Somewhere to Belong
1377 Words
Lyra's POV
"You will be discharged today."
Doctor Ifeanyi's words settled over me like the first cold breath of a season changing. I looked at him, searching his face for something more. An explanation. A direction. Anything that would tell me what discharged meant for a woman with no name, no past, and nowhere to go.
He smiled gently, the way people smile when they've already decided not to answer the questions they can see forming in your eyes.
"You've healed well, Lyra," he said. "Better than any of us expected."
Lyra.
"Where do I go?" I asked.
He busied himself with the clipboard in his hands. "Arrangements have been made."
"By who?"
He paused whatever he was doing.
"The Alpha," he said.
He left before I could ask anything else.
I sat on the edge of the bed for a long moment, my glasses on, my hearing aid in place, the world crisp and present around me in a way it hadn't been when I first woke up here. I looked at my hands. Turned them over. Looked at the lines on my palms like they might spell something out if I stared long enough.
They didn't.
A woman appeared in the doorway twenty minutes later. She was older, built solidly, with a face that had settled permanently into an expression of mild disapproval. She wore a grey uniform and carried a folded set of the same over one arm.
She looked at me the way you look at a piece of furniture that has been placed in the wrong room.
"Get dressed," she said. "We're leaving."
I took the uniform she held out. "Who are you?"
"Sera."
"Where are we going?"
"Silver Blade pack." She said it like I should already know. Like the name should mean something. When she saw that it didn't, something moved in her expression — not quite pity, not quite irritation. Somewhere between the two. "It's the Alpha's pack. Your pack now, I suppose."
"My pack," I repeated.
"Get dressed," she said again.
I dressed.
The drive was long and quiet. Sera sat beside me in the back of a black car, her eyes forward, her hands folded in her lap. The driver didn't speak. The roads outside the window shifted from city to forest to something vast and green that I had no name for.
I watched it all pass and felt nothing familiar in any of it.
"Sera," I said quietly.
She didn't look at me.
"Who am I?"
The question sat between us.
She was quiet long enough that I thought she wasn't going to answer. Then she exhaled through her nose, a short controlled sound, and said, "I don't know."
"You don't know my name?"
"I know your name. Lyra. That's what the Alpha said to call you."
"But who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here?"
She turned to look at me then..
"The Alpha picked you up. That's all I was told. The Alpha picked you up and brought you in and said to treat you and when you were well to bring you to the pack." She paused. "If you want to know more than that, you'll have to ask him."
I turned back to the window.
"And he'll answer?" I asked.
She said nothing.
Which was its own kind of answer.
Silver Blade pack rose out of the trees like something that had always been there and always would be. The gates were tall and iron and opened without anyone touching them as the car approached. The grounds beyond them were vast — green lawns, stone pathways, training grounds in the distance where figures moved in formations I couldn't make sense of.
And at the center of it all, the mansion.
Large. Dark stone. Windows that caught the afternoon light and threw it back like they had nothing to hide and no interest in sharing it either.
I stared at it as the car rolled through the gates.
"This is where I'll live?" I asked.
"This is where you'll work," Sera said.
The car stopped. She was out before I had unbuckled myself, moving toward the entrance with the efficiency of someone who had made this trip many times and found it unremarkable. I climbed out slowly, my feet finding the gravel, the afternoon air cool and sharp against my skin.
I stood for a moment and looked up at the mansion.
Somewhere inside it was a man named Diego who knew who I was and had decided, for reasons I couldn't begin to understand, not to tell me.
Sera's voice came from the entrance. "Don't fall behind."
I followed her inside.
The interior was exactly what the exterior promised. High ceilings. Dark wood. A staircase that split at the top into two directions like a question with no obvious answer. The air smelled faintly of wood polish and something colder underneath, something that lived in old stones and didn't leave.
Sera moved through it without looking at anything. I tried to memorize it all.
She led me down a corridor on the ground floor, past doors that were all closed, until she stopped at one near the end and pushed it open.
Small. Simple. A single bed with grey linen, a narrow window, a nightstand, a lamp.
"This is your room," she said.
I stepped inside. My footsteps sounded very loud in there.
"The room you were kept in while you recovered," she continued, "was on the second floor. East wing. The doctors used it because it was quiet." She said it plainly, the way you recite information you've been instructed to pass on. "You won't be returning there."
"What will I be doing instead?"
"Maid work." She folded her arms. "You start tomorrow. Five in the morning. Don't be late."
She turned to leave.
"Sera." My voice was smaller than I intended. "The Alpha. Does he know who I am? Truly?"
She stopped in the doorway.
I pressed on. "Because the doctors said they don't know. They said no records came with me. No pack name, no family, nothing. But you said the Alpha picked me up himself, which means he was there. Which means he saw something." I swallowed. "Which means he knows something."
Sera was quiet for a long time.
When she finally spoke, her voice was low and flat and carried the particular quality of a door being shut firmly but without drama.
"The Alpha knows what the Alpha knows," she said. "And he shares what he chooses to share. Which, in my experience, is very little." She looked at me one last time. "Don't ask me again. And I'd think very carefully before asking him."
The door clicked shut behind her.
I stood alone in the small room, the grey linen, the narrow window, the lamp throwing a weak yellow circle on the floor.
I sat on the edge of the bed.
Outside the window the sky was beginning to dim, the light going the slow amber way it goes when evening hasn't arrived yet but afternoon has already given up.
I reached up and removed my glasses, setting them carefully on the nightstand. Then the hearing aid. The world softened at its edges, the sounds dulling to a low hum.
I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
Somewhere in this mansion was a man who had picked me up from wherever I had fallen and brought me here and given me a name to answer to and a uniform to wear and a room at the end of a corridor.
And he knew.
He knew who I was and where I had come from and what had happened to me.
And he had looked at me in that hospital room — tall, dressed in black, his voice dropping like stones — and called me a slave and walked away.
I closed my eyes.
"Who am I?" I whispered to the ceiling.
The ceiling didn't answer.
But somewhere above me, on a floor I hadn't been to yet, a door opened and closed.
And the sound of his footsteps moved through, announcing his presence.
I took a deep breath.
sooner or later, I'll find out who I was.
- Writer
