His mouth moved. Shaping words I couldn’t hear at first.
Then: “Mae...”
He stopped. Confusion flickered across his face.
“What?” I leaned closer. “Xavier, what did you say?”
He found me again. Lost. Terrified.
“Maeve.” The word came out broken. Barely audible.
My stomach dropped.
“Who’s Maeve?”
But Xavier had already closed off. His breathing evening out into unconsciousness.
I looked up at Havoc. “Who the hell is Maeve?”
Havoc’s expression was grim. “I don’t know. But if he’s remembering names...”
“His past is coming back,” Hellhound finished quietly. “Along with everything Oblivion tried to erase.”
I stared down at Xavier’s unconscious form. At the man I’d been falling for without permission. The man who’d said my name last night like it was the only word that mattered.
And now he was calling for someone else.
A woman named Maeve.
Chapter 18
Clare
I’d been hiding in our room for six hours.
Pathetic. Professionally embarrassing. Totally justified.
The laptop screen glowed blue-white in the darkness. My eyes burned from staring at search results that gave me absolutely nothing.
Maeve + Xavier =No fugitive matches found.
Maeve + France border crossing = 1,247 results, none relevant.
Maeve + Oblivion = Nothing, of course.
I tried variations, different spellings, alternate search engines. The VPN layers Havoc had configured on his secured laptop made everything crawl at a glacial pace, but I kept battering away at dead ends anyway.
Six hours of this. Nothing to show for it but eyestrain and spiraling thoughts.
My second coffee had gone cold hours ago. I drank it anyway, the bitterness coating my tongue like punishment. Exactly what I deserved.
Outside the window, twilight bled across the frost-covered grounds, transforming the abandoned school into something from a gothic novel. Beautiful in that desolate, haunting way. The kind of beauty that made you feel like the only person left alive in the world.
I wasn’t hiding.
I was researching.
Gathering critical information to better manage my patient’s deteriorating neurological condition.
