4…

~~Felix~~

Yeah, this dude is cooking. I don’t know what he’s cooking, but he’s cooking so well. What does he mean by, “standard for people like us”? There is no fucking way in hell our security ever merges together, married or not married. I guess I need to play along. I have to make him believe I believe his story. What does he take me for, an idiot?

I let my face go soft, confused and harmless. The exact opposite of what was happening in my brain, which at that point was running through every scenario like a war room with too much caffeine in it.

“Okay,” I said, voice small, tired, the voice of a man who’d just been handed too much information and needed to shut his eyes and process it. “Okay. I trust you.”

I did not trust him. I would sooner trust a snake in a suit.

He softened immediately, relief washing over his stupid handsome face, and reached for my hand again. I let him take it this time, because apparently that’s what a loving, memory-wiped husband would do, and filed away exactly how easily he bought the act. Noted. Useful later.

They discharged me the next morning.

A nurse came in with a wheelchair I didn’t need and a stack of paperwork Evans signed before I even got a look at it. I asked for a pen, said I wanted to read it myself, and he just smiled that soft, patient smile and said, “Already handled, baby,” like that was supposed to make me feel better and not immediately make my skin crawl.

I asked for my phone again on the way out. Nothing.

I asked at the pharmacy pickup. Nothing, some line about it “still being replaced.”

I asked in the car, some sleek blacked-out thing that smelled like leather and money, driven by a man I didn’t recognize who Evans introduced as “our driver” like the word “our” wasn’t doing insane amounts of heavy lifting in that sentence. I asked to borrow the driver’s phone, just to call my second in command, just to hear one voice from my actual life. Evans cut in smooth as anything and said the doctor didn’t want me overstimulated so soon after discharge. No screens. Doctor’s orders.

Cute. Real cute.

I sat back against the seat and watched the city blur past the tinted windows, and somewhere around the third traffic light I started doing math. No phone. No security I recognized. No parents I could reach. A wedding I had zero memory of, to a man I was fairly certain I’d hated with the heat of a thousand suns a year ago, and every single person around me treating that hatred like it was a fact I’d simply misplaced along with the rest of my memory.

You know what this is starting to look like? This is starting to look like a kidnapping with better lighting.

I’ve run this exact play myself. Grab the target, keep them isolated, control every piece of information they touch, control who they talk to, control what they believe is true until the story you’re feeding them becomes the only reality left standing. I’ve done it to other people. I know the shape of it from the inside.

The scary part was how good he was at it. Nothing about this felt like amateur hour. The ring on my finger was real gold, not costume. The framed photo I glimpsed on his phone screen when a text lit it up in the car looked real too, not obviously edited, the two of us standing close together in front of something that looked like an altar, both of us smiling like idiots. That takes money. That takes planning. That takes someone who had this contingency ready to deploy the second I opened my eyes in that hospital bed, which meant one of two things.

Either he’d been planning this for a long time.

Or he moved fast enough after whatever put me in that hospital to build an entire fake life around me in the time it took me to wake up.

Neither option made me feel better.

“You’re quiet,” Evans said, watching me instead of the road ahead like I was the more interesting view.

“Thinking.” Which was true, if incomplete.

“About?”

“About how weird it is that a mafia heir with an entire organization behind him doesn’t have a single person from his actual life try to reach him after he wakes up from being shot.” I kept my voice light. Curious. Not accusatory, even though every word out of my mouth was a small blade aimed right at the soft parts of his story. “You’d think somebody would be blowing up my phone. If I had one.”

Something flickered across his face, there and gone so fast I almost missed it.

“Everyone knows you’re recovering,” he said. “I told them to give you space.”

“Everyone.” I let that word sit there a second, tasting it. “That’s a lot of trust to put in you, from people I supposedly command.”

“We’re married, Felix. It’s not unusual for people to defer to me on things like this.”

“Right.” I looked back out the window and let a small, dumb smile settle on my face, the kind I imagined a man with half his brain missing might wear while he tried to make peace with a life he couldn’t remember choosing. “Right. Of course.”

Inside, my mind was already building the list. Get a phone, any phone, borrowed, stolen, doesn’t matter. Find one crack in this story and pull until the whole thing comes apart. Find out who actually put me in that hospital bed, because something told me it wasn’t half as accidental as everyone around me kept implying.

And figure out, fast, whether the man holding my hand in the backseat of this car was my husband.

Or my warden.