ALTHEA'S POV
The silence in the car was a physical thing. It pressed against my eardrums, thick and heavy with everything unsaid. Haven's hand was wrapped around mine, her grip firm to the point of pain, but I didn't pull away. The pain was an anchor. It was real. Unlike the slippery, terrifying words on that card now burning a hole in the pocket of her suit jacket.
Flowers die in the dark… the gardener says it's for their own safety.
The metaphor wrapped around my throat like a vine. Was that my life? A beautiful, gilded darkness? And Haven… my beautiful, terrifying gardener. The thought should have revolted me. It should have made me rip my hand from hers. But all it did was make the dizzy confusion worse, because the darkness with her felt safer than any unknown light.
The mansion was a cathedral of quiet when we arrived. Sushi's explosive, golden-furred greeting was a shock to the system. A happy, simple, uncomplicated shock.
"Ahhh! My handsome prince!" The words tore from me, too loud, too bright. I sank to my knees on the cold marble, not caring about my dress, and buried my face in his fur. He smelled like sunshine and dog and home. He wriggled and whined, covering my face, my neck, the tears I hadn't even realized were starting, with frantic, slobbery kisses. "Yes, yes, good boy, that's it, just… fix me," I mumbled into his fur. For a moment, the world was just this: a warm, breathing creature who loved me without history, without conditions, without cryptic warnings.
I felt Haven's gaze on us, a weight as tangible as her hand had been. I didn't look up. A moment later, I heard her footsteps, crisp and purposeful, heading toward the kitchen. The message was clear. I will provide order. I will provide sustenance. You stay here, in this safe circle of dog.
I gave Sushi one last, desperate squeeze and stood, my legs feeling like they were made of wet sand. "I'm going to… wash off the day," I called out, my voice echoing in the vast foyer.
A non-committal hum was her only reply.
Upstairs, the master bathroom felt like a stage set for a life I was pretending to live. All marble and chrome and expensive, minimalist aesthetics. I turned the shower on full, twisting the dial all the way to cold. I needed the shock. I needed to feel something besides this crawling, formless dread. I stepped under the icy spray, gasping as it needled my skin, a thousand tiny, painful pinpricks. I stood there, shivering violently, letting the cold water slam into my skull.
Eya.
The name from the card echoed in the drumming water.
Who calls you Eya?
Come on, brain. You have to be in there somewhere. You have memories. You have friends. Who were they? Think past the fog. Push.
I squeezed my eyes shut, picturing doors in my mind. Heavy, ornate doors, locked tight. I mentally slammed my shoulder against them. Open! Show me! A face. A voice saying my name. "Hey, Eya." I strained, the muscles in my neck and jaw tightening. The headache began as a low throb behind my eyes, familiar and unwelcome. It was the brain's "access denied" signal.
The song before the silence. What song? My last hit? Some deep cut? A private melody I hummed only to myself? I tried to force a tune, any tune, from the void. Nothing. Just the hollow rushing of water and blood in my ears. The only music in me was the new stuff, the Haven stuff, or the old, angsty Haven stuff. Nothing that felt like mine from before.
Frustration boiled up, hot and acidic, cutting through the cold. I wasn't just an amnesiac. I was a useless one. A blank book others could write their stories in. Haven wrote a epic romance of obsession and protection. Janea scribbled in the margins with bitter nostalgia. And now some ghost from the past was slipping in poisoned bookmarks. I had no narrative of my own. I was a reactor, not an actor. A prize, a patient, a muse, a victim.
"Who AM I?" I whispered, the words swallowed by the shower's roar. The question wasn't philosophical. It was desperate. It was a scream into the emptiness where a person should be.
The headache spiked, a sudden, blinding pain that made the world tilt. The beautiful mosaic tiles of the shower wall swam before my eyes. Nausea rolled through my gut. I braced a hand against the wall, the cool tile the only stable point in a spinning universe. I needed to get out. I needed to sit.
I tried to take a step back toward the shower bench, but my legs betrayed me. They were liquid, disconnected. My foot, slick with water and soap, slid out from under me.
A sharp cry tore from my throat—more surprise than pain. I flailed, my hand grabbing instinctively for anything. It caught the heavy, linen shower curtain. For a glorious, suspended second, it held my weight. Then, with a sound that was both a rip and a metallic shriek of protest, the curtain rod tore from its brackets. The world became a whirl of white fabric, falling metal, and crashing impact.
I hit the floor hard, my elbow and knee taking the brunt. The air was knocked from my lungs in a painful whoosh. I lay there, stunned, wrapped in a sodden shroud, the cold water still cascading down onto the wreckage. The absurdity was a separate, sharp pain. The mysterious, threatening letter… and now this. A slapstick tragedy. I was so pathetic I couldn't even have a proper existential crisis without pratfalling.
A sob, choked and ragged, broke free.
The bathroom door didn't open. It exploded inwards, the handle cracking against the marble wall.
"Althea! Are you oka—"
Haven froze in the doorway, backlit by the hallway light, a statue of pure, petrified horror. Her eyes, wide and black, scanned the scene: the broken rod, the curtain draped like a shroud, the water pooling, me—a wet, crumpled, weeping heap on the floor.
Every ounce of the cold, controlled fury from the car vanished, replaced by something primal and raw. She was across the room in two strides, skidding slightly on the wet floor, dropping to her knees beside me. "Don't move," she commanded, but her voice was a frayed wire, crackling with panic. Her hands hovered over me, trembling, afraid to touch and find something broken.
"I'm… I'm okay," I hiccupped, tears now freely mixing with shower water. "Just… stupid. Clumsy."
She didn't listen. Her hands descended, shockingly gentle but thorough. They cradled my head, fingers probing through my wet hair, checking my scalp. They ran down my neck, my arms. When her fingertips brushed the already-blossoming scrape on my knee, I couldn't suppress a flinch. Her entire face tightened, a mask of anguish and rage.
Without another word, she slid one arm under my shoulders, the other under my knees. She lifted me as if I were made of glass and thistledown, cradling me against her chest. My wet dress soaked into her dry silk blouse instantly. She carried me from the wrecked bathroom, her steps swift and sure, down the hall to a guest suite I'd never used.
This bathroom was smaller, impersonal, pristine. She set me carefully on the closed toilet lid, her hands lingering for a moment on my shoulders as if to make sure I wouldn't dissolve. She turned on the shower, tested the temperature with her hand until it streamed warm, not scalding. Then, with a focused, terrifying tenderness, she helped me out of my sopping clothes. Her movements were methodical, reverent. She didn't speak. She just washed me. Her hands, usually instruments of corporate domination or fierce possession, lathered soap over my skin with unbearable softness. She shampooed my hair, her fingers massaging my scalp in slow circles, meticulously avoiding the tender spot where I'd hit the floor. She rinsed away the studio glitter, the scent of other people's perfume, the cold fear.
When I was clean, swaddled in a towel so large it swallowed me, she lifted me again. This time, she carried me to the guest bed, laying me down on the crisp duvet. She knelt beside the bed, her eyes scanning me. The scrape on my knee was an angry red, already beginning to bruise at the edges. A darker bloom was forming on my elbow.
She fetched a first-aid kit from the wall and returned, kneeling once more. She dabbed antiseptic on the scrape. I winced at the sting.
Finally, the heavy silence broke. "What happened?" Her voice was a low rasp, scraped raw from held-back emotion.
And that's when the dam inside me, the one holding back the ocean of grief for a self I couldn't remember, shattered completely.
The tears came in great, heaving sobs that shook my entire body. It was ugly, uncontrolled, a torrent of sorrow that had been building since I first woke up in that hospital bed.
"I tried…" I wept, the words splintering. "I tried to remember. Who calls me Eya? Who? I pushed… I pushed so hard, and my head… it just breaks. It's empty! It's a black hole!" I gestured weakly at my own skull, as if I could claw the memories out. "And then I got so dizzy, and I fell… I can't even stand up in a shower, Haven! I'm a grown woman, and I'm defeated by a bathtub!"
I looked down at my bruised knee, a perfect, pathetic symbol of my fragility. "I'm not a person. I'm a… a black slate. A hollow doll. You dress me up, you put me in beautiful rooms, you tell me stories about who I was, but I'm empty. I don't know my own mind! I don't know who to trust because I can't remember who I trusted! Someone out there knows me, knows my fears, and they're sending me warnings, and I'm just sitting here, useless, waiting for you to interpret the danger because my own brain is a locked room and I threw away the key!"
The sobs deepened, wrenching from a place of bottomless loss. "I hate it. I hate this. I look in the mirror and I see a stranger wearing my face. I sing songs and I don't know if the emotion is mine or just something I'm mimicking. I love you…" I looked at her, my vision blurred with tears, "I love you so much it feels like the only real thing in the world, but sometimes I wonder… is this love even mine? Or is it just what grew in the empty space where a person used to be? Am I just… just a parasite, feeding on your memories, your life, because I have none of my own?"
I curled in on myself, the towel falling away. I felt exposed, vulnerable in every possible way. "I'm so tired of being broken. I'm so tired of being a project. I just want to be whole. I want to be me. And I don't even know who that is."
HAVEN'S POV
Watching her break was the most exquisite torture I had ever endured.
Seeing her fall on the camera feed had sent a bolt of pure terror through me so acute I'd tasted copper. But this… this unraveling was worse. This was the shattering of the beautiful, vibrant creature I'd fought so hard to protect, and it was happening from the inside out.
Her words were knives, each one twisting deeper.
A hollow doll.
A parasite.
Is this love even mine?
They were questions born of a pain I could not fix with money, with threats, with the fierce, smothering weight of my possession. This was the one enemy I could not defeat: the void within her.
Her tears were a physical agony to me. Each sob felt like a failure etched directly onto my soul. I had built a fortress around her, but I couldn't fortress her mind. I couldn't fight the ghosts in her own head.
When she asked if her love was real, something in my own carefully constructed reality cracked. The monster in me wanted to roar, to shake her, to insist, Of course it's real, it's mine, I made it real! But the part of me that was utterly, hopelessly hers… that part just bled.
I didn't offer empty platitudes. I didn't tell her she was wrong. Instead, I did the only thing I could. I climbed onto the bed beside her. I gathered her wet, shaking body into my arms, towel and all, and pulled her against my chest. I held her as she wept, my chin resting on top of her head, my own eyes burning with a dangerous, helpless wetness I refused to shed.
"I know," I whispered into her hair, my voice rough. "I know it hurts. I know the emptiness is a monster. I see it in your eyes sometimes, and it is the only thing in this world that truly frightens me."
I rocked her gently. "You are not a doll. You are a miracle. Every day, you wake up and you choose. You choose to smile. You choose to sing. You choose to love a monster like me. That is not a hollow thing. That is the bravest, most real thing I have ever witnessed."
I pulled back just enough to cup her face, forcing her tear-drowned eyes to meet mine. "Your love is yours. It is the first, truest thing of you that I have ever known. The old Althea… she loved me in pieces, in shadows, between the lines of angry songs. This Althea? You love me in sunlight. In goofy socks. In whispered confessions to my sleeping face. That is not a parasite. That is a phoenix. And it is mine."
I kissed her forehead, her wet eyelids, the salt on her cheeks. "The memories will come, or they won't. But you are here. Right now. And you are not broken. You are reforged. And you are the most beautiful, frustrating, glorious thing in my universe."
I held her until the storm of sobs subsided into shuddering hiccups and exhausted silence. I continued to hold her, my mind already splitting. One half was pure, soothing presence, a balm for her pain. The other half was a dark, churning command center, replaying the card, the fall, the delivery man's masked face.
Whoever did this made her feel this. Whoever did this caused this pain.
The thought was a black star in my mind, pulling all other thoughts into its gravitational field of vengeance.
When her breathing evened out, I slipped from the bed. "Stay," I murmured. "I'll be right back."
In the kitchen, I moved on autopilot. The dinner I'd planned—a complex saffron risotto—was abandoned. Comfort food was needed. I made creamy tomato soup from scratch, the recipe ingrained in muscle memory. I grilled golden cheese sandwiches, cutting them into delicate triangles. I arranged it all on a tray with a sprig of basil, a silly touch I knew she'd like.
When I returned, she was sitting up, the towel wrapped around her, her eyes puffy and distant. I set the tray on the bed and climbed up beside her.
"I'm not hungry," she whispered.
"You don't have to be," I said softly. I picked up a spoon, dipped it into the soup, blew on it gently, and held it to her lips. "Just taste."
She looked at me, a flicker of her old self in her eyes—amusement at being fed. She opened her mouth. I fed her, one slow spoonful at a time, then a triangle of sandwich. We didn't speak. The silence now was soft, healing. With each bite, a little more color returned to her cheeks.
When the soup was half gone, she took the spoon from my hand. "I can do it," she said, her voice small but firm.
"I know you can," I said, and the pride in my voice was real.
We ate the rest in quiet companionship. I told her inconsequential things—that Sushi had tried to bury a carrot in the sofa, that Mrs. Li had finally mastered the espresso machine. She offered a weak smile.
Later, curled together under the duvet in the guest room, the lights dim, I stroked her hair. "The name 'Eya'," I said quietly. "It was used by a few people. Me sometimes when we were kids, your brother, Theo, called you that." I paused, my jaw tightening. "And… Elias Chase."
She was silent, absorbing this. "Elias," she repeated, the name unfamiliar on her tongue. "Who is he?"
I chose my words with the care of a bomb technician, editing the complicated, painful history down to a digestible, yet truthful, core. "He was your childhood friend. Your families were… close. His father, Elion Chase, was a renowned vocal coach. He became your mentor from a very young age, guiding you all the way to your stardom. He was there for you after your family's accident."
I left out the salacious, tragic rumors that Elion Chase had been in love with her mother, Anthea, before she married Alistair Vale. That Elias's lifelong closeness to Althea was shadowed by that old, unrequited family longing. That Elias had been her steadfast companion in a way that felt, to my jealous eyes, like a claimant to a throne I had seized. He was the boy from before. The one who knew the little girl, the teenager, the rising star—all the versions of her that existed before I carved my name into her soul at that hotel gala when we were barely adults.
"He was important to you," I finished, the understatement thick in the air.
She didn't ask for more details. She just nestled closer, her head on my chest, as if trying to absorb the simple fact through my heartbeat. "I'm scared, Haven."
"I know, my love. But you are not alone in the dark. I am here. And I am very, very good at darkness."
Eventually, her breathing deepened into the rhythms of sleep. I lay awake for a long time, feeling the gentle weight of her, listening to her heart beat against mine. The protective fury had not abated; it had been distilled, crystallized into something cold, hard, and infinitely patient.
When I was sure she was deep under, I carefully extracted myself. I covered her gently, kissed her temple, and slipped from the room.
In my soundproofed study, I opened a secure line. The screen flickered to life, revealing the impassive face of Miss Chen. Her eyes were sharp, alert.
"Report," I said, my voice devoid of the tenderness of minutes before. It was flat. Deadly.
"The delivery uniform was stolen from a service three blocks away. The man's face was obscured, but gait analysis suggests a height of 5'10", weight around 170 pounds. He knew camera blind spots. Professional, or very well-informed."
"The flowers?"
"Custom order from an exclusive boutique in the arts district. Paid for in untraceable cryptocurrency. The order was placed remotely. The handwriting on the card is being analyzed, but it appears deliberately generic."
"Elias Chase," I said, the name a curse.
Chen didn't flinch. "His last known location was a remote family estate in Tuscany, linked to the Chase family's European holdings. He vanished from there nine months ago, shortly after Althea's accident. We are re-initiating trace protocols." She paused. "The Chase family is old, private, and insular. They have resources and a deep-seated loyalty. If it's him, he's not acting alone, and he's not just a jilted friend. This is a mission for him."
A mission. Of course. To rescue the damsel from the dragon. To reclaim what his family saw as their legacy pupil, their almost-daughter, from the corrupting influence of the Hartwell empire.
"I don't care if he has the resources of a small nation," I said, my voice dropping to a whisper that vibrated with contained violence. "He used his history, his father's legacy, as a weapon. He touched what is mine. He frightened her. He made her question the very foundation of her sanity. He made her cry."
The image of Althea sobbing on the floor, calling herself a hollow doll, was seared into my vision. Elias Chase hadn't just sent a warning; he'd detonated a depth charge in the fragile sea of her psyche.
"Find him," I commanded, each word a decree of war. "Forget subtlety. Lean on every bank, every holding company, every cultural institution with Chase ties. I want their financial arteries pinched. I want their reputation dust. I want Elias to feel the walls of his privileged world closing in until the only direction he can look is toward me."
I leaned forward, my reflection a pale, furious ghost in the dark screen. "And when the pressure flushes him out… you bring him to me. I want to look into the eyes of the boy who knew her first and explain to him the simple, final law of possession: finders, keepers."
"Understood."
The screen went dark. I sat in the absolute silence of the study, the scent of Althea's strawberry-vanilla shampoo still clinging to my skin, a heartbreakingly sweet counterpoint to the venom coursing through my veins.
Elias Chase. The childhood friend. The legacy of a mentor's unrequited love. The ghost from the golden past.
He would learn that the past was just a ghost. I was the present, the future, the eternal now. And my sanctuary, built with my own two hands and stained with whatever darkness was required, had no room for ghosts. Only for the living, breathing woman sleeping upstairs, who was, and would forever be, mine.