Chapter 43
Salvario
One month later
“How long are you planning to stay here? I never thought I’d witness you spending so much quality time with such a big-ass family. Your lone wolf image is in trouble, brother,” Ilyas quips.
Without looking away from her, I reply, “She’s better here. Until she recovers, we won’t leave San Diego.”
We’re outside behind Matleon’s mansion, where an outdoor physical therapy area has been set up. Her therapist is helping her walk. I can see the discomfort on her face, but she’s pushing through it.
Her delirium is completely gone, but the neurological injuries have shown very little improvement.
She was devastated once her delirium faded and used to cry a lot about not being able to move or walk on her own, about not being able to use her hands.
But with the optimistic support of her family and therapists, she’s passed the toughest part of that phase. It’s still a long battle ahead.
“Didn’t the therapist say it’ll take her more than a year to recover?”
I nod. “The psychological recovery won’t take that long, at most two to three months.
She needs someone with her all the time.
We can’t leave her alone, because as soon as her mind is free, she starts getting pessimistic about recovery and about never being able to walk, talk, and live like before. ”
He sighs. “Poor girl.”
I look at him for a moment. “What about you? How are things going on your end?”
He went off to find answers to his thousands of questions a month ago, after I told him things were smooth with her family. He only came back today.
“Well, I should kiss Chris. Unfortunately, he has nothing left in place of lips, or I would have gone for it. Because of him changing my face, I can live as I wish. Or you could say I get a fresh start with a different choice of career, because there isn’t a single country where Ilyas isn’t wanted.
I was a very successful thief, you know. ”
“What did you find out from the scientists who worked on us?”
“Nothing much. They had the videos of us that I sent you, where we were rambling nonstop like idiots high on cocaine.” He laughs. “I always find those videos hilarious whenever I watch them.”
He isn’t wrong. They are funny. The videos he’s talking about are recordings of us telling everything about ourselves in a monotonous tone. We were talking about things that were traumatic, things that were funny. In Ilyas’s case, there were many; in mine, none.
But I had a lot to say about Elowen, and everything was in the same flat tone. They had me talk about every bit and piece of my memory. I lost most of my childhood and some of my adulthood memories after my suicide attempt, but what remained was all recorded by them. I now have those videos.
I’d do anything to have those memories back, along with the others I lost on my own.
Not the traumatic ones from my childhood that condemned me to live with my nine-year-old self inside my own mind.
Only the memories of Elowen. That’s all I want.
And I know there’s nothing in my thirty-six years of life worth remembering except her.
Elowen doesn’t want that to happen. She wants my dissociative amnesia to never end. She’s afraid I’ll remember everything, and then the boy will come back.
When I talked to her psychiatrist, Stan Oxford, about it, he said there was very little chance of me getting my memories back.
Because of those memories and the boy, I almost killed myself.
For my brain, it’s necessary to keep those memories locked away in order for me to survive.
What I can get are fragments, when my brain glitches or when it considers something harmless enough for me to see.
As for the memories Chris erased, they can never come back.
“Didn’t you get any footage of them performing surgeries on us?”
He clicks his tongue. “None. The plastic surgeon who did that job is nowhere to be found.”
“What about the neurosurgeon who made us lose our memories and fucked with our language processing and generation?”
“He’s a genius scientist and still alive. The thing he did with our accents and language processing was his own discovery. And do you know there were very high chances of losing our ability to speak any language? We were just lucky guinea pigs.”
“Wouldn’t that be a bad deal for Chris? Why did he allow that?”
“Well, it was necessary, I guess. You had a little Italian accent, but I had a very thick Arabic accent, as you can hear in those videos. And there couldn’t be an explanation for that. We were supposed to be Canadians, born and raised there.”
“Right. I would have never believed Chris’s story if I had even a trace of an Italian accent,” I mutter. “Did you find the real Logan Blackwood?”
“Hunter killed him right after they gave me his face.”
I’m not surprised. Chris chose Hunter to swap with me, not only because he had the same eyes, height, and build as me, since those could be found anywhere else as well.
He chose him because he was the cruelest bastard he had, the head of Chris’s child trafficking and forced slavery unit, and a hacker.
Chris needed someone smart with doomed morals, and Hunter was exactly that.
They planned for him to enter Alessio and Alexander’s inner system through Elowen. Once that was done, she was meant to be eliminated because there was a risk of her identifying him.
Since I had kidnapped her, her family took him in quite quickly.
That’s why they arranged to kill her in the forest. If that had succeeded, her family would have killed me, because no one would have believed it wasn’t me who killed her.
It was hitting two birds with one stone.
But she got saved, so Hunter kept up his game of manipulating her.
He was also seeing how difficult it was getting to control her, so he started using drugs.
The only problem was he wasn’t as smart as Chris took him for, and the motherfucker overdosed her.
Using the drug on her when she was already in a fucked-up state was bad enough.
The overdose on top of it sent everything completely out of control.
Thankfully, she doesn’t remember anything from the time she was drugged, including that filth’s assault.
I saw it later on the house security footage.
What he did. Bruno didn’t let him get far, stopped him before he could do worse, but what he did was enough.
Enough for me to want to drag him back from the dead just to kill him again.
Slower this time. The only thing that quiets the rage is knowing he’s rotting. And even that doesn’t last.
“By the way, how are things going with your company? You can request me for the CEO position since I’m a jobless genius for now. I won’t break your heart,” Ilyas’s voice pulls me out of my burning thoughts.
I turn to him. “You can join from tomorrow.”
He laughs. “I didn’t know you were waiting for me to open my mouth.”
“I’m serious. Antonio has been asking me to give him retirement.
Without him, I don’t have anyone to manage things from the front.
Leave for London as soon as you can, meet Antonio, and he’ll update you on everything.
Then start working from Miami. Soon we’ll shift the headquarters to Naples, and then I’ll also come out in public. For now, I’m good in the shadows.”
“That sounds like a good plan, but shouldn’t you be wary about giving a thief such a good position?”
I smirk. “It’s not easy to steal from me. Besides, I know you’re smarter than that. Even if you sold my whole company, you wouldn’t get the amount you could make working with me.”
He chuckles. “That’s true.”
“Join as soon as you can. That bastard has done huge damage. It’ll take more than three months, even with both of us working, to revert all of it.”
Antonio came here two weeks ago to see Elowen after I told him about her condition.
That’s when he told me everything that happened.
After I kidnapped Wen, Hunter, as Salvario, spoke to Antonio and fed him that fake story.
Like everyone else, Antonio believed it.
Soon after, he took over my position and started working.
That’s when Antonio’s doubts began. His decisions weren’t like mine, and he made several reckless choices that led to major losses. But just like Elowen, Antonio only had suspicions with nothing solid to support them, so he eventually pushed those thoughts aside.
“Alright, I’ll leave for London tomorrow,” Ilyas says.
I hum in agreement.
The only good thing that happened to me because of Chris is that I found a brother.