~ 6: Meeting Olga

~ 6

~ Mia ~

Dr. Jonathan didn't waste time.

Within the hour I was being wheeled through corridors of glass and pale stone for scans on machines East Lake's hospital couldn't have named, let alone owned. Technicians spoke in low, quick voices. Screens bloomed with images of my brain from angles I'd only ever seen in textbooks.

By evening, Jonathan was back at my bedside with a tablet full of results and a surgeon's flat honesty.

"Tell me the truth," I said. "All of it."

"The mass is large, and it sits against the brain stem. Operating there is like defusing a bomb through a keyhole." He turned the tablet toward me. "But here is what interests me. The clot beneath it is old. Decades old. Scar tissue from an injury or from something done to you when you were very young. The mass grew out of that damage. And both of them together sit directly on the seat of the wolf-bond."

"So when you remove them…"

"If I remove them, and if you survive it intact… there is nothing left holding your wolf down." He set the tablet aside. "I've done this surgery three times. The first patient died on my table. The second lived, with impairments. The third walked out of this hospital and runs with her pack every moon."

"One in three."

"Better odds than zero." He held my gaze. "We operate at dawn."

I looked at the ceiling, at the seams in the pale tiles. Die slowly. Die on the table. Or wake up whole for the first time in my life.

While I was still doing that arithmetic, the corridor outside changed.

I felt the same pressure Darian carried into rooms, but an order of magnitude greater, rolling down the hallway.

The door opened.

The man who filled it was in his sixties and looked like the mountain the border stone had been cut from. Silver hair, a winter coat thrown over what were unmistakably traveling clothes, mud still on his boots. 

The Alpha of the Red Moon Pack… the most powerful wolf on the continent stood in my doorway, and his hands were trembling.

"Where…" His voice failed. He tried again. "I flew back from the northern summit. Six hours. The whole way I told myself it would be another false hope. There have been so many false…"

Then he looked at me. 

Whatever he'd meant to say died. He crossed the room slowly, like a man wading upstream, and stopped at the foot of my bed, and this mountain of a man — this Alpha of Alphas — simply broke. He sank into the chair, put his face in his hands, and wept.

"Mira," he said to his Luna, muffled, shaking. "Mira, it's her."

"I know," the Luna whispered, her hand on his shoulder. "I know, love."

I didn't know what to do with any of it. In years in the Alpha house, I had never once seen a grown Alpha cry. I hadn't known they could.

"I'm sorry," I said stupidly. "I don't remember you. I don't remember anything from before I was ten. I'm sorry…"

"Don't." His head came up. His eyes were rimmed red which honestly looked like mine. "Don't you apologize." He moved to the chair beside my bed, and his huge weathered hand hovered over mine, asking. I nodded. It settled over my fingers, warm and impossibly careful. "Eighteen years I have hunted every rumor of you across every territory on this continent. I emptied treasuries. I started two border conflicts. Your mother planted a tree in the garden the spring you were taken and told me you'd come home before it outgrew the house." His voice cracked. "It outgrew the house, Liliana."

"I…" Liliana. The name slid against something in me and almost, almost caught. "My name is Mia."

"Then Mia," he said, without hesitation, and that undid me worse than the tears had. "Whatever name you carry. Whatever the test says. You collapsed at my Academy's gates, and you are dying, and that makes you mine to protect under pack law and under every other law that matters."

They stayed with me for hours.

The Luna brushed out my hair with gentle hands and didn't ask questions when I cried at the simple kindness of it. Ryker brought terrible cafeteria coffee and told stories about growing up underfoot in the Alpha house — how the Alpha had taught him to track, how there was a portrait of a six-year-old girl on the stairs that no one was allowed to move. The Alpha himself made a series of quiet calls in the corner, and I heard fragments … cancel the summit, postpone the council, family emergency.

And piece by piece, because they asked so gently, I told them.

About waking at ten with no memories in an East Lake hospital. About the old Alpha adopting me. The forced marriage. Fanny. Eight years as a servant wearing a Luna's title. My son wishing me dead. The pregnancy. The night I packed one suitcase and left, and the two days of silence from a phone no one called.

By the end, Luna Mira was weeping silently, Ryker's knuckles were white on the windowsill, and the Alpha of the Red Moon Pack had gone very, very still.

"East Lake," he said quietly. It was a note being filed somewhere permanent.

"He's not worth it," I said tiredly. "None of them are. I just want to be free of it."

"You will be." He said it the way other people said the sun would rise. "After you survive. First things first."

Jonathan appeared in the doorway, and his smile was almost fierce. "On that note… visiting hours are long over, and my patient cuts open at dawn."

…

They prepped me at five.

Luna Mira held one hand through the corridors; the Alpha walked at my other side with his palm resting on my shoulder, as if he could keep death off me by proximity. Ryker trailed behind, uncharacteristically silent.

Outside the operating theater, they each said goodbye.

Ryker squeezed my hand hard enough to hurt. "You'd better wake up. I've waited my whole life to not be an only child."

Luna Mira cupped my face in both hands. "I lost you once and survived it because I had no choice. Don't make me do it twice. Fight."

The Alpha bent and pressed his forehead to mine — and something in the gesture landed in my body like a word in a language I'd forgotten I spoke. "Whatever you find in the dark in there," he said roughly, "you come back out. That's an Alpha's command."

"I don't have a wolf to hear it," I whispered.

"She'll hear it," he said. "She's been listening your whole life."

Then the doors, and Jonathan in his gown, only his eyes visible above the mask.

"Ready?"

"No," I admitted. "Do it anyway."

He nodded to the anesthesiologist. "Count backward from ten."

"Ten… nine… eight…"

I thought of Darian… how much I loved him but never reciprocated.

"…seven… six…"

Of Nick, asleep around a stuffed wolf.

"…five… four…"

Of a tree that outgrew a house.

"…three… two…"

I want to live.

"…one."

….

"…vitals holding… swelling within parameters…"

"…Jonathan, you've been on your feet for sixteen hours…"

"I'm not leaving her."

I surfaced by degrees. My eyelids weighed a thousand pounds. The beeping. The light.

"Her hand…" Ryker's voice, cracking. "Her hand moved!"

"Mia?" Luna Mira, close. "Darling, can you hear me?"

I cracked my eyes open. Blurry shapes resolved: four of them, hovering.  

"There she is." The Alpha's voice was wrecked.

"Did it…" My throat was raw ash. "Did it work?"

"All of it." Jonathan's eyes above his mask were wet. "Clean margins. Every trace of the mass, and the clot beneath it. Congratulations."

Relief moved through me… and then something else did.

It started low, at the base of my skull, where the pain had lived for so long.

The monitors stuttered; a nurse stepped forward, and Jonathan flung out an arm to stop her, staring at the readouts with naked wonder.

The world suddenly felt wide.

Scents flooded in, suddenly distinct and blazing: cedar and flowers that meant Luna Mira, storm-and-stone that meant the Alpha, antiseptic, coffee, Ryker's rain-soaked coat, the green of pines through a sealed window three rooms away. Sounds layered themselves… heartbeats, four of them, no, a dozen, down the corridor. Colors sharpened past anything eyes should do.

And in my chest, in the space that had been empty my whole remembered life, something uncurled, stretched, and stood up.

‘Hello, Mia. I have waited for this day for a really long time. My name is Olga’ she said. My wolf said. In a voice I had somehow always known. 

The sound that came out of me wasn't quite a sob and wasn't quite a laugh. "Oh my goodness…" I couldn't finish. My hands were shaking. "You are here!” I said to myself, then I turned to the people watching me in excitement. “I just heard her… I just heard my wolf” 

Luna Mira started sniffing tears back in. The Alpha had turned his face away, jaw working. Ryker whooped loud enough that a nurse shushed him.

"Welcome back," Jonathan said softly. "Both of you."

I lay there feeling Olga settle through me like warmth through cold hands.

I still didn’t get any memories of my past. My life still began at ten, in a hospital, with a locket and Liliana as my birth name.

Whatever had been done to me in that forest, it was still hidden.

"The test," I rasped, before I could be afraid of it. "The DNA test. I want it. Run it now."