I really, really hope he doesn’t.
2
??
A mansion.Marble floors slicked with something dark. Then a club. Strobe lights carving women’s silhouettes out of smoke, bass so heavy I feel it in my teeth. Someone grabs my shoulder. A face I almost know, mouth moving, shouting words I can’t hear over the?—
Gunfire. Close.
A muzzle swings toward me. I see the finger tighten on the trigger before the flash swallows everything white.
I jackknife upright so hard my skull detonates.
For three full seconds, I don’t know where I am. My hands are already moving, patting the mattress, reaching for something on a nightstand that isn’t there. A phone. A weapon. I can’t tell which one my hands expected to find, but the fact thatweaponmade the list leaves me cold.
Because it didn’t feel like a dream. Not entirely. My body knows that the way it knows how to breathe: automatically, withoutpermission. And without giving me a single useful detail to go with it.
The throbbing in my head settles into a steady, vindictive rhythm.
I force myself to focus on the room. Off-white walls. Wicker dresser with nothing on it. A painting of a sailboat that looks like it came with the frame. The whole space has the personality of a hotel nobody checked into on purpose. Clean, coordinated, and completely devoid of anyone’s actual life.
I swing my legs off the bed and immediately regret the ambition. Every muscle in my body has filed a formal complaint. My wrist throbs when I put weight on it, and the cut above my temple has graduated from a dull ache to a sharp, pointed fuck-you every time I move my jaw.
The bathroom mirror confirms what I suspected: I look like shit. Dark circles. An angry bruise blooming along my cheekbone. The butterfly strips Natalia applied are the neatest thing about me.
I splash water on my face and hiss when it finds every scrape and cut I didn’t know I had. The face staring back at me is mine. I’m reasonably sure of that. Dark eyes, dark hair that needs washing, chin that could use a shave. It’s familiar the way a word is familiar when you’ve said it so many times it stops meaning anything. I’m somewhere in my mid-twenties if I had to guess, which apparently I do.
I grip the edge of the sink. My knuckles go white.
I don’t know my name.
That fact keeps landing fresh, like a sucker punch I should see coming but can’t dodge. Every few minutes, my brain circles back to it and delivers the news again with the enthusiasm of someone who really enjoys giving bad news.Hey, quick reminder: you have no idea who you are. Just wanted to make sure that was still ruining your day.
The smart move is a hospital. I know that. The thought forms clearly, logically. Yet my whole body rejects it. Not reluctance. Something deeper. An alarm wired into my nervous system that screamsnowith the certainty of a reflex. Like touching a hot stove. Like ducking before you’ve consciously registered the sound of a gunshot.
The house is quiet when I slip out of the bedroom. The hallway gives me more of the same: neutral walls, generic coastal prints, the kind of furniture that comes with a lease. But there are signs of someone actually living here. A laptop and a thick textbook on the kitchen counter. A single mug in the dish rack. A pair of sandals kicked off by the sliding glass door that leads to the back deck. Beyond it, the beach stretches out under a sky just starting to bleed pink. It’s morning? How long have I been out?
I need air.
The deck boards are cool under my bare feet, and the morning hits me all at once. Salt and wind and the particular dampness of an ocean sunrise that clings to everything. The crash of waves is steady and rhythmic, and something about it loosens the knot in my chest by a fraction.
That’s when I see her.
Natalia’s walking the shoreline, near enough to the water that the tide keeps reaching for her feet. Tall and slim, chestnutbrown hair catching copper in the sunrise. Blue eyes that I remember from yesterday, the way she leaned over me on the beach, checking my pupils with a focus that didn’t match how scared she looked.
She’s on the phone, her free hand gesturing in tight, controlled movements, the kind a person makes when they’re furious but keeping the volume down.
I watch her stop. Drop her head. Her whole body goes rigid for a beat, then she forces her shoulders down, shoves the phone in her pocket, and turns back toward the house.
She moves like someone who’s learned to take up as little space as possible. Shoulders drawn in, steps careful, head down until whatever that phone call did to her gets packed away somewhere I can’t see. Then she looks up, spots me on the deck, and something loosens. She lifts her hand in a small wave, and her smile is real enough that I feel it land.
I want to know who she was talking to. I want to know why her first instinct is to make herself smaller. I don’t have the right to want any of that. I don’t even know my own name. But the pull behind my ribs doesn’t seem to give a shit about what makes sense.
She’s beautiful. That’s not news. I noticed yesterday through the haze of bleeding and confusion. But this morning, with the ocean behind her and the gold light catching the angles of her face, it’s harder to file underirrelevant.
I shut that down. Whatever instinct is trying to catalog the shade of her eyes can take a number and wait. I’m a stranger with a head wound and amnesia who slept in her guest room. Reading into the warmth of her smile is not on the agenda.
She crosses the last stretch of sand and climbs the deck stairs to meet me.
