Chapter Seven: What His Hands Remember

MIRA POV

“You don’t have to go,” Petra said from my bed, where she was lying on her stomach eating crackers from a packet and watching me get dressed like it was a show she’d bought tickets for.

“It’s a pack gathering. I kind of do.”

“People skip these all the time.”

“Not healer centre staff. We’re specifically on the attendance list.”

“That’s genuinely the most annoying thing I’ve heard all week.” She crunched a cracker. “Okay but listen. Strategy. You go in, you get something to eat, you stand near the door the whole time, you leave after forty-five minutes and nobody can say you weren’t there.”

“That’s actually not a bad plan.”

“I have good plans. People underestimate me.” She sat up. “I’m coming with you by the way.”

“I know.”

“I wasn’t asking.”

“I know that too.”

She threw her jacket on and we went. The gathering was in the main hall of the pack building, one floor down from where Caius had his office, and when we got there it was already more crowded than I’d hoped. Someone had done the lights warm instead of the usual overhead fluorescents, which made the room look nicer than it actually was. There was food on a long table along one wall, the kind of spread the pack kitchen did for these things, all finger food and things on small plates. Music low in the background. A lot of people standing in clusters, talking, the way pack members talked at gatherings where everyone knew everyone but some of them hadn’t seen each other in a while.

Caius was already there.

I spotted him the second we walked in, which was not something I had any control over. My body just knew where he was in a room now. It had been doing it since the meeting. Some background function that ran without my permission, always orienting toward him the way a compass oriented north.

He was talking to three senior wolves near the window, relaxed, one hand in his pocket and the other holding a glass of water. He hadn’t seen me come in.

“Edge of the room,” Petra said quietly beside me. “Food table. Go.”

“I’m already going.”

The edge of the room was fine. I was good at edges. I’d been good at them my whole life and especially for the last five years and I knew how to position myself so I had a wall behind me and a clear sightline to the door and enough space that the noise of a room full of people didn’t get inside my head and sit there. Petra got us both drinks from the table and we found a spot near the back and stood there and I made conversation with two healers from the other centre and I watched the room and it was fine.

It was fine for about twenty minutes.

Then the clusters shifted the way they always did at these things, people moving, new conversations starting, and I found myself at the food table because Petra had abandoned me temporarily to talk to someone she knew from admin, and the food table was near the back which was where I wanted to be anyway, so that was also fine.

And then Caius was beside me.

Not because he’d crossed the room to find me. I don’t think he’d even fully registered I was there. He’d just moved through the gathering the way he moved through everything, unhurried, stopping to talk to people, and the room was small and I was at the food table and at some point the natural movement of the evening had put us both in the same two feet of space and I became very interested in the small pastries in front of me.

“They’re better warm,” he said.

I looked up. He was looking at the food too, not at me, reading the labels on the little cards the kitchen always put out.

“The pastries?” I said.

“The kitchen always makes them about an hour early for these things. By the time people arrive they’ve gone cold.” He picked one up and looked at it. “I used to ask them to hold off until the last minute. They probably stopped doing that while I was gone.”

“Probably,” I said.

He put the pastry on a plate. Reached past me for a napkin and his arm brushed mine.

We both went still.

It was half a second. Less. The kind of contact that happened at every gathering when a room was too full and people were too close to each other, the kind that nobody normally registered. His arm against mine from elbow to wrist and then gone, him pulling back with the napkin, and both of us stopped at exactly the same moment like the same wire had gone through us.

He recovered before I did.

“Sorry,” he said, easy, already moving on. “Not enough room at this table.”

“It’s fine,” I said.

He picked up something else from the table, something small and wrapped, turning it over in his fingers to look at it. And I watched his hands do that and I could not make myself stop.

His hands. I knew his hands. I had five years of memories of those hands and I knew the scar on the side of his right thumb from something that had happened before we met and I knew the way he tapped two fingers on a surface when he was thinking and I knew how careful they got when they were holding something he was worried about breaking. I was carrying all of that and right now those hands were six inches away from me turning over a little wrapped cracker and I was the only person in this entire room who knew them that well and it was the strangest loneliness I had ever felt.

To know someone completely. And be a stranger to them.

“Did you come with someone?” he said.

I blinked. “Sorry?”

“To the gathering. Did you come with someone?” He glanced sideways at me, brief, just a look. “You keep checking the room like you’re looking for someone.”

“A friend. She went to talk to someone from admin.”

“Ah.” He nodded and looked back at the food table. He put the wrapped cracker down and picked up an actual plate and started putting things on it and I stood next to him and watched him do completely ordinary things and told myself to breathe normally.

“Are you eating?” he asked, not looking up.

“Yes.”

“You’ve been standing at this table for five minutes and you haven’t put anything on your plate.”

“I was deciding.”

“The pastries are fine even cold,” he said. “For what it’s worth.”

I put a pastry on my plate. He almost smiled. Not quite. Just the edge of it, the corner of his mouth doing a small thing and then stopping.

He moved off down the table and I stayed where I was and I ate the pastry and he was right, it was fine even cold, and I stood there holding my plate and being careful not to look at him and also completely failing to not look at him.

Petra reappeared at my elbow from nowhere.

“I saw that,” she said very quietly.

“Nothing happened.”

“I know nothing happened. That’s almost worse. You two were standing there having a conversation about pastries and the air between you was doing something extremely noticeable.”

“Petra.”

“I’m just reporting what I observed. As your friend. Professionally.” She took something from the table and bit into it. “Also his arm touched yours and you both stopped like someone had pressed pause on the room. I saw that too.”

“Please stop.”

“Stopped.” She looked out across the room and her voice changed. Went careful. “Hey. Don’t react. Just look slowly toward the left side of the room. Near the plant.”

I looked slowly. The left side of the room. There was a tall plant in a pot that nobody had watered enough, its leaves going a bit yellow at the tips. And near it, standing with a drink in her hand and her eyes on the food table, was Lena.

Caius’s cousin. The woman who had watched the corridor this morning and made a phone call.

And standing slightly behind her, almost tucked behind her shoulder like he was using her as a reason to be in the room, was a man I had never seen before.

Silver hair. Expensive jacket. The kind of calm that sat on a person’s face not because they were relaxed but because they had decided a long time ago not to let anything show. He was looking at the room the way someone looked at a room when they were cataloguing it. Not enjoying it. Assessing it.

He wasn’t looking at me.

But I knew him.

I had never seen his face before in my life and I knew him the same way you knew the smell of something that had hurt you once, the way your body remembered things your brain tried to file away neatly. The shape of him. The stillness. The particular way he held himself like he was always the most patient person in any room he walked into because he knew eventually the room would come to him.

My plate was in my hands and the pastry was half-eaten and the warm light of the room was doing its nice thing on every surface and I stood there and felt my blood go cold.

Destan Cole.

I didn’t know how he was in this room. I didn’t know who had let him in or what reason he’d given or how long he’d been standing there. But I knew one thing about Destan that I had learned slowly and at a cost I was still paying.

He never went anywhere without a reason.