. She said someone was looking for her before she lost consciousness.’

Luke went quiet.

‘You think whoever was chasing her could find the hospital?’

‘Exactly. And if they do, we don’t know what they’ll discover. I can’t risk the treaty because we were careless.’

‘So what, we just take her home? No questions?’

‘We take her home.’ I turned away from the window, jaw tight. ‘But she doesn’t get free access to the pack. I’ll put her under my protection, and I’ll have the guards watching the perimeter. Nobody enters or leaves without my knowledge. If she’s hiding something, we’ll find out before it becomes a threat.’

Luke was silent for a moment.

‘And if the council objects?’

‘They can object to me.’

I looked back at the closed hospital door.

‘I’m responsible for her now.’

I didn’t tell him the rest of what I was thinking, that some small, traitorous part of me almost hoped she never remembered a thing, because whoever Faye used to be, whatever had left her convinced the world owed her nothing and nobody was coming, I already knew I didn’t want to give her back to it.