The Wolf Who Forgot Me のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 31 - チャプター 40

MIRA POV“I have to go” I said.He nodded. He did not push. He looked at me with that face, the patient searching one, and he nodded once and let me go the same way he had been letting me go every time I reached a point I couldn’t cross yet and pulled back. Patient. Always patient.I hated it a little. How patient he was. How he never pushed past the wall I kept building and never stopped clearly knowing the wall was there.He had been doing that since the first meeting room. Reaching right up to the edge of what I would give him and then stopping there and waiting. I had built the wall and he had found it immediately and had been standing outside it for three weeks and had never once tried to knock it down. He just stood there with that expression and waited and it was the kindest and also the most maddening thing anyone had ever done to me.Orion drove. The eastern border got smaller in the mirror and the road back to the city was straight and flat and the light was going. I sat in

MIRA POV“Get inside” I said.Lena came in. I pulled the door shut and turned the lock and stood for one second with my back to it and my mind running.Two vehicles. Both ends of the block. Coming without lights. The finder had flagged me and Destan had moved and they were already positioned and the window between right now and very bad was getting shorter.I ran through it fast. What I had, what I didn’t have, what mattered. Third floor. One door in, one window to the fire escape, Orion not here because I had told him I didn’t need him tonight and I had meant it then and I was paying for that now. Sable not picking up. Petra moving.Petra had to get to Caius before they got to me. That was the calculation. That was the only one that mattered.I called Sable.It rang four times and went to voicemail. I hung up and called again and it did the same thing and I put that aside and called Petra.Two rings.“Mira”“Get to Caius right now” I said. Five words, even and clear.A beat. I heard

MIRA POV"Say it again."Caius said it so quiet I almost missed it.Not loud. Not angry. Just those three words sitting in the cold alley air like he was giving her one more chance to take it back.Lena did not take it back.She stood there in the dark, jacket pulled tight, the blade still tucked away where she'd put it back. Her face was different now. All that careful warmth she wore like a second skin at pack dinners, at those corridor conversations where she smiled just a little too fast. Gone. What was left underneath was just a person. Tired. Caught."I have been in contact with Destan Cole," she said. "For the past year. I gave him information about pack movements. About your schedule. About security rotations."She did not dress it up. Did not soften it with context or reasons. Just the facts, flat and plain, the way you said something you had been carrying so long you stopped caring how it landed.I stayed still. Arms at my sides. Watching Caius.He had not moved once since s

MIRA POV"Where are we going?"He did not answer right away. He just pushed the side door open and held it and looked back at me with that expression he had been wearing since the alley. The one that said the decision had already been made and he was just waiting for my feet to catch up.I followed him in.The stairwell smelled like cold concrete and the same metallic nothing it always smelled like. Four flights. My hand on the railing, his footsteps ahead of me, neither of us talking. The second floor light buzzed the way it always buzzed. I noticed it this time the same way I had noticed it the first time he brought me up here.Not this version of him. The other one. The one I had been carrying.The roof door opened and the cold hit me hard. Sharp and clean and real. And there it was. The city spread out below, all light and noise and movement, and the mountain sitting dark and enormous above it all, and the sky between them doing that deep blue thing it did on clear cold nights.I

MIRA POVHe came to me and I did not move back.That was the thing. Every other time he had gotten close in the past three weeks, something in me had pulled tight and stayed ready and kept a small careful distance between his warmth and my actual chest. Not because I did not want him near. Because I wanted it too much and the wanting had nowhere safe to go.But he had just said what did he do to you with that look on his face and my body had run out of walls.So when he came toward me I stayed exactly where I was.His arms went around me. Both of them. Solid and warm and completely certain the way he was certain about things he had made up his mind about. He did not ask first. He did not hesitate. He just put his arms around me and pulled me in and I pressed my face against his chest and I cried.Not pretty. Not quiet.Just the ugly real kind that happened when something had been held in so long that when it finally came out it did not come out politely. Five years of it. Five years o