ANMELDENELARA’S POVThe work in the office turned out to be real.Files. Documents. Things that needed organizing and cross referencing and the kind of careful attention that Knox apparently trusted her with more than she’d expected. They worked through the afternoon without much conversation, just the quiet sounds of papers moving and keyboards and occasional questions that he answered patiently.It was actually fine.Better than fine. There was something grounding about useful work. About being in a room with a clear purpose and doing it well.By evening they had finished most of it.Knox closed the last folder and leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. He looked tired. “Thank you,” he said. “For today.”“It’s fine,” she said. “I didn’t have anything I couldn’t reschedule.”She gathered the files she’d been working with and stacked them neatly on the corner of the desk. She didn’t do much work just helping him organize the mess. “I’ll get these back to you tomorrow,” she sa
ELARA’S POVIt started the way good things sometimes started in dreams.Everything felt so warm and cozy. His hands were in her hair and his eyes on her face and everything outside the two of them were completely irrelevant. She was in his arms and he was looking at her the way he used to look at her, that unguarded, unashamed way that said she was the only thing in the room worth looking at. Even if it meant their love might kill them, they loved each other so much it didn’t matter.She kissed him.He kissed her back.It was everything. Every feeling she had packed away and stored carefully and told herself she was done with. It was all of it, flooding back at once, his hands and his warmth and the way she fit against him like the space had been made for her.She was crying.She didn’t know when she started. She just felt the tears running down her face while she was kissing him, which made no sense and every sense at the same time.She pulled back and looked up at him.He looked
KNOX POVKnox looked at Ray for a long time.Ray looked back with empty eyes. He knew it was just a matter of time and no matter what he does, this is the place he was going to die.Knox reached into his jacket and pulled out his gun.One shot straight to the center of his head. He kept shooting until Ray was a bloody mess and there was nothing left of his body.Knox put the gun away and walked out of the room without looking back. He nodded once to Marcus in the corridor. Marcus looked at his face and then looked at the door to room three and understood everything he needed to understand without a word being said.Knox kept walking.Through the corridor. Through the doors. Out into the night air.He stood outside for a moment.Rylan.He said it inside himself like something being put to rest. He had avenged his brother that night.Then he got in the car and went home. The house was quiet when he got back.Every light off except the small lamp in the entrance hall that Maria always
THIRD PERSON POVKnox sat in his car in the driveway for a long time after he walked away from that corridor.He didn’t go back inside. He couldn’t even move, it felt really drained of life.The image of Elara against that wall was sitting directly behind his eyes and every time he blinked it was there, and he knew that not even alcohol could save him from his cruel fate.He had his memory back. All of it.Every laugh they had shared and every argument. Every moment in that cabin when the world outside had felt very far away and everything inside it had felt like enough. He had all of it back now, sitting in his chest alongside the image of Dominic’s hand on her face. He started the car.He drove without a destination for twenty minutes. Then he pulled up outside a gym he had passed a hundred times without going in. A boxing gym. It was an old building that even its sign was fading, it was not the kind of place he would normally go to but he was no longer that person.He went in.T
ELARA’S POVI was sitting on the back terrace when Dominic found me.Late afternoon. The garden was golden and quiet, Mr. Heng was long gone for the day. I had a cup of tea that had gone cold beside me and a book open in my lap that I hadn’t read a word of in twenty minutes.I heard the door and looked up.Dominic stood in the doorway with two fresh cups. He nodded at the cold one beside me. “Thought so,” he said.I smiled. “Am I that predictable?”“You make tea and then forget to drink it. Yes.” He sat in the other chair and handed me a warm cup. “Every time.”I wrapped my hands around it.We sat for a while the way we had learned to sit together, without needing to fill the quiet. It was one of the things I genuinely liked about him. He didn’t treat silence like a problem.The garden settled into the last of the afternoon light.“Can I tell you something?” Dominic said.I looked at him. His voice had changed slightly. Lost its usual easiness.“Of course,” I said.He looked at the
KNOX’S POV“Drive faster,” I said.My driver looked at me in the mirror.“Mr. Reyes…”“Please,” I said. “Just drive faster.”He drove faster.I sat in the back seat with my hands on my knees and looked at nothing and tried to hold everything together that had come apart in that corridor. The memories were still settling, still finding their places, like furniture being moved back into a room after a long time in storage. Everything slightly unfamiliar and completely known at the same time.I kept seeing her face.Not the face she’d been showing me for the past weeks. The careful, composed, measuring face. The one she wore like armor.The other one. The real one. The one I now remembered from a cabin and a lodge and a hundred ordinary moments that had been everything without announcing themselves as everything.The face she made when she was actually laughing.The face she made when she was scared and refused to show it.The face she’d made on the beach two nights ago.She had known t







