Lara stood with her arms folded tight across her chest. "Let me think about it."
The resident doctor cleared his throat. Whatever patience he'd been pretending to have finally thinned.
"Miss Reyes," he said, his voice snapping into the clipped cadence of institutional power, "Doctor Fenn is offering you something exceptional. Frankly, something most people would be grateful for."
Lara turned toward him slowly.
She tilted her head, studying him—not with annoyance, but with the detached curiosity of someone examining a faulty machine, deciding whether it could be fixed or should be discarded.
The room seemed to tighten.
"Should I be?" she said. "Perhaps it is my good luck that I received similar offers. I have to weigh my options."
The words were soft. The impact wasn't.
The resident doctor stiffened. "You're just a patient. You're being unreasonable."
"Am I?" she asked quietly.
A few seconds passed.
No laughter. No interruption. Even the machines seemed to hold their breath.
The resident doctor exhaled sharply. "Go back to the bed. I need to examine you."
Yannis watched closely, fingers stilled above his tablet.
Lara hesitated. Something in her resisted the command—not emotionally, but instinctively, as though obedience itself didn't quite fit her. Still, she crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, movements unhurried, deliberate.
The nurse checked her vitals. The resident began again with routine questions.
Lara frowned, impatience flickering across her face."Didn't you already ask me this?"
"You're in a hospital," the resident snapped. "There are protocols. You just woke up. You shouldn't be moving around—certainly not exercising."
"They were gentle exercises," Lara said. "Barely stretches."
His jaw tightened. "Are you the doctor, or am I?"
Before the tension could fracture the room, Yannis stepped in.
Yannis spoke before the tension snapped. "What my colleague means," he said smoothly, "is that we are responsible for your safety."
Lara lifted her gaze to him. Held it. "Responsibility isn't the same as control."
Silence followed.
One of the nurses shifted her weight, suddenly unsure where to stand.
Yannis leaned back, studying Lara with open interest now. "You're remarkably composed for someone with acute memory loss."
"So I've been told."
"And yet," he continued, "you don't behave like someone unsure of herself."
Lara considered that.
"No," she said. "I don't."
The resident doctor scoffed softly. "Confidence doesn't change medical reality."
Lara looked at him again. This time, there was no curiosity.
"There are many kinds of reality," she said. "Medical is only one of them."
The words were not loud. They didn't need to be.
Yannis closed his tablet with a soft click. "That will be all," he said. "You may leave."
"That will be all for now. You can leave," he said.
The resident hesitated. "Doctor—"
"Leave!" Yannis repeated.
Reluctantly, the nurses and resident doctor filed out, casting uneasy glances over their shoulders. When the door finally closed, the room felt larger. Quieter.
Lara exhaled.
She hadn't realized she'd been holding her breath.
Yannis studied her openly now. "You don't like being spoken to as if you're powerless."
"I don't feel powerless," Lara said. "Which is confusing, considering what I've supposedly lost."
Yannis nodded slowly. "Sometimes the body remembers what the mind forgets."
He stood. "Rest. I'll return later."
When he left, Lara remained seated for a moment, listening to the faint hum of the hospital—footsteps, distant voices, the soft machinery of authority continuing without her.
Then she rose.
She crossed the room and stood before the mirror near the window.
The woman staring back at her was pale. The scar she'd seen in the photograph was hidden now beneath short brown hair that barely brushed her ears.
But her eyes—
Her eyes were steady.
She lifted her chin slightly, just enough.
The effect was immediate.
She saw it then—not a memory, not an image, but a truth embedded in muscle and bone. The way people had gone quiet when she spoke. The way rooms had subtly rearranged themselves around her presence.
I don't ask, she realized. I decide.
The thought sent a chill through her.
She turned from the mirror and surveyed the room—the couch, the door, the empty space transforming in her mind into something else entirely. A throne room. A place where others waited. Listened.
A faint, humorless smile curved her lips. "I must really be crazy."
Whoever she had been before the crash, she had not survived by being gentle.
And whoever had tried to shape her into something smaller had failed.
Because even stripped of memory—left with instinct alone—
She still commanded rooms.
...
After eating the light hospital breakfast, Lara decided to walk.
She didn't leave the room right away.
Instead, she moved through it slowly. Not pacing but surveying.
Yesterday, everything had come at her too fast: faces, questions, authority pressing in from every direction. She hadn't had the time to look.
Now she did.
Her feet carried her without hesitation. She registered blind spots first—the angle where the door vanished from the mirror by the window, the narrow corner the security camera couldn't quite claim. Her eyes lingered on the camera. She didn't need to think about what it was or what it could see. She already knew — by instinct.
She assessed the furniture next. The weight of the chair. The distance between the bed and the door. How many steps would it take to cross the room if someone rushed her? How much time would she have?
The realization unsettled her.
Why do I know this?
She stopped at the window and pressed her palm to the cool glass.
Below, a small park unfolded in soft morning light. Patients drifted through it—some walking, some in wheelchairs—faces turned toward the sun, fingers brushing flowers as if touching something normal again might anchor them.
Hospital staff moved among them in clean, efficient lines. Heads bent over tablets. Shoes squeaking faintly against the pavement.
A system. A hierarchy. The medical professionals talked. The patients listened even when they don't understand.
She didn't find comfort in it. What she felt instead was understanding—instinctive, immediate. She knew exactly where she would stand if she stepped into that structure.
At the top. Or not at all.
Her chest tightened.
She remembered Shay and Ares.
Would she become Shay's governess? Accept the Norse family's offer? Or agree to be Yannis Fenn's living case study in exchange for a bed and unanswered questions?
A lab rat with a roof.
She exhaled slowly and heavily.
The door opened.