One of Those Amnesia Stories

Prologue

I had a headache.

Let me rephrase.

I had a headache that felt determined to split my skull open.

My eyes refused to open. Every muscle in my body stayed stubbornly still. I barely registered the mattress beneath me. All I could feel was the relentless pounding behind my eyes. A jackhammer ripping through my skull without mercy, rattling every thought and every nerve.

The pain spread everywhere. It seeped into my neck, settled in my shoulders, crawled down my spine, and sank into every aching limb until it felt like my entire body had become one giant bruise.

I was going to kill Felicity.

This was, objectively and completely, her fault.

I’d told her not to let me get this drunk.

Apparently, she’d decided to ignore me.

Now I’d reached the point where my body couldn’t decide whether to feel everything or nothing at all. Every miserable second of this hangover belonged to her.

It took three attempts to pry my eyes open.

Three.

The first greeted me with a searing burst of light that stabbed straight through my skull, forcing them shut again. The second left the world swimming in a useless blur. By the third, the room finally stopped tilting long enough for me to focus.

An unfamiliar ceiling stared back at me.

The pounding in my head faded into the background as a new kind of panic settled in.

I blinked.

Or at least, I thought I did.

The movement scraped across my eyes, slow and gritty, sending a fresh spike of pain straight through my already throbbing skull.

Even blinking hurt?

Oh, Felicity had better hope I never saw her again.

Once the urge to squeeze my eyes shut again passed, I took another look at the ceiling.

Plain. Off-white. Painfully boring.

My stomach pulled tight.

Last night surfaced in broken flashes—neon smeared across dark rooms, bass pounding through the floor, Felicity laughing beside me—then nothing. Just this. This aggressively bland void that belonged to absolutely nobody I knew.

Felicity’s ceiling would never tolerate this much emptiness. Even her bathroom had a constellation glowing above the shower, cheap plastic stars she’d stuck up at two in the morning. Three years later, they were still dusted with glitter.

She couldn’t leave a blank surface alone. Give her a blank wall and she’d have fairy lights, photographs, a ridiculous quote in cursive, and probably a tiny plastic flamingo taped to it before dinner.

This place had none of that.

My fingers curled into the sheets.

Okay.

Think.

Where had we gone after the club?

The answer should have been easy.

It wasn’t.

A cold prickle spread across the back of my neck.

Had I gotten so spectacularly drunk that I’d wandered into a stranger’s house?

My heavy, sluggish eyes finally tore themselves away from the soul-crushingly plain ceiling and moved across the room.

A white-hot pain seized the muscles along my neck and spread into my shoulders, making me wince.

I froze, sucking air through my teeth and waiting for the ache to ease before forcing myself to look farther.

Everything around me seemed blurred at the edges, indistinct shapes swimming through the haze before slowly falling into place.

A soft beep sounded somewhere to my left.

Then another.

The rhythm continued, almost soothing, if I could ignore the fact that I had no idea where it was coming from.

Beep.

I followed the sound toward a cluster of monitors I hadn’t noticed before. Pale light flickered across their screens, numbers shifting beside jagged green lines. A tangle of cables ran from the monitors, disappearing beneath the bed and out of sight.

The fog in my head began to clear.

A hospital room.

I was in a freaking hospital room.

Great. Just great.

My eyes moved again, taking in the generic landscape print hanging crookedly on the wall before settling on a small sofa tucked into the corner. A dark jacket had been tossed over the arm, one sleeve hanging toward the floor.

Then something beside my bed caught my attention.

My brain screeched to a halt.

There was a creature in the room.

A man.

He was folded into a stool pulled right up against my bed, his head resting on the mattress near my hip. Dark hair fell across his forehead, hiding most of his face. One arm lay across the edge of the bed.

The other…

My breath caught.

His hand was wrapped around mine.

For a moment, my mind refused to make sense of it. His fingers rested loosely against mine, his thumb brushing my knuckles. Warmth spread through my skin from where our hands touched, startling against the coolness that had settled over the rest of me.

My fingers twitched.

His grip tightened, his fingers curling around mine in a sleepy, instinctive response.

My hand went rigid beneath his.

The ache in my head, the sour twist of nausea in my stomach, even the fog clouding my thoughts faded beneath the sudden awareness of what was happening. My mind scrambled for an explanation, but every possibility felt equally absurd.

I was in a hospital bed, barely able to remember how I had gotten there, and somehow a complete stranger was sitting beside me, holding my hand.

Clearly, I had made some questionable life choices before losing consciousness.

I must’ve shifted or made some kind of sound because the guy stirred.

His fingers loosened around mine. He shifted on the stool, dragging a hand over his face before blinking awake.

Sleep still clung to him, leaving his movements sluggish and uncoordinated.

His hair was mussed, a faint crease marked his cheek from the mattress, and exhaustion softened every line of his face.

His eyes found mine, and whatever sleep remained in them vanished.

He froze for half a heartbeat, surprise flashing across his face. Then he lurched upright so quickly that the stool scraped against the floor. His hand slipped from mine with the sudden movement, and he caught himself against the edge of the mattress, his shoulders pulling tight.

His brows drew together as he studied my face, his fingers curling into the mattress until his knuckles whitened.

He searched my face with an intensity that made me hold still.

Then his shoulders finally loosened, and a trembling breath slipped from his lips.

Relief softened his features, easing the strain that had carved itself across his face.

The pale hospital light moved across his face, catching in his eyes.

They were the darkest brown I’d ever seen. At first glance, they looked almost black, swallowing what little light reached them. Then he shifted, and the light caught his irises, drawing out a fleeting touch of amber.

I found myself waiting for it.

Every small movement of his head changed the colour again, and each time, my eyes followed without permission.

It was ridiculous. I had woken up in a hospital with a stranger sitting beside my bed, yet I couldn’t stop studying his eyes.

“Alessia.”

My attention finally broke from his eyes.

His voice was so soft it nearly disappeared beneath the monitor’s steady beeping. He pushed himself up from the stool, rubbing the sleep from his eyes before looking at me again.

There was a strange familiarity in his expression, a softness I couldn’t understand.

My eyes moved over his face, searching for something that would make this make sense.

How did he know my name? Why had he been sitting beside my bed?

Why did he look at me with an expression that suggested I should know him?

The longer I studied him, the more convinced I became that I’d never seen that face before. I searched through my memory for anything that might connect him to me, but nothing surfaced. His face remained completely unfamiliar, no matter how long I stared.

My confusion only deepened.

I was still trying to understand what he could possibly want from me when his hand lifted toward my head.

A cold jolt tore through me.

My shoulders locked, and I recoiled into the pillow far harder than I’d meant to. Pain burst through my skull, stealing the breath from my lungs. A strangled sound caught in my throat as my fingers twisted into the sheets, gripping the fabric until my knuckles ached.

His hand stopped halfway to my head, his fingers curling inward before he could touch me. Surprise crossed his face, replaced almost instantly by concern. His brows pulled together, his expression tightening as he took in my reaction.

He lowered his hand completely and stepped back from the bed, putting distance between us without taking his attention off me.

My mouth was parched enough to crack. I swallowed, my throat scraping painfully around the effort, my tongue thick and clumsy against the roof of my mouth. I drew in a shallow breath, gathered what little strength I had, and forced the words out.

“Who are you?”