Chapter Three: Haunted By Something I Cannot Name

CAIUS POV

“You’ve read that one already.”

Orion said it from the doorway without looking up from his own papers. He’d been standing there for two minutes doing exactly that, not coming in, not leaving, just existing in the doorway the way he did when he had something to say and hadn’t decided whether to say it yet.

“I know,” I said.

“That’s the third time.”

“Orion.”

“Just saying.” He finally came in and dropped into the chair across from my desk, papers on his knee, and looked at me with that face. The one he’d been making since we were twenty-two. The one that said he’d already figured out whatever I was still working through and was just waiting for me to catch up.

I put the file down.

“She’s a healer’s assistant,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Five years with the pack. Clean record. Nothing flagged.”

“Also yes.”

“So why does her file feel like it’s missing half of itself?”

Orion tilted his head. “What does your gut say?”

“My gut says I’ve lost my mind.”

“You haven’t lost your mind.” He picked his papers back up. “But out of twenty-three people you interviewed today, you haven’t said a single other name. Just hers. That’s either instinct or something else, and either way it means something.”

I didn’t answer. Mostly because he was right and saying it out loud would make it worse.

Twenty-three people. I’d been in that conference room from nine in the morning until past three and I’d shaken hands and asked questions and written things down, and I couldn’t tell you one single name from that entire day except the woman who walked out without looking back.

Number eleven.

Mira Voss.

She’d sat across from me with her hands flat on the table and answered every question in this voice that was completely even, completely controlled, and the whole time she looked at me like she was bracing for something. Not nervous the way people got nervous in front of their Alpha. Something else. Like she was waiting for a thing she already knew was coming and was just trying to get through the moment before it hit her.

People didn’t look at strangers like that.

“Pull everything on her,” I said to Orion. “Not just the pack file. Transfer records, references, whatever brought her to Ashveil specifically.”

Orion made a short sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “So we’re doing this.”

“We’re doing this.”

“Can I ask why?”

“No.”

“Is it because she’s pretty?”

“Orion.”

“Professionally asking.”

“Get out of my office.”

He left, still not laughing but very close to it. I heard him in the hall, then the outer door, then nothing. The building went quiet the way it went quiet at the end of a long day, all at once, like something finally exhaled.

I leaned back and looked at the ceiling.

My wolf had been doing something since she walked into that room this morning and hadn’t stopped since. Not loud. Not urgent. Just there, this low persistent hum under everything, like a sound sitting just below what you could actually hear. I’d had some version of it since I woke up in that hospital fourteen months ago with five years gone from my head. But it had been background noise before. Manageable.

Since this morning it had moved to the front.

I’d grabbed her wrist.

I still couldn’t fully explain it. She stood up to leave and my arm just moved, no decision involved, fingers around her wrist before I even registered what I was doing. Then I pulled back and apologised like an idiot and she looked at me for just a second, before she got her face back under control, with an expression I couldn’t read. Not angry. Not scared. Something I didn’t have a name for.

I picked her file up and read it again. Same two pages. Same nothing.

Healer’s assistant. Reeve Street. Five years. No flags. Transferred from some small pack outside the city. The photo in the corner was slightly washed out, her face overexposed, her eyes coming out lighter than they’d actually been.

They were brown. Warm brown, almost amber when the light caught them right. I’d noticed when she sat down and then immediately made myself stop noticing because I was her Alpha running an official meeting and that was not the kind of thing I needed to be doing.

I put the file face down. Then picked it back up and put it face up, because apparently that was who I was now.

I ate dinner at my desk. Rice, something with vegetables, I didn’t taste any of it. Border reports in front of me, nothing unusual, nothing that needed me tonight. I went home at ten.

The apartment was the same as it’d been since I moved back six weeks ago. Sparse. Storage furniture. It didn’t feel like home yet. It just felt empty in a way that had nothing to do with the lack of furniture.

I showered. Checked the locks. Sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the wall while my wolf kept doing that low insistent thing, and I thought: okay. What is it. What are you trying to tell me.

Nothing. No answer. Just the feeling, steady as a second heartbeat, not going anywhere.

I lay down and closed my eyes.

Sleep took a long time coming. When it did it was thin and restless, the kind where part of you never fully goes under. I kept almost surfacing. Kept reaching for something I couldn’t find.

My wolf made a sound in that in-between place. Low and searching. I’d heard it once before, the morning I woke up in the hospital not knowing what year it was, tubes in my arm and a nurse saying sir, sir, stay still. My wolf had made that exact sound then, like something had been cut out of it and it was trying to locate the missing piece.

It was making it again now.

But different. In the hospital it was pure loss, just the raw shape of something gone. Now it sounded like it had found an edge. Like someone reaching through a dark room and their fingertips barely grazing a wall.

I woke up at two in the morning, wide awake, no transition, just instantly completely conscious and staring at the ceiling. And there was an image in my head so clear it felt wrong.

A pair of hands.

Brown skin. Slender fingers. Holding something the way she’d held her water glass in the conference room this morning, both palms wrapped around it, thumbs crossed over the top, like the warmth was the whole point.

I lay there and the image didn’t move. It sat in the front of my head with the weight of a real memory. My own memory. Something that had actually happened to me.

Except it hadn’t. I had never seen Mira Voss before she walked into that conference room this morning. I was as certain of that as I could be about anything in the five years I didn’t have access to.

I got up without turning on any lights. Crossed to the desk in the corner, went through the stack of files I’d brought home until I found hers and put it on top.

Then I stood there in the dark with her file in my hand and her hands still sitting clear as anything in the back of my head and I thought: I have absolutely no idea what this is.

But I was going to find out.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​