Memory Lane

Chapter Three

"Why now?" came the very quick response of my husband. I was still processing the throne part.

"It is time. Our mother has decided that she should be Queen as our true Queen has not been seen in five years."

"Throne?" I asked confused. "I didn't know there was any royalty in the werewolf hierarchy." If there was, Arthur certainly had not told me.

"Okay, what is wrong with you?" The man demanded. "You pretending not to know me, I can understand that given our past, but your heritage? How can you pretend not to know that, when it is so important to who you are?" I jumped to my feet.

"Important to who I am?" I shouted back. "What's important to who I am is my mate, our children and our pack. I am not running away from my family for someone who claims to know who I am, especially when I don't know their goddamn name!"

"I am your brother, I shouldn't need to tell you my name. You know your responsibilities, you agreed to return when I came to find you. You -"

"She doesn't remember," came Arthur's soft response, cutting the man off.

"What do you mean?"He demanded.

"Five years ago, I was in a car accident. The only things I remember before waking up in a hospital are being saved by my mate and a voice telling me to run. I don't know who you are, I don't know where I came from or why I was running from there, just that I was."

Arthur tossed the folder over his desk. It landed with an echoing clap on a table in the middle of the room. It was thick and sticky labels protruded from both the top and the sides. Arthur has a reason for everything. I looked up at him.

"That is everything I have done in the past five years to try and find Melanie's family," he spoke to the whole room. "There is a section on you, your brother, both parents and your family history. It also has information on the wolves and other supernatural creatures who knew of her existence. The information stored in there includes every individual's family, whereabouts and any other tidbits I could find out about them. It also includes all of Melanie's memories about each person, in detail." That bit of news was. shock to me. He had written down all of my memories before finding him and not told me?

"What about the throne?" The man asked. Arthur pulled another folder off the same shelf the first had come off. That landed next to the first and it was almost as thick.

"I know about the prophecy too." The man's head shot up to look at Arthur.

"Prophecy?" I asked. It sounded medieval.

"About our family," the man threw out. "It doesn't matter." He faced Arthur again and began firing questions at him, which Arthur answered quickly.

I began to ignore them though, concentrating on the folders in front of me.

Opening up the folder containing family and acquaintances, I began to flip through. Each pocket wallet had a different person in it, starting with me. I smiled at the big words of 'My Mate' scrawled along the top of the first page with a little red heart next to it. My gaze went down the page, reading every word carefully. If there was anything I didn't know about myself, it would be in here.

With fascination, I read what Arthur had learned about me. I had parents - Alastair Adams and Lanie Foster - five brothers and I was the only girl to have been born to my family, through my father's line, in over one hundred years.

Page after page of Arthur's handwriting told me memories of before the accident when I was alone. These pages told me what I enjoying, what gave me some peace and what I couldn't stand to do. Some of them were mundane and I still did not like to do them, washing up after dinner being one of them.

Things I liked to do now and seemed to have prior memory of doing it suddenly made sense. Drawing, knitting and crochet, a whole lot of other craft things.

I moved onto the next pocket wallet. There was a picture in this one, as well as a name. James Adams. And it was the man in front of me.

The paper stated the man was my brother, one of five, the eldest. The father's name was the same as mine, but the mother's name was different.

"Why are our mother's different?" I interrupted, not caring what their conversation was about. "If she was our father's mate, why would he go with someone else? Why would I have a different mother?"

"You have it the wrong way," James stated. "My mother is not our father's mate. She forced him into mating due to his family history. Your mother was his true mate. By the time my mother found out, they had already had you. She took you and killed Lanie, knowing father had promised to protect you. She basically forced him to go back to her."

"What? That doesn't make sense."

"There's a prophecy about our lineage. It basically states that forced matings will not succeed to the throne. Only those chosen by the goddess will. It's why we have no sisters, other than you."

I frowned, thinking over what he said. It didn't make sense to me. If only one female was to be born, why did i have five daughters? I put the question to James.

"You're a true mated pair, chosen by the Moon Goddess," came his response. "Your daughters are not the product of any forced mating. With the exception of father and Laini, all mated pairs in our family for the last hundred odd years have been arranged. You, technically, should not have been born."

"Except that my dad found his true mate, despite the arranged one."

"Indeed. And that makes you the heir."