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 recognise was sitting on the bench across the corridor with a coffee cup in one hand and her phone in the other, not even looking up from the screen when she said it.

“I’m early,” I said.

“Door’s not locked.”

I know that. I knew that. I just hadn’t been able to make my hand reach for the handle yet.

I’d practised in front of my bathroom mirror this morning. Not what to wear, not what to say exactly .. just my face. What my face should look like walking into a room and seeing someone for the first time. Neutral. Open. Slightly friendly but not too friendly. The kind of face that has absolutely no history behind it.

I’d practised for twenty minutes and I still wasn’t sure I had it right.

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

I pushed the door open and went in.

He was already there.

Of course he was already there. Caius was always early. I knew that. I’d known that for years, stored in me the way I stored everything else .. his punctuality, his coffee order, the particular way he sat in chairs that were slightly too small for him, always with one arm on the table and his weight shifted left. He was sitting exactly like that right now, at the head of the conference table, writing something on a notepad, and he looked up when the door clicked shut behind me.

Everything I’d practised fell out of my head completely.

He was the same. That was the first thing that hit me. 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 in front of me, wrapped around a pen. He was broader than I remembered. Something around his eyes had gone a little harder. But it was him. It was completely, entirely him.

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

“Mira Voss?” he said.

His voice.

I’d been carrying the memory of his voice for five years and I thought I knew it perfectly. I thought there was nothing he could say that would surprise me. But hearing it in the actual air of an actual room with him actually sitting three feet away from me was a completely different thing and my chest did something I was absolutely not prepared for.

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

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

I sat. I put my bag on the floor and my hands flat on the table and I looked at him and he looked at me and there was nothing on his face except polite attention. The face of a man doing a job.

“How long have you been with the pack?” he asked. He had the notepad in front of him. He was actually going to write this down.

“Five years,” I said.

He wrote something. “And what’s your role?”

“Healer’s assistant. I work out of the centre on Reeve Street.”

“Good.” He wrote that too. “Any issues I should know about? Anything that came up during the five years that didn’t get flagged properly?”

A laugh tried to come out of me. I kept it down.

“No,” I said. “Nothing like that.”

“Good.” He looked up from the notepad and the full weight of his attention landed on me and I had to work very hard not to look away. “You joined right around when I left, then.”

“Around that time, yes.”

“Where were you before?”

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

He nodded. Wrote something else. The scratch of the pen on the paper was the loudest thing in the room. The conference room smelled like old coffee and the cleaning product they used on the floors .. something sharp and citrus that didn’t quite cover the underneath smell of a room a lot of people had sat in over the years. The window behind him was showing a grey sky. One cloud moving slowly across it. I was watching the cloud because it was safer than watching him.

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

I looked back at him.

“No,” I said.

“Most people ask something. Even just out of politeness.” There was the smallest thing in his voice. Not quite amusement. Close to it.

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

“Fine.”

“Good.”

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

I looked at him. He looked back. He was right and he knew he was right and there was something almost like a dare in it.

“Is that a problem?” I said.

“No.” His mouth moved. Just barely. “I appreciate the honesty.”

Inside my head, the version of him I’d been carrying for five years was warm. Close. Saying my name the way he used to say it, with the weight on the first syllable, like it mattered. Like I mattered. Like I was the only person in whatever room we were in.

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

“Is there anything the healer centre needs that it’s not getting?” he asked. Back to business. Pen ready.

“The supply requests have been a bit slow. About a three-week delay on some of the 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 slightly and looked at me in a way that was different from the professional attention he’d been giving me for the last ten minutes. It was quieter than that. More personal. Like he was actually seeing me for the first time instead of just clocking number eleven on his list. “Thank you for coming in.”

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

“How long have we met?”

I stopped.

“Sorry?”

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

My whole body went careful. Every single part of me at once.

“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. Completely believable, I hoped.

He held my gaze for a beat too long. “Right.” He picked up the pen again. “Sorry. That was.. never mind. You can go.”

I stood. Pushed the chair back. I had three steps to the door. Three steps and I was out and I could breathe and then I could 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 like he’d grabbed me. More like his arm had moved before he’d decided to move it and his fingers had just .. landed. On my wrist. Warm and certain and immediately wrong because a second later he pulled back like he’d touched something hot.

“Sorry,” he said, fast. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I..” He stopped. He was staring at his own hand like it had done something without permission. “Sorry,” he said again.

I hadn’t moved.

I was standing completely still with my back half to him and my wrist where he’d touched it feeling like the skin there was paying attention in a way skin normally didn’t. And deep in the back of my head, in the part where I’d been storing five years of him, something had shifted. A flicker. Small and fast, like a light turning on in a room at the end of a very long hallway.

His wolf had felt something.

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

But I felt it. I felt it move through everything I was carrying like a key turning in a lock it had been searching for a long time.

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

I walked out and I did not look back and the door clicked shut behind me and the woman on the bench looked up from her phone and said something I didn’t hear because I was already moving down the corridor with one thought running on a loop in my head.

His wolf just recognised something.

And now everything was going to get so much harder.