Chapter 3: A Stranger

Adrian POV

The heart monitor kept a steady beat somewhere near my head. Every breath felt like it was dragging over broken glass. My arms and legs weighed too much to belong to me. When I finally forced my eyes open, the light was so bright I had to squint against it.

"Captain Cross."

A doctor leaned over me with a penlight, checking my pupils, one and then the other.

"Good," he said, clicking it off. "Your eyes are working fine."

I tried to ask where I was. Nothing came out. My throat was sandpaper. He glanced at the chart clipped to the foot of my bed, his face carefully arranged into nothing at all.

"You were in an accident. Your team bus went into a river."

The words landed like they should mean something. Accident. River. Bus.

I reached for the memory and found only static, no road, no engine noise, no impact. Just a dull throb building behind my eyes.

"What happened?" My voice barely carried.

"You've been under for three days."

"My team?"

He paused, just long enough that I understood before he said it.

"Some of your teammates didn't make it."

I wanted names. I wanted faces to grieve. I had neither. I couldn't remember a single man who might have died beside me.

A second doctor arrived, older and more clinical than the first.

"You suffered a brain injury."

He let the words settle before continuing.

"You have retrograde amnesia."

I frowned. "What does that mean?"

"You've lost the last three years."

I stared at him. "Three years?"

He nodded once. "Yes."

Three years.

Three birthdays.

Three hockey seasons.

Three years of my life...

Gone.

I searched my mind for a memory. Anything at all. There was only silence.

"Your memories may return," the doctor said quietly. "Or they may not."

He delivered it like a weather report.

I stared at the ceiling tiles and felt something get taken from me that I couldn't even name, because I didn't know what had been in the space it left behind.

I searched for what remained. My name.

Hockey.

That I was captain of the Titans because everyone in the room kept calling me that.

Past those three facts, everything dissolved into fog, faces, victories, entire seasons gone.

I was a stranger standing in the wreckage of my own life, and everyone around me expected me to recognize the furniture.

***

The day passed in shifts of nurses and needles and questions I couldn't answer. By afternoon, the visitors started.

My mother came first and cried the moment she saw my face. Coach Dawson followed, looking older than I remembered him being, though I had no way to know if that was true. My surviving teammates clustered in the doorway like they weren't sure the room would let them in.

They all tried to smile.

None of it reached their eyes.

"Captain." Jax stepped forward first, hope thin in his voice. "You remember the game? The one before the finals?"

I looked at him and found nothing.

Shame burned up my throat.

"I'm sorry. I don't."

Down the hall, a machine beeped once, too loud in the silence that followed. Every face in the room had the same tired weight to it, bandaged arms, unslept eyes, the specific way people look at someone they're afraid to say the wrong thing to.

Coach Dawson reached toward the bed, then stopped himself and pulled his hand back.

My mother's grip on my fingers tightened instead.

Nobody was smiling anymore.

I was surrounded by people who knew my whole life, and I knew none of it.

That frightened me more than anything that had happened in the crash.

They talked in half-sentences about contracts, road trips, team dinners I'd apparently hosted at my apartment. Every name landed and slid off me. For a while, I felt less like a person and more like someone wearing my own body, the captaincy, a coat sized for a man three years further along than I currently was.

Coach Dawson brought out photographs. Game footage. He walked me through the roster, pointing out which players had joined during the years I'd lost and which ones had become close to me.

I recognized none of them. One name came up more than the others.

Noah Bennett.

Captain of the Chicago Wolves.Joined the league three years ago and became one of its biggest stars almost overnight. My greatest rival, Coach Dawson said. The media built entire storylines around us. Fans argued over who deserved the crown. Our teams collided in some of the league's biggest games.

I understood the facts the way I understood a stranger's biography.

I felt nothing behind them.

Every time the door opened after that, the room changed shape around it. My mother straightened. Coach Dawson went still. My teammates turned like they were all waiting for the same person.

I didn't know who. The air had a charge to it I couldn't name.

***

The door opened again.

An Omega walked in. Dark hair fell across his forehead. His blue eyes were rimmed red, like he'd been crying somewhere private before he came in here to stop.

The moment he crossed into the light, something moved in my chest, my heart slamming hard enough that I felt it in my throat.

Under the disinfectant, I caught salt water and cold winter air, and my skin went hot like I'd been standing too close to a fire.

I wanted him closer. I wanted my arms around him. I couldn't explain either urge. My mind held no record of this man, but every other part of me insisted he mattered more than anyone else who had walked through that door today.

He stopped at the edge of my bed. His hands trembled at his sides.

He looked like he wanted to reach for me and was fighting the impulse, fingers curling into his palms, eyes locked on mine, hope and fear openly at war in his face.

He tried to smile. It didn't hold. Watching it fail made something ache in my own chest that I had no memory to explain.

***

The room went quiet in a different way than before. My mother drifted to the window.

Coach Dawson folded his arms and turned his back, like he couldn't watch.

The Omega kept looking at me, waiting. For what, I didn't know.

Only that I was failing to give it to him.

I reached for anything. A memory. A single frame. Nothing surfaced.

It was like staring at a photograph of my own life with the picture missing from the frame.

Guilt sat heavy in my chest.

I made myself hold his eyes.

"I'm sorry," I said, my voice rough.

"Do I know you?"