Chapter One: The File With His Name On It

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.