All Chapters of The Wolf Who Forgot Me: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

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 h

MIRA POV My phone had fourteen unread messages from Sable. The first one came right after I left for the meeting this morning. You okay? Then one an hour later. Then two more after that, the gaps between them getting shorter the longer I stayed quiet, the way his messages always did when I went silent. Patient first, then less patient, then the one that just said Mira. with a full stop, which meant he was already looking for his car keys. The last one, twelve minutes ago: I’m outside. Buzz me up or I’m calling Petra. I pressed the buzzer without getting up. I was on the kitchen floor. Back against the cabinet under the sink, knees pulled up, still in the same clothes I’d worn to the meeting. I’d come home, dropped my bag at the door, and just ended up here. Didn’t plan it. The couch was right there. The bedroom was right there. The floor just felt smaller. More manageable. I heard him take the stairs instead of the lift. He always took the stairs, said old building lifts made a s

MIRA POV“He took the coffee back.”Sable put his fork down.“Sorry?”“When he left. He took both coffees with him. I don’t know why I keep thinking about that part.”My brother looked at me across my kitchen table with the expression that meant he was deciding how to say the next thing. He’d shown up an hour ago with food from the place on Deller Road, the one we’d been ordering from since we were teenagers, and he’d put containers on the table and sat down and waited. He was good at waiting. He had been doing it with me for five years.“Start from the beginning,” he said. “The corridor. All of it.”So I told him. The coffee showing up wrong. The questions. The step closer. What Caius had said before he left. Sable listened the whole way through without interrupting, which was unusual for him, and by the time I finished he had both elbows on the table and his hands pressed together in front of his mouth like he was trying to keep something in.“Okay,” he said finally.“Okay?”“This i

MIRA POV“Petra.”I said it low, not moving my mouth much, still facing forward. She was right beside me and she heard it.“I know,” she said. Same volume. Same stillness.“I need two minutes. Follow me out.”I put my plate down on the table like I was done eating and turned and walked toward the corridor door at the side of the room. Not fast. Not slow. The pace of someone who needed the bathroom or wanted some air, the completely unremarkable pace of a person who was not thinking about the silver-haired man standing near the yellow-leafed plant twenty feet behind her.The corridor was cooler than the hall and quieter and I stopped a few steps in and turned around and Petra was right behind me, pulling the door almost shut.“That man,” I said. “Silver hair. Standing behind Lena. Dark jacket. Did you get a good look at him?”“Good enough. I don’t know him.”“Have you seen him before? Any pack event, any meeting, anything.”“No. Never. Mira, who is he?”I shook my head. Not because I w

MIRA POV“Sit down,” Sable said to Caius. “Please.”Caius sat. Not on the couch next to me. On the chair across from it, the one Sable used when he was working from home, angled slightly toward the coffee table. He sat with his elbows on his knees and he looked at me and he waited and the waiting was very patient and very complete.Sable stayed standing near the kitchen doorway. Not leaving, not joining, just being in the room in case he was needed.I looked at Caius across the coffee table and I thought about all the things I could say. All the true things. All the things that would actually explain why a man in a silver-haired jacket saying two words to me on his way out of a gathering had left me standing against a wall unable to move for thirty seconds.I picked the version that would hold up.“There was a man at the gathering tonight,” I said. “I didn’t know him. He wasn’t pack. He was standing near the back with Lena and he was watching the room in a way that felt wrong.”“Wrong