Chapter One: The File With His Name On It

MIRA POV

“Mira.”

I didn’t look up.

“That’s the third time I refilled your mug and you haven’t touched it!”

Dani was leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed and that look on her face. The one she got right before she stopped pretending she wasn’t about to say something.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You’ve been staring at that file for forty minutes.”

“I’m reviewing it.”

“Mira, it’s two pages.”

I flipped it face down so his name on the tab stopped looking at me. “I’m done reviewing it.”

She walked over, swapped my cold mug for a warm one, patted my shoulder once. Classic Dani. Then she stopped at the door.

“He came in yesterday,” she said, all casual, like she was talking about the weather. “For his post-mission check. Sat right where you’re sitting.”

My chest did something sharp and stupid. I kept my face completely still. Five years of practice and I was very, very good at still.

“Good to know,” I said.

“He’s huge. Like I knew Alphas were big but that man is genuinely…”

“Dani.”

“Right. Gone.”

She left. I picked the file back up.

Caius Dray. Alpha of the Ashveil Pack. Age thirty-two. Returned from a five-year undercover mission three days ago. Physically healthy. Wolf stable.

Memory gap: five years. Cause: unknown.

Unknown.

I almost laughed.

I was the cause. I was sitting right here, two streets away from the pack hall, and the reason his file was this thin was because nobody thought to check inside a Memory Wolf. Nobody knew to look. I was the reason there was a gap at all, and I had been carrying that gap inside my own skull for five years like it was perfectly normal, like it wasn’t slowly eating through me from the inside out.

He asked me to take everything before he left. Every memory. Every feeling. Every single thing that made him who he was, so that if Destan’s people ever got close enough to read him, there would be nothing to find. No mate. No love. No weakness.

And I said yes.

I said yes because I loved him and he asked and his voice was so steady when he said it. Six months, Mira. That’s it. I’ll come back for all of it.

Six months.

That was five years ago.

I remembered that morning like it was sitting on top of everything else in my head, which it was, because I was the one carrying it. Grey light through his kitchen window. Coffee neither of us touched. Him in a jacket I’d never seen before, already halfway into a person he wasn’t. He kissed my forehead. Not my mouth. My forehead, slow and deliberate, like he was pressing it in to make it last.

Then he looked at me and said six months like it was nothing.

And I nodded. Like I wasn’t already doing the quiet math on how long a Memory Wolf could hold a full transfer before the damage started.

Stupid. Not for saying yes, I’d say yes again and that was the worst part. Stupid for believing the timeline.

The mug Dani brought was peppermint tea. I hated peppermint tea. I had told her this at least four times. I drank it anyway because my hands needed something to hold and the alternative was sitting here with nothing between me and the five years of his life currently living in my head, louder than it had been in months.

Because he was close.

Not this building. The pack hall, two streets over. But the bond, the thing that had been humming quietly in my chest since the day he left, had been getting louder since yesterday. Since he actually walked back into Ashveil. Like it had been patient about the distance for five years and was done being patient now that he was right there.

I pressed my palm flat on the desk and breathed.

I had a system. Work, come home, don’t crack. Not at my desk, not at two in the morning when his voice got so clear in the back of my head that I turned around expecting to see him standing there. I had been doing it for five years. I could keep doing it.

“Mira.”

I looked up. Dani again.

“There’s someone at the front asking for you.”

Everything in me went still. “Who?”

“Pack admin. Young guy. Says it’s official business.”

Not him. I let out the breath I was holding. “Send him in.”

The admin guy was maybe twenty-five with a lanyard and a tablet and the look of someone already exhausted before lunch. He stopped in the doorway.

“Mira Voss?”

“Yes.”

“Notice from the Alpha’s office.” He held the tablet out. “He’s doing meet-and-greets. Pack members he doesn’t recognise from his missing years. You’re on the list.”

Something cold moved through my chest fast. “A meet-and-greet.”

“Yes ma’am. Informal. Tomorrow morning, nine o’clock. Pack hall, third floor.” He scrolled. “You’re number eleven.”

Number eleven.

I had been carrying this man’s entire life inside me for five years. Every memory he trusted me with. Every version of him he’d ever let himself be when nobody was watching. And tomorrow I was going to walk into a conference room and be a name on a list. A stranger. Number eleven out of however many.

“Ma’am? Do you need…”

“No,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

He left. I sat there looking at the file. His name on the tab. Nine o’clock tomorrow and a third floor conference room and the face he was going to make when I walked through that door.

The face of someone who had never seen me before in his life.

I finished the peppermint tea. Cold and awful and vaguely medicinal. I needed something in my mouth that wasn’t his name or the fact that I already knew exactly how he took his coffee, what his laugh sounded like when something actually caught him off guard, what it felt like to sit beside him when he finally stopped being an Alpha for five minutes and just let himself breathe.

Tomorrow. Nine o’clock.

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