Chapter Two: Everything I Cannot Say

MIRA POV

“You’ve been standing out here for like four minutes.”

I turned around. A woman I didn’t know was on the bench across the corridor, coffee in one hand, phone in the other, not even bothering to look up when she said it.

“I’m early,” I said.

“Door’s not locked.”

I knew that. I’d known that the whole time. My hand just wouldn’t reach for the handle.

I’d practiced in front of my bathroom mirror this morning. Not what to wear, not what to say. Just my face. What a normal face looked like walking into a room and seeing someone for the very first time. Neutral. Open. A face with absolutely no history behind it.

Twenty minutes of practice and I still wasn’t sure I had it right.

The woman finally glanced up. “You’re number eleven? He’s running on time. You’re up.”

I pushed the door open and walked in.

He was already there.

Of course he was. Caius was always early. I knew that. I’d known it for years, the same way I knew everything else about him, his coffee order, the way he always sat with one arm on the table and his weight shifted slightly left, the way he wrote things down like the act of writing made them more real. He was doing exactly that right now, head down over a notepad, pen moving, and then the door clicked shut behind me and he looked up.

Everything I’d practiced fell straight out of my head.

He was the same. That was what hit me first, fast and hard, right in the sternum. Same jaw. Same dark eyes. Same hands, God, his hands, I’d been carrying memories of those hands for five years and there they were, right there on the table, wrapped around a pen like it was nothing. He was broader than before. Something around his eyes had gone harder. But it was him. Completely, entirely him.

And he looked at me like he’d never seen me in his life.

“Mira Voss?” he said.

His voice.

I thought I knew it perfectly. Five years of carrying the memory of it and I was so sure nothing could surprise me. But hearing it in real air, in a real room, with him actually three feet away from me, was something else entirely. My chest did something I was not prepared for at all.

“Yes,” I said. My voice came out steady. I genuinely don’t know how.

“Sit down.” He gestured at the chair across the table. Not warm, not cold. Just professional. “This won’t take long. I’m putting names to faces.”

I sat. Bag on the floor, hands flat on the table, eyes on him. There was nothing on his face except polite attention. The face of a man doing a job. Just a job.

“How long have you been with the pack?” he asked.

“Five years.”

He wrote it down. Actually wrote it down. “Role?”

“Healer’s assistant. Reeve Street centre.”

“Any issues that came up during the five years that didn’t get flagged properly?”

A laugh tried to crawl up my throat. I pushed it back down hard. “No. Nothing like that.”

“Good.” He looked up from the notepad and the full weight of his attention landed on me and I had to physically stop myself from looking away. “You joined right around when I left then.”

“Around that time, yes.”

“Where were you before?”

“Small pack outside the city. I transferred in.”

He nodded and wrote something else. The scratch of his pen was the loudest thing in the room. The conference room smelled like stale coffee and floor cleaner, something sharp and citrus that didn’t quite cover the old smell underneath it. The window behind him showed a flat grey sky. I watched one cloud move across it because watching the cloud was safer than watching him.

“Anything you want to ask me?” he said.

I looked back at him. “No.”

“Most people ask something. Even just to be polite.” There was something small in his voice. Not quite amusement but close.

“How are you settling back in?” I said, because he was clearly waiting for something and I needed him to stop looking at me like that.

“Fine.”

“Good.”

“You don’t actually want to know,” he said. “You’re asking because I pointed out that you weren’t asking.”

He was right and he knew he was right and there was something almost like a dare sitting in it.

“Is that a problem?” I said.

“No.” The corner of his mouth moved, barely. “I appreciate the honesty.”

In the back of my head, the version of him I’d been carrying for five years was warm. Close. Saying my name the way he used to, weight on the first syllable, like it meant something. Like I meant something.

The version sitting across from me was writing on a notepad and moving on.

“Anything the healer centre needs that it’s not getting?” Back to business, pen ready.

“Supply requests have been slow. Three-week delays on standard stock.”

“I’ll have someone look at it.” He wrote that down too. “Anything else?”

“No.”

“Alright.” He set the pen down and sat back and looked at me differently than he’d been looking at me for the past ten minutes. Quieter. More direct. Like he was actually seeing me for the first time instead of just processing number eleven on a list. “Thank you for coming in.”

“Of course.” I picked up my bag. “Thank you for…”

“Have we met before?”

I stopped moving completely.

“Sorry?”

“You and I.” He was frowning, just slightly, like he was listening to a sound I couldn’t hear. “Before today. Have we met?”

Every part of me went careful at the exact same time.

“No,” I said. “We haven’t.”

“You’ve been looking at me like we have.”

“I’ve been looking at you because you’ve been asking me questions,” I said. Even. Flat. Believable, I prayed.

He held my gaze one beat too long. “Right.” He picked the pen back up. “Sorry. Never mind. You can go.”

I stood. Pushed the chair back. Three steps to the door. Three steps and I was out and I could breathe and figure out how to survive the next time I had to be in a room with him.

One step.

Two.

His hand closed around my wrist.

Not hard. Not grabbing. More like his arm moved before he decided to move it and his fingers just landed there, warm and certain. Then he pulled back fast, like he’d touched something that burned, and stared at his own hand like it had done something without asking him.

“Sorry,” he said quickly. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I…” He stopped. “Sorry.”

I hadn’t moved.

I was standing completely still, my back half to him, and the skin on my wrist felt like it was paying attention in a way skin had no business doing. Deep in the back of my head, in the place where I kept five years of him, something shifted. Small and fast. Like a light coming on at the end of a very long hallway.

His wolf had felt something.

He didn’t know what. There was no memory attached to it, no context, nothing to grab onto. Just a reflex his body made that his brain couldn’t explain.

But I felt it move through everything I was carrying, slow and certain, like a key finding the right lock after years of searching for it.

“It’s fine,” I said. My voice was still steady. I still don’t know how. “Don’t worry about it.”

I walked out and I didn’t look back and the door clicked shut and the woman on the bench said something I didn’t catch because I was already moving down the corridor with one single thought running on a loop.

His wolf just recognised something.

And now everything was going to get so much harder.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​