The Name They Buried

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Name They Buried

ELENA

The woman fell before I could reach her.

One moment, she was standing in front of me, telling me that my entire existence was a lie. The next, she was on the road with blood spreading beneath her coat, her fingers clawing weakly at the gravel.

Adrian dropped beside her.

“No. No, no, no.” He pressed both hands against the wound in her chest. “Stay with me. Do you hear me? You’re not dying again.”

Again.

The word lodged in my mind.

The woman let out a broken laugh that ended in a cough. Blood touched the corner of her mouth.

“You always did have terrible timing,” she whispered.

“Save your strength.”

“Still giving orders.”

“Please.”

That last word silenced her.

I had never heard Adrian beg anyone for anything. I had seen him furious, frightened, and desperate, but this was different. He looked like a man watching the only thing he had ever loved disappear for the second time.

I took a step toward them.

Then another.

“Who shot her?”

Adrian didn’t answer.

I looked toward the road. The car that had brought her was already moving, its taillights shrinking between the trees. I could just make out a silhouette behind the rear window.

Someone was watching us.

Someone had known she would come.

Someone had been waiting to silence her.

“Adrian!”

He finally looked up.

“Call an ambulance,” I demanded.

He shook his head.

“What do you mean, no?”

“There’s no time.”

“She’s bleeding!”

“I know!”

His voice cracked so violently that I recoiled.

He looked down at the woman in his arms, and whatever he saw in her face made his expression collapse.

“She won’t survive another attempt,” he whispered.

Another attempt.

My stomach twisted.

“What happened to her before?”

The woman caught my wrist.

Her fingers were cold, but her grip was surprisingly strong.

“Listen to me,” she whispered.

I knelt beside her.

“I’m listening.”

“Your name isn’t Elena.”

I stared at her.

“Please don’t do this.”

“You need to remember.”

“I don’t know who I am!”

Her eyes filled with tears.

“Yes, you do.”

She struggled to reach into her coat. Adrian tried to stop her, but she shook her head and pulled out a small silver pendant.

It was the same pendant I had found in the locked drawer in my bedroom.

The same black stone.

The same delicate chain.

She pressed it into my palm.

“Your mother gave you this before they took you away.”

A strange sensation spread through my chest.

A woman standing beside a window.

Long fingers fastening a necklace around a little girl’s throat.

A kiss on the forehead.

A whisper.

Whatever they tell you, never forget that you were loved.

I gasped.

The memory vanished as quickly as it had come.

The woman squeezed my hand.

“There you are,” she whispered.

Then her eyes shifted toward Adrian.

“You promised me you would protect her.”

“I tried.”

“No.” Her voice was barely audible. “You protected the version of her that you wanted.”

Adrian lowered his head.

“You’re right.”

I stared at him.

He didn’t defend himself. He didn’t argue. He simply sat beside the dying woman and accepted her accusation as though he had been waiting years to hear it.

The woman turned back to me.

“There’s a room beneath the west wing,” she whispered. “Behind the locked door. Find the records.”

“What records?”

“Everything they did to us.”

Her breathing became shallow.

“Find Subject Zero.”

My fingers tightened around the pendant.

“Who’s Subject Zero?”

She looked directly into my eyes.

“You are.”

Her hand slipped from mine.

For a moment, I waited for her to speak again.

She didn’t.

“Hey.” I shook her shoulder. “Hey, look at me.”

Nothing.

“No.”

I pressed my fingers against her wrist, desperately searching for a pulse. I had no idea what I was doing. I had never learned how to save anyone.

But I knew what death looked like.

I had seen it in the mirror.

I had seen it in Adrian’s face.

And now I was watching it take a woman who had known my name before I did.

“No,” I whispered again.

Adrian reached for my shoulder.

I slapped his hand away.

“Don’t touch me.”

He withdrew immediately.

I looked at the woman lying between us.

Then I looked at the pendant in my palm.

The black stone had begun to glow.

A thin red line appeared across its surface, spreading slowly until it formed a symbol I recognized without understanding why.

A circle.

A line through the center.

And a small mark beneath it.

The same symbol engraved on the silver badges in the photograph.

The same symbol I had seen on the door of the room where I had first woken from my nightmares.

My stomach turned.

They had marked me long before I knew I existed.

⸻

ADRIAN

I knew the moment I saw the pendant that we had lost our last chance.

The woman on the road was supposed to remain dead.

I had watched her disappear into a locked room beneath the hospital twenty years earlier. I had signed the paperwork. I had watched the monitors go dark. I had even stood beside her grave while the world mourned a woman whose body had never been placed inside the coffin.

And yet she had returned.

Not because she had survived.

Because someone had brought her back.

I looked at Elena, who was staring at the pendant as though it contained the answers to every question she had ever asked.

I wanted to take it from her.

I wanted to tell her that the woman had been lying, that the name she had whispered meant nothing, that Subject Zero was only a designation in an experiment that had ended long before Elena came into my life.

But the truth was worse.

Subject Zero had never been an experiment.

It had been a person.

A little girl who had been taken from her mother before her seventh birthday. A child who had been subjected to procedures no one should ever have survived. A girl whose memories had been divided, altered, and buried until even she no longer knew which parts of her life belonged to her.

A girl whose name I had sworn never to speak again.

“Elena,” I said.

She looked at me.

“Don’t call me that.”

The words struck with the force of a slap.

I lowered my eyes.

“What should I call you?”

For several seconds, she said nothing.

Then she looked down at the dead woman.

“I don’t know.”

I had no answer for her.

I had spent twenty years believing that love could justify the things I had done. I had convinced myself that every lie, every secret, every act of cruelty had been necessary because I was trying to protect her.

But protection without truth was another form of imprisonment.

And I had been keeping her prisoner for longer than she could remember.

A distant engine interrupted my thoughts.

I looked toward the trees.

The car was returning.

“Get up,” I said.

Elena didn’t move.

“They’re coming.”

“Who?”

I reached for her hand.

She stepped away from me.

“Don’t touch me.”

I forced myself to lower my hand.

“Please. We have to leave.”

“Why? So you can hide me again?”

“No.”

“Then tell me the truth.”

I looked at the woman on the ground.

Then at the approaching headlights.

There was no time left for another lie.

“Your real name,” I said quietly, “is Eleanor Whitmore.”

Elena went still.

The car stopped at the far end of the road.

Its headlights illuminated the dead woman’s face.

I continued before I could lose my nerve.

“You were seven when your father took you to the facility. Your mother tried to stop him. She was killed that night.”

Elena’s face drained of color.

“No.”

“I was there.”

She stared at me.

“You were there?”

“I was younger. I was working under your father. I thought we were developing a treatment for memory loss and neurological damage. I didn’t understand what he was actually doing until it was too late.”

“Too late for whom?”

“For you.”

The car doors opened.

Men stepped out, dressed in black.

I recognized the insignia on their sleeves.

The same symbol as the pendant.

My blood ran cold.

“They’ve found us,” I whispered.

Elena looked toward them.

“Who are they?”

“The people who made you.”

She stared at me for one terrible second.

Then she asked the question I had feared most.

“And what did you do?”

I couldn’t look away from her.

“I helped them.”

The first man raised his weapon.

“Elena Whitmore,” he called. “Step away from the subject.”

Elena looked at me.

I saw the exact moment she understood.

Not everything.

Not yet.

But enough.

I had not saved her from the people who wanted to control her.

I had been one of them.

ELENA

The man called me Eleanor.

The stranger on the road had called me by a name I had forgotten.

Adrian had admitted that he helped the people who had taken me from my mother.

And now a group of armed men stood in front of me, demanding that I step away from myself.

Something inside me broke.

I looked at the pendant in my hand.

The red symbol pulsed once.

Then twice.

The men stopped moving.

One of them lowered his weapon.

“Impossible,” he whispered.

I looked up.

“What?”

He stared at my face as though he were looking at a ghost.

“Subject Zero is active.”

The words seemed to awaken something beneath my skin.

A sharp pain tore through my head.

I stumbled, clutching the pendant, and the world disappeared.

I was seven years old again.

I stood in a white room with my hands pressed against a glass wall. On the other side, a woman was crying. She had dark hair and frightened eyes, and she was pounding against the glass with both fists.

“Eleanor!”

I screamed and reached for her.

A man seized my shoulders.

“Begin the procedure.”

“No!” the woman cried. “She’s a child!”

Another man stepped into view.

My father.

He looked exactly as he had in the photograph, except his face was younger and his hands were clean.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said.

Then he turned toward the machine behind me.

“Erase everything.”

The room filled with white light.

The woman disappeared.

And I remembered the last thing she said.

You are not the thing they made you into.

I opened my eyes.

The men were kneeling.

Every single one of them.

Their weapons lay scattered across the road.

Adrian stood several feet away, staring at me with absolute terror.

I looked down at my hands.

The pendant had gone dark.

But the symbol was no longer confined to the stone.

A faint red mark had appeared on my wrist.

The same symbol.

The same circle.

The same line through the center.

I raised my eyes to Adrian.

“What did they do to me?”

He opened his mouth.

Before he could answer, a voice came from the darkness behind the men.

“You’re asking the wrong question, Eleanor.”

My father stepped into the headlights.

He was smiling.

The wound beneath his ribs had vanished, and his torn clothes were clean. He looked younger than he had in the shed, almost exactly as he appeared in the old photograph.

He glanced at the kneeling men.

“Get up.”

They obeyed immediately.

Then he turned to me.

“You want to know what they did to you?”

I couldn’t move.

He spread his arms as though welcoming me home.

“Nothing, my darling.”

His smile widened.

“They only removed the memories that would have taught you how dangerous you really are.”

Adrian stepped between us.

“Don’t listen to him.”

My father laughed.

“Still pretending you can protect her?”

He looked at me.

“Ask your beloved Adrian what happened the last time you remembered everything.”

I turned toward Adrian.

He was shaking his head.

“Eleanor, please.”

My father leaned closer.

“The last time you remembered, you killed everyone in that facility.”

The road fell silent.

I stared at my hands.

At the red symbol on my wrist.

At the men who had dropped to their knees when I woke.

And suddenly, I understood why everyone was afraid of me.

I had not been brought back from the dead because Adrian loved me.

I had been brought back because someone wanted to know whether the monster they had created could finally be controlled.

My father held out his hand.

“Come home, Eleanor.”

I looked at him.

Then I looked at Adrian.

Neither man deserved my trust.

Neither man deserved my forgiveness.

For the first time in my life, I stopped waiting for someone to tell me who I was.

I stepped toward the armed men.

Every weapon on the road rose into the air.

My father stopped smiling.

Adrian whispered my name.

And I finally remembered the one thing they had all been trying to make me forget.

I had never been their prisoner.

They had been mine.