The sound of an ambulance echoed louder than it should have. She sat perfectly still, staring at the place where Leonard Norse and his children had stood earlier, as if she focused hard enough, he might reappear to comfort her, like her father always did, when they were on the battlefield, and she was restless in bed.
But he didn't.
Her breath came out shaky.
Okay. Breathe.
She pressed her palms into the mattress, grounding herself in the cool cotton sheets, the faint antiseptic smell of the hospital. These were the real things. Present things. Not the fractured, unreliable mess inside her head.
She squeezed her eyes shut.
Faces flickered behind her lids—too fast to grasp. A man shouting her name. Firelight reflecting off twisted metal. The scream of tearing steel. Then nothing.
Her fingers curled into fists.
"I'm not crazy," she whispered to the empty room.
The names surfaced again, uninvited and unshakable.
Alaric Kromwel, Emperor!
It felt heavy. Dangerous. Like a key to a door she wasn't sure she wanted to open.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed and reached for the carry-on bag with a sudden, desperate urgency. If the truth was anywhere, it was in here. Something solid. Something that didn't vanish when she tried to hold onto it.
The zipper sounded too loud in the silence.
She reached for the wallet and took out her identity card.
Her photo looked like her—but sharper. Eyes harder. A woman who didn't doubt herself. A woman who knew exactly where she was going.
"I was someone, but I can't remember." Lara breathed.
The realization hit harder than Layla's accusations. She hadn't just lost memories, but she'd lost control.
Her gaze drifted to the cracked phone beside the wallet. She pressed the power button again. Nothing happened. The phone was really dead. Of course it was. Whatever life she'd been living before had been neatly severed—cut clean.
Was that an accident? Or had someone wanted her dead? Was it related to her mission?
Her gut twisted.
Lara exhaled slowly as she lay on the bed, pressing the wallet to her chest as if it could anchor her. Whatever she'd been before the coma, she wasn't helpless. She could tell by the determined look of the woman on the ID card — her!
...
Lara has just dozed off when she was jolted awake to a sound that wouldn't stop—an angry, insistent buzz cutting through her dreams.
For a moment, she lay there, disoriented, the city's distant sirens and the sound of ambulances leaking through the window. Then she reached blindly for the bedside table and knocked her knuckles against a small cardboard box.
Right. The box.
Artemio Fuegerro's gift.
The buzzing grew more violent, rattling against the thin walls of the container. Half-awake and suddenly alert, Lara flipped it open. Inside, a phone vibrated like it was alive, the screen pulsing with bluish light.
She lifted it. The device looked unfamiliar—and yet her fingers moved with practiced ease.
The screen unlocked on its own. Facial recognition confirmed her identity. A messaging app snapped open, then notifications flooded in.
Unknown Contact:I heard General Norse offered you accommodation at his house. That's a good offer. You should accept it. It will help you accomplish your mission earlier.
Her stomach tightened.
She typed back.
Larissa: Who are you to give me orders? What mission?
Three dots appeared. Disappeared and then appeared again.
Seconds stretched.
Unknown Contact: Damn it. Don't joke around with me.
Larissa: I don't know you. I'm not joking.
She hit send before she could second-guess herself.
The three dots returned, blinking slowly, like a pulse. Lara stared at them, unease crawling up her spine.
Strange. The phone wasn't hers—or at least it shouldn't be—but holding it felt natural. Her thumbs hovered over the screen as if muscle memory had taken over, as if she'd done this a thousand times before.
Finally, a new message appeared.
Unknown Contact: This is Artemio Fuegerro.
Lara froze.
She didn't reply.
Instead, she exited the app and opened the contacts list. It was empty. No names. No numbers.
She opened a search engine and typed Artemio Guerrero.
The result loaded quickly.
A wiki page: decorated three-star general, graduate of a prestigious Northern Military Academy. Commended for leading the campaign that crushed the southern rebellion. Beyond that, the internet went quiet. No interviews. No personal or family history. A man shaped entirely by official victories.
Next search: Leonard Norse.
A wiki page loaded.
He was the highest-ranking official — a four-star general in the army and the current chief of staff of the armed forces of Azuverda. She scrolled through an endless catalog of medals, campaigns, and commendations—a lifetime distilled into bullet points.
Then she typed: Ancient Azurverda.
The map loaded, and her breath caught. She knew the place.
Not from schoolbooks, not from documentaries but from memory.
It was the same Azuverda she and Alaric had founded—once an empire, now a nation. In over six centuries, the name had barely changed, even as the world around it had. The monarchy fell. The borders of the four kingdoms blurred. The empire fractured into a republic of twenty-four provinces.
Her hands trembled as she typed again.
Alaric Kromwel.
There were no results.
Her frown deepened. She refined the search.
Emperors of Azurverda.
A list appeared. Ten emperors with foreign-sounding surnames—like the surname of the Mazuran King, the nation beyond the Sinaya Sea of Westalis.
No Kromwel.
She reread the list. Once. Twice. Three times.
In her lifetime, Alaric had ruled for thirty years. Their son Aldrich for thirty-five. And before she died, her eldest grandson had already been on the throne for five years.
So where were they?
Had Carles—the capital—fallen so completely that their era in history was missing? Or had none of it ever existed?
The thought made her head throb.
What if those memories—so vivid, so detailed—were nothing more than a figment of her imagination? A side effect of her head injury? False histories burned into her brain like corrupted files?
What if Lara Norse Kromwel was just a story her mind invented?
She swallowed hard.
So she was only Larissa Reyes. A nobody. A woman with an overactive imagination and a fractured mind.
Her temples pulsed, pain blooming behind her eyes. Lara set the phone down, turned off the light, and lay back against the pillow.
Tomorrow, she told herself. Tomorrow, she would get answers.
Tomorrow, she would speak to a neuropsychiatrist.
For now, the city hummed outside her window, and somewhere in the dark, her phone remained silent—waiting.