Chapter 2
***
A mansion. Marble floors slicked with something dark. Then a club. Strobe lights carving women’s silhouettes out of smoke, bass so heavy I feel it in my teeth. Someone grabs my shoulder. A face I almost know, mouth moving, shouting words I can’t hear over the—
Gunfire. Close.
A muzzle swings toward me. I see the finger tighten on the trigger before the flash swallows everything white.
I jackknife upright so hard my skull detonates.
For three full seconds, I don’t know where I am. My hands are already moving, patting the mattress, reaching for something on a nightstand that isn’t there. A phone. A weapon. I can’t tell which one my hands expected to find, but the fact that weapon made the list leaves me cold.
Because it didn’t feel like a dream. Not entirely. My body knows that the way it knows how to breathe: automatically, without permission. And without giving me a single useful detail to go with it.
The throbbing in my head settles into a steady, vindictive rhythm.
I force myself to focus on the room. Off-white walls. Wicker dresser with nothing on it. A painting of a sailboat that looks like it came with the frame. The whole space has the personality of a hotel nobody checked into on purpose. Clean, coordinated, and completely devoid of anyone’s actual life.
I swing my legs off the bed and immediately regret the ambition. Every muscle in my body has filed a formal complaint. My wrist throbs when I put weight on it, and the cut above my temple has graduated from a dull ache to a sharp, pointed fuck-you every time I move my jaw.
The bathroom mirror confirms what I suspected: I look like shit. Dark circles. An angry bruise blooming along my cheekbone. The butterfly strips Natalia applied are the neatest thing about me.
I splash water on my face and hiss when it finds every scrape and cut I didn’t know I had.
The face staring back at me is mine. I’m reasonably sure of that.
Dark eyes, dark hair that needs washing, chin that could use a shave.
It’s familiar the way a word is familiar when you’ve said it so many times it stops meaning anything.
I’m somewhere in my mid-twenties if I had to guess, which apparently I do.
I grip the edge of the sink. My knuckles go white.
I don’t know my name.
That fact keeps landing fresh, like a sucker punch I should see coming but can’t dodge.
Every few minutes, my brain circles back to it and delivers the news again with the enthusiasm of someone who really enjoys giving bad news.
Hey, quick reminder: you have no idea who you are.
Just wanted to make sure that was still ruining your day.
The smart move is a hospital. I know that.
The thought forms clearly, logically. Yet my whole body rejects it.
Not reluctance. Something deeper. An alarm wired into my nervous system that screams no with the certainty of a reflex.
Like touching a hot stove. Like ducking before you’ve consciously registered the sound of a gunshot.
The house is quiet when I slip out of the bedroom.
The hallway gives me more of the same: neutral walls, generic coastal prints, the kind of furniture that comes with a lease.
But there are signs of someone actually living here.
A laptop and a thick textbook on the kitchen counter.
A single mug in the dish rack. A pair of sandals kicked off by the sliding glass door that leads to the back deck.
Beyond it, the beach stretches out under a sky just starting to bleed pink. It’s morning? How long have I been out?
I need air.
The deck boards are cool under my bare feet, and the morning hits me all at once. Salt and wind and the particular dampness of an ocean sunrise that clings to everything. The crash of waves is steady and rhythmic, and something about it loosens the knot in my chest by a fraction.
That’s when I see her.
Natalia’s walking the shoreline, near enough to the water that the tide keeps reaching for her feet.
Tall and slim, chestnut brown hair catching copper in the sunrise.
Blue eyes that I remember from yesterday, the way she leaned over me on the beach, checking my pupils with a focus that didn’t match how scared she looked.
She’s on the phone, her free hand gesturing in tight, controlled movements, the kind a person makes when they’re furious but keeping the volume down.
I watch her stop. Drop her head. Her whole body goes rigid for a beat, then she forces her shoulders down, shoves the phone in her pocket, and turns back toward the house.
She moves like someone who’s learned to take up as little space as possible.
Shoulders drawn in, steps careful, head down until whatever that phone call did to her gets packed away somewhere I can’t see.
Then she looks up, spots me on the deck, and something loosens.
She lifts her hand in a small wave, and her smile is real enough that I feel it land.
I want to know who she was talking to. I want to know why her first instinct is to make herself smaller. I don’t have the right to want any of that. I don’t even know my own name. But the pull behind my ribs doesn’t seem to give a shit about what makes sense.
She’s beautiful. That’s not news. I noticed yesterday through the haze of bleeding and confusion. But this morning, with the ocean behind her and the gold light catching the angles of her face, it’s harder to file under irrelevant.
I shut that down. Whatever instinct is trying to catalog the shade of her eyes can take a number and wait. I’m a stranger with a head wound and amnesia who slept in her guest room. Reading into the warmth of her smile is not on the agenda.
She crosses the last stretch of sand and climbs the deck stairs to meet me.
“Good morning. How are you feeling?”
“Like I picked a fight with a concrete wall and the wall won.” I roll my shoulder and wince. “Decisively.”
Her answering laugh is quick and surprised. I like the sound of it.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got anything to drink,” I add.
“I’ve got coffee and tap water. The tap water tastes like someone filtered it through a parking lot, so I’d recommend the coffee.”
“Bold of you to assume I remember what parking lots taste like.”
She gives me an amused look over her shoulder as she turns back toward the house. “Your memory’s gone but your mouth works just fine, huh?”
Something about the way her eyes crinkle when she’s being a smartass makes me want to keep talking, to see if she’ll do it again.
She heads to the kitchen door. “Any memories come back overnight?”
“Some flashes. Nothing I can pin down.” I follow her inside. “A club, maybe. Loud music. After that, it gets... violent and blurry.”
She drapes her jacket over a chair and circles the island to the coffee maker. “It’s actually a good sign that your brain is producing fragments. Post-concussive amnesia usually resolves in layers. The flashes mean the pathways are trying to reconnect.”
She says it like she knows what she’s talking about.
“Did you want me to drive you to a hospital?” The question comes carefully, and I can hear what’s underneath it. She doesn’t want to go to a hospital either. For different reasons, maybe. But the hesitation is there.
“No.” The word comes before I’ve thought it through. That alarm again. A knee-jerk reaction.
Her eyes stay on mine just long enough for me to know she caught the edge in that word. Then she turns back to the coffee maker.
“Look.” I lean against the island, arms crossed. “I know this is a lot to ask. But is it alright if I stay? Just until things start coming back.”
She pauses. One beat. Two.
“Of course.” She turns, and her smile doesn’t quite hide the flicker of apprehension behind it.
“Your clothes are in the laundry right now. But I think I’ve got a couple oversized things that might work for you in the meantime.
” A small pause. “The guest room has its own shower. You probably want to get the sand out of your hair before it sets up permanent residence.”
“Pretty sure I brought half the beach into your bed. Sorry about that.”
“I’ll throw the sheets in the wash. It’s not a problem.”
She pulls towels from the hall closet and stacks them in my arms. Her fingers brush the inside of my wrist on the handoff, and my whole arm lights up like a fuse.
Her eyes flick to mine. A spark flares in them before she steps back and the moment dissolves.
“Thanks.” I step back, clutching the towels. “I’ll, uh. Shower. Thanks again, Natalia.”
I turn for the guest room before my face does something stupid.
The shower is the first thing that’s felt right since I woke up on that beach.
Hot water sluices over me, carrying sand and dried salt down the drain. I stand under it longer than I need to, letting the heat work into muscles that feel like they’ve been through a fight I can’t remember.
Then I start the inventory.
Scars first. A thick, knotted patch of tissue on my outer thigh.
It’s round, and puckered at the center. Bullet wound.
The knowledge arrives without fanfare, clinical and certain.
My fingers find a jagged line along my left side, near the ribs.
Knife. Healed rough. Whoever stitched it wasn’t worried about cosmetics.
So I’m a guy people hurt. Or a guy who gets hurt doing the hurting. Neither answer makes me eager to rush back out there and share with the class.
The tattoos tell me less. Black and gray work, scrolling Gothic architecture, intricate geometric patterns, symbols I can feel the meaning of without being able to name them. They’re quality. Expensive. Done by someone skilled as hell.
My whole body is a story I can’t read. Every scar is a chapter, every tattoo is a detail, and I don’t have the first clue what any of it means.
I kill the water and step out, grabbing a towel and running it over my hair a few times before wrapping it around my waist.
When I turn to grab the clothes Natalia left, the mirror catches what I couldn’t see in the shower.
A tattoo covering most of my back. A snarling wolf framed in ornate scrollwork, with a bold letter A beneath it and a dagger driven through the center.
This one feels different from the rest. Less art, more insignia.
Recognition tugs at the base of my skull. A word sitting right on the tip of my tongue that won’t come loose. Faces flicker at the edges. A voice, low and commanding. The smell of cigar smoke and leather.
Then it’s gone. The images scatter like startled birds, and I’m left gripping the edge of the sink, breathing like I just ran a sprint, staring at a stranger in the mirror with no more answers than I had five minutes ago.
The A could stand for anything. My money’s on asshole.
I pull on the clothes Natalia left outside the door. Another oversized t-shirt and a pair of sweats that are a little short in the leg but close enough.
Back in the bedroom, the bed is wrecked with sand. I strip the sheets, bundle them into a pile by the door, and stand there for a moment in the silence.
Somewhere in this body is a man with a name, a history, and a reason he washed up on a desolate beach with a head wound and scars he can’t explain.
I just have to wait for him to show up. But guys with bullet scars and wolf tattoos don’t usually turn out to be accountants.