CHAPTER SIX — THE TERMS OF HER NEW LIFE

CHAPTER SIX — SHADOWS OF MEMORY

The morning light in St. Haven’s was the colour of old pearls, thin and cold.

It slid across the private ward like a scalpel, exposing every bruise on Adrian’s knuckles, every tremor in the hand that still refused to release Liana’s wrist.

He had not let go.

Not once.

Not even when the nurses changed the IV bag, not when the neurologist tried to shine a penlight into his eyes, not when his own mother swept into the room like a winter storm wrapped in couture.

Eleanor Jin stood at the foot of the bed now, immaculate in charcoal cashmere, her gaze flicking from her son’s death-grip on Liana to Liana’s cool, unblinking face.

“You look remarkably composed for a wife whose husband nearly died,” Eleanor said, voice dipped in frost.

Liana did not flinch.

She had died once already.

A mother-in-law’s venom was child’s play.

“Someone had to be,” Liana answered, letting the words fall soft and sharp. “He was fighting the entire trauma team when I arrived. Screaming. Bleeding. You weren’t here, Eleanor.”

Adrian’s fingers tightened reflexively at the sound of her voice, as if her words alone could anchor him to the earth.

His eyes, dark, fractured, fever-bright, never left Liana’s face.

Eleanor’s mouth thinned. “He doesn’t even know who you are.”

“He knows enough,” Liana said.

And it was true.

Adrian might not remember their wedding, their fights, the way he had once looked at her like she was an inconvenience to be endured.

But something deeper than memory had recognised her the instant the trauma-room doors slid open.

Something that made him bare his teeth at doctors, at his own mother, at anyone who tried to come between them.

The neurologist cleared his throat. “Selective retrograde amnesia, likely temporary. Emotional recognition appears… heightened. He responds only to Mrs. Jin.”

Eleanor’s gaze cut to her son. “Adrian. Let go of her hand. Now.”

Adrian’s entire body went rigid.

A low sound, half growl, half whimper, rumbled in his chest.

He pulled Liana’s wrist closer, pressing it against the bare skin just above his heart, as though her pulse was the only thing keeping his own beating.

“Adrian,” Eleanor snapped again, stepping forward.

He turned his head slowly, eyes narrowing into something feral.

“Mine,” he rasped, the single word scraped raw.

The room went very still.

Liana felt the word sink into her like heated iron.

Mine.

In her first life, he had never said it.

He had taken, used, discarded.

Now the same mouth shaped the word like a vow and a threat at once.

She leaned down, close enough that her breath stirred the hair at his temple.

“Behave,” she murmured, barely audible. “Or they’ll sedate you again.”

His pupils blew wide.

The fight drained out of him so fast it left him trembling.

He turned his face into her wrist, lips brushing the thin skin where her pulse beat, an involuntary, reverent kiss.

Eleanor watched the exchange with the expression of someone who had just seen a lion roll over and expose its throat.

Liana straightened.

“I’ll stay until he calms,” she told the room at large. “Then we’ll discuss discharge.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Eleanor began.

Liana met her eyes.

Cold.

Unforgiving.

The same stare she had once used in boardrooms before she’d thrown it all away for a man who didn’t deserve it.

“Try to remove me,” Liana said quietly, “and he tears this ward apart. You saw what happened last night.”

A muscle jumped in Eleanor’s cheek.

For the first time in Liana’s memory (past or present), the woman had nothing to say.

Adrian’s thumb traced slow circles over the inside of Liana’s wrist, a touch that was almost tender if one ignored the desperation in it.

His voice came rough, cracked from disuse and violence.

“Don’t leave.”

Two words.

Simple.

Devastating.

Liana looked down at him, at the man who had once watched her die without lifting a finger, now clinging to her like she was the only real thing in a world gone mad.

Her heart gave one treacherous thud.

She crushed it instantly.

“I’m right here,” she said.

And for now, that was enough.

His eyelids fluttered.

The monitors slowed.

Within minutes, exhaustion dragged him under again, but even in sleep his fingers stayed locked around her wrist, as if terrified that if he let go she would vanish like smoke.

Liana sat carefully on the edge of the bed, letting him keep that fragile tether.

She stared at their joined hands, at the faint red marks his grip had already left on her skin.

A brand.

She should hate it.

Instead, a dark, secret heat curled low in her belly.

Power, she reminded herself.

This is power.

But when Adrian shifted in his sleep, unconsciously pulling her hand higher, pressing her palm flat against the bare, heated skin of his chest, right over the wild thunder of his heart, something inside her whispered a far more dangerous truth.

This time, the obsession might not be one-sided for long.

She closed her eyes, breathed through the sudden ache between her thighs, and waited for the storm to break.