LOGIN~~Evans~~I ducked exactly when he told me to, glass and gunfire filling the space above my head where I’d been sitting two seconds earlier, and through the roar of it I watched Felix lean half out of that window like a man who’d done this a thousand times before, calm in a way that should have terrified me and instead, God help me, did something else entirely.He fired three times, controlled, and the pursuit vehicle beside us swerved hard, one of its front tires blown clean out, spinning off into the tree line with a violent crunch of metal against bark.“One left!” he shouted, already reloading, ducking back into the car just as another spray of gunfire raked across the trunk.“Get down, get down,” I said, reaching for him instinctively, some part of me desperate to shield him even though he was clearly, terrifyingly more capable of handling this than I was.“I’m fine, stop trying to protect me and let me actually do the thing I’m apparently built for.” He shot me a look that was s
~~Felix~~The car had barely turned off the private airstrip access road when the first shot cracked through the back windshield.I moved before I even consciously decided to, years of instinct apparently surviving whatever the amnesia had taken from me, hand shoving Evans’s head down hard as glass sprayed across the back seat in a glittering arc.“Down!” I barked it, already reaching under the seat where some part of me, some buried, trained reflex, knew exactly where a weapon would be stashed in a car this heavily armored. My fingers closed around a pistol tucked into a compartment I had no memory of ever being shown, and I didn’t question it, just checked the mag on pure muscle memory and came up ready.“Felix, what are you—”“Shut up and stay low.” Another round punched through the door panel, close enough that I felt the vibration of it through the seat. Our driver was already swerving hard, throwing the car into a controlled skid that put a line of trees between us and whatever
~~Evans~~The jet leveled out somewhere over open water, the seatbelt sign clicking off, and I’d barely had the chance to unbuckle before I abandoned my own seat entirely and dropped myself straight into Felix’s lap.“Evans.” He nearly choked on the water he’d just taken a sip of, one hand flying up to steady the glass before it spilled everywhere. “What are you doing.”“Sitting with my husband.” I settled in like this was the most natural thing in the world, arm draped easy around his shoulders, entirely unbothered by the fact that there was an empty seat directly across the aisle.“You have your own seat.”“My seat is lonely. This seat has you in it. Clearly the superior option.” I adjusted myself slightly, getting comfortable, and felt him sigh, the particular long-suffering sigh he’d started reserving specifically for me over the last two weeks, the one that always somehow ended with him giving in anyway.“You weigh a concerning amount for a man who claims to eat salads.”“I have
~~Felix~~I stood under the spray of the shower longer than necessary, letting the hot water work through the tension I’d been carrying since the lawyer showed up at the gate, since the folder Evans wouldn’t let me see, since every single piece of my missing year currently sitting just out of reach behind some locked door in my own head.Please let this work, I thought, forehead resting against the cool tile, water running down my back. Please let there be something real waiting at the end of this trip, something that isn’t just more grief with no shape to hold onto, no memory attached, just facts about people I apparently loved and lost without ever getting to actually feel any of it.I heard the door open behind me, felt the change in the air before I heard his voice.“Room for one more?”I didn’t even turn around. “Absolutely not.”“That’s rude. I brought excellent company.” The shower door slid open anyway, and a second later he stepped in behind me, completely unbothered by my pr
~~Evans~~I woke early, before the light had fully broken through the curtains, and lay there for a while just watching him sleep, running through the plan one more time in my head before I let myself act on it. Then, because some things are easier to do than think about doing, I leaned over and started kissing him awake, slow at first, his jaw, his cheek, working my way toward his mouth.He stirred, groaned, and shoved a hand blindly against my chest, pushing me off before he’d even fully opened his eyes. “Mmph. No. Too early.”“Guess what day it is,” I said, undeterred, propping myself up beside him.“The day I sleep another hour.” He rolled away from me, burying his face back into the pillow.“Felix.” I tugged the pillow gently out from under his head, ignoring the muffled protest that followed. “It’s the day i help you remember what happened this past year.”That got him. He sat up fast, hair a mess, eyes suddenly sharp and alert in a way that had nothing to do with the early hour
~~Reyes~~I spent the rest of that night going through every file we had on Felix De Luca’s final months before the shooting, spreading printouts across my desk until the whole surface disappeared under paper, because if I was going to find a way inside that villa, I needed to understand exactly what kind of man I was dealing with now, memory or no memory.“Talk me through what we actually know,” I said, without looking up, as my right hand settled into the chair across from me.“Before the shooting, Felix had built a case against us. Financials, meeting logs, at least one witness statement we’ve never been able to locate or confirm the contents of.” He flipped through his own copies as he spoke. “He believed we were responsible for his parents’ deaths. That’s the piece that started all of it, boss. Everything after, the surveillance, the informant inside Evans’s organization, all of it traces back to him trying to prove that one thing.”“We didn’t kill his parents.” I said it flat,







