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 is not him being curious, Mira. You understand that, right? The wrist yesterday, the coffee this morning, the wolf comment. That is not a man who thinks something is a bit off about a pack member. That is a mate bond running underneath his memory and finding its way through." He dropped his hands. "Water through cracks in stone. It doesn't matter that the memory is gone. The bond is still there and it is moving."
I already knew that. I had known it since the corridor. That was the problem with already knowing things.
"I know," I said.
"So you have to give them back."
"Sable."
"Before the bond does it on its own. Because if the bond surfaces fully before you return them, he gets the feeling without the context, and an Alpha wolf in that state is not something either of you wants to deal with."
"I know that too."
"Then what is the actual problem."
He said it flat. Not as a question. He already knew the answer, or he thought he did, and he was giving me the space to say it out loud instead of just sitting with it quietly the way I'd been doing since Caius came home.
I looked at my food. The container in front of me had rice and the green sauce I always got and I hadn't touched it yet.
"When he gets the memories back," I said slowly, "he gets everything. Not just us. Not just the good stuff. He gets the two years with Destan. What happened during that time. All of it."
"Yes."
"You know what he'll do."
"I have a pretty good idea."
"It'll be a mess. People will get hurt. And it'll be because of me, because I'm the reason he'll go straight at Destan without stopping to think first."
Sable was quiet for a moment. He picked up his fork and put it back down and looked at the table and then at me.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"You're going to anyway."
"Do you actually believe that him finding out will make things worse? Or are you scared of something else?"
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
"Because those are two different things," Sable said, not unkindly. "One is about protecting people. The other is about protecting yourself."
"That's not what this is."
"I'm not saying it is. I'm asking. Is it possible that part of why you're holding onto those memories is because you're scared that when he gets them back, when he finds out what happened to you during those two years, he won't look at you the way he used to?" He waited. "That he'll look at you with guilt instead of love and you won't be able to tell the difference anymore?"
The kitchen was very quiet.
The fridge hummed. Outside, someone was reversing a car into a spot on the street below and they were not very good at it. I could hear the faint sound of their indicator. On. Off. On. Off.
I didn't answer.
Sable didn't push. He never pushed after he'd said the hard thing. He just let it sit in the air between us, not filling the silence with anything, just letting me have it. That was the thing about him. He said the difficult thing once and then he let you hold it yourself.
I picked up my fork and ate some of the rice. It had gone a bit cold but it still tasted like it always tasted and that was something.
"I just need a little more time," I said.
"Okay."
"I'm not avoiding it forever. I just need to figure out how to do it without..." I stopped. Restarted. "I need to figure out the right moment."
"Okay," he said again. Same word. Different weight this time, a little more patience in it, a little less urgency.
"You're not going to argue?"
"Would it help?"
"No."
"Then no." He finally picked up his own fork and ate something. "But Mira. Not forever. Okay? The bond is already moving faster than either of us expected and your body is carrying five years of someone else's memories and you are not twenty-two anymore. There is a limit to how long you can hold this and I need you to know that I know what it's costing you even when you don't say it."
I looked at him. My big brother. The person who had sat on every kitchen floor with me. Who had found me pale and shaking the morning after Caius left and hadn't left my side for three days.
"I know you know," I said.
"Good." He pointed at my food with his fork. "Eat. It's getting cold."
We ate. The evening settled in around us, the light going orange through the window and then grey and then dark. Sable washed up afterward even though I told him he didn't have to, and I dried, and we stood at the sink doing the completely ordinary thing and not talking and it was one of the easier moments I'd had since Caius came home.
Sable left around eight. I locked the door behind him and leaned against it for a second and then pushed off and went to make tea.
The knock came twenty minutes later.
I thought it was Sable. He was always forgetting things, his keys or his jacket or once, memorably, his actual shoes. I opened the door without checking.
It was Petra.
She had a paper bag in one hand and a look on her face that I recognised immediately. It was the look she got when she had information she wasn't sure she should share. The look that meant she'd been sitting on something all day and it had gotten too heavy and she'd needed to put it somewhere.
"I brought food," she said. "I know Sable was probably already here with food but I brought different food so it's fine."
I stepped back and let her in.
She put the bag on the table and didn't sit down. She stood with her hands in her jacket pockets and looked at me and I looked at her and we both knew what was coming.
"Just say it," I said.
"Okay." She pulled her hands out of her pockets. "You know the corridor. This morning. You and Caius."
"Yes."
"Someone was watching."
My stomach dropped. Fast and clean, the way a stone dropped in water.
"Who."
"Lena." Petra watched my face. "Caius's cousin. She was at the far end of the hall the whole time. I don't know how long she'd been standing there. I only caught her on my way to the supply room and by the time I looked properly she was already turning away."
I didn't say anything.
"Mira. That's not the whole thing." Petra's voice had gone careful. "When Caius walked out, when he left through the car park door, Lena watched him go and then she pulled out her phone and made a call. Right there in the corridor. She didn't move, didn't go somewhere private, just stood there and called someone and I couldn't hear what she said but she was looking toward the door the whole time she was on the phone. The door you were still standing behind."
The tea on the hob had started to whistle. I didn't move to get it.
"You're sure it was her?" I said.
"I know what Lena looks like."
"And you're sure she was watching the whole conversation."
"Long enough to see everything that mattered." Petra held my gaze. "Who do you think she was calling?"
I didn't answer that either.
But I already knew.
