Chapter 3 Thirty Days #3
"Of course." The healer made a final note on the chart at the end of the bed, then glanced toward the door, and something in her expression shifted — not unkindly, but with the particular awareness of someone who'd heard things, who knew more about why I was here than just sick child arrives at packhouse .
"I'll let you two have some quiet. If anything changes with her fever, just press the call button by the bed — someone will come right away. "
She left, and the room settled into a quiet that felt, for the first time all night, almost peaceful. Birdie's hand was warm in mine — fever-warm, not dangerous-warm — and her eyes were already drifting shut again, her breathing slow and even in a way it hadn't been in hours.
"Mama?" Her voice was barely a whisper, right on the edge of sleep.
"Yeah, baby?"
"Is this a good place?"
I looked around the small, bright room — at the careful, kind healers, at the window that looked out over gray morning light filtering through tall pines, at the building that smelled like cedar and woodsmoke and a life I'd once believed in completely — and felt something complicated rise up in my chest, something that didn't have a single clean answer.
"I don't know yet," I said honestly. "But they're going to take good care of you here. I promise."
"Okay." Her eyes slid shut. "I like the wolf smell."
I didn't say anything to that. There wasn't anything to say.
I just sat there, holding her hand, listening to her breathing even out into sleep, and tried not to think about the fact that somewhere in this building, on the other side of however many walls, the Alpha of Ashgrove was probably hearing my name for the first time in his life — and that in a few minutes, maybe less, he was going to walk through a door and look at me, and I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen when he did.
I didn't have to wait long to find out.
I heard footsteps first — measured, even, the particular gait of someone moving with purpose but trying not to look like they were rushing — and then the door at the end of the hallway opened, and even before I turned around, before I saw him, something in me reacted.
It wasn't a thought. It was lower than thought, faster than thought — a kind of full-body recognition that hit me before my brain had processed anything at all, a wave of awareness that rolled through me head to toe and left me gripping the edge of Birdie's bed like the floor had tilted.
My skin prickled. My pulse, which had finally started to slow down after the morning I'd had, kicked back up to something fast and frantic.
And underneath all of it, low and visceral and impossible to ignore, something in my chest pulled — toward the door, toward whoever was walking through it, with a force that felt less like emotion and more like gravity.
I knew that pull. I'd spent three years telling myself I'd imagined it, that the bond hadn't been real, that whatever I'd felt the first time I'd met Roman Voss had just been hormones and youth and the desperate hope of a girl who'd wanted, more than anything, to belong somewhere.
It hadn't been imagined. It was happening right now, in real time, and it was so much more than I remembered that for one dizzying second I genuinely thought I might be sick.
I turned around.
Roman stood in the doorway.
He looked — older, was the first thing I registered, though it had only been three years and three years shouldn't have been enough to do this.
There was something in his face that hadn't been there before, something carved in by time or grief or both, a tightness around his eyes that made him look like a man who'd spent a long time holding something very heavy and had stopped expecting anyone to offer to help carry it.
He was taller than I remembered, or maybe just broader, the kind of presence that filled a doorway without trying to.
And he was looking at me like he'd never seen me before in his life.
Not coldly. Not with the careful, deliberate blankness I'd braced myself for, the look of a man steeling himself to face someone he'd hurt.
There was none of that. What was on his face instead was something far stranger — a kind of stunned, searching confusion, the look of someone trying to place a face they were certain they should recognize and coming up, again and again, with absolutely nothing.
"You're—" His voice was lower than I remembered, rougher. He stopped, started again. "You're Wren Calloway."
"Hale, now." The words came out steadier than I felt. "But yes."
He didn't say anything for a long moment.
He just stood there, in the doorway, looking at me with an expression I couldn't read — and the pull in my chest didn't fade, didn't ease, just sat there, heavy and undeniable, a physical fact in a room that was rapidly filling up with things neither of us seemed to know how to say.
"I don't—" he started, and stopped again, and for the first time since he'd walked in, something cracked through the careful composure on his face — something raw, something almost afraid. "I don't remember you. I'm sorry. I don't — I should. I know I should. But I don't remember you at all."