Chapter Twenty
ROXY
The apartment smells like stale coffee and the lavender oil I diffuse at night to help me sleep. However, neither scent does much to mask the underlying current of obsession that permeates every corner of this space I’ve come to occupy without truly inhabiting.
I stand in the doorway of what used to be a spare bedroom, what the landlord optimistically called a ‘home office’ in the listing, and what has become something closer to a war room for a conflict I can’t remember fighting.
The walls are covered floor to ceiling in research that feels both intimately mine and utterly foreign, a museum dedicated to memories that don’t belong to me anymore, even though the handwriting scattered across dozens of sticky notes is undeniably my own.
Dragons.
Mountains.
Disappearances…
That follows no logical pattern except that they cluster around the Appalachian Mountains like moths drawn to a flame they can’t see but instinctively know will either illuminate or immolate them.
Red string connects photographs to newspaper clippings to hand-drawn maps with elevation markers and territorial boundaries sketched in my careful, precise lettering.
Black thread links different species of supernatural creatures I’ve cataloged, organizing them by region and reported sightings with the methodical attention of someone conducting actual field research rather than chasing fairy tales through the wilderness.
The centerpiece stops my breath every time I look at it.
A photograph, grainy and slightly out of focus, captured from what must have been a significant distance, given its quality.
It shows a creature in flight, massive wings spread wide against a twilight sky that bleeds purple and gold, scales catching the dying light in a way that makes them shimmer with an almost ethereal quality.
The dragon’s form is unmistakable despite the blur, power and grace combined into something that shouldn’t exist outside of mythology but clearly does.
Beneath it, my handwriting in black marker.
Ice Dragon
‘Raze’
And below that, in red.
Witch’s curse.
Fire stolen.
Must help him.
I trace the words with trembling fingers, feeling the texture of permanent marker against glossy photographic paper, and try to summon even a flicker of memory about why I wrote them, what they mean, who or what Raze is to me beyond a name attached to an impossible creature.
But nothing comes.
Just the hollow ache of absence, the bone-deep certainty that I’ve lost something precious without being able to identify what it was or how to get it back.
My dreams don’t help either. They come every night now, growing more vivid and visceral with each passing evening, images that feel less like subconscious invention and more like memories fighting to surface through whatever barrier has been erected between my waking mind and the truth buried beneath.
Fire and ice.
Blue eyes cold enough to freeze blood in veins.
Heat that burns through frost like a promise.
Violence.
Ledgers.
The scent of leather, exhaust, and something wild that makes my pulse quicken even in sleep.
And always, underneath everything else, the sense of belonging to something larger than myself, being part of a family I can’t remember joining, feeling claimed, protected, and his in ways that shouldn’t be possible given that I can’t recall a single face, name, or moment that explains the certainty.
The car accident should have killed me.
That’s what the hospital said when I woke, disoriented and aching, with gaps in my memory large enough to drive a semi through and no explanation for how I survived weeks in the wilderness after my vehicle wrapped around a tree on a mountain road I have no recollection of crashing on.
They found the hunter’s body in the wreckage. Told me I was lucky. Said brain trauma and hypothermia explained the memory loss, that time and rest would restore what I’d forgotten, and that I should be grateful to be alive at all.
But standing here surrounded by evidence of a life I was clearly living before everything went dark, I can’t shake the conviction that luck had nothing to do with my survival, and what I’ve lost is far more significant than a few missing days or even weeks.
I’ve lost myself.
Or at least, I’ve lost the version of myself, the woman obsessed with years of research before she ended up in a hospital bed with some kind of amnesia, the woman who photographed an impossible creature mid-flight, who wrote about dragons and curses and helping someone named Raze with enough conviction to make it the centerpiece of an investigation that consumed her entire spare bedroom and probably most of her waking hours.
The clock on my nightstand reads 11:47 p.m. when I finally tear myself away from the wall and shuffle toward the bathroom, exhaustion pulling at my bones despite the restless energy that’s kept me pacing for hours.
Sleep comes hard these days, fractured and insufficient, haunted by images that dissolve the moment I try to examine them too closely.
I’m reaching for my toothbrush when I hear it.
The soft metallic click of my apartment door unlocking.
My hand freezes halfway to the bathroom cabinet, every muscle in my body locking down as adrenaline floods my system with the sudden, brutal awareness that someone is inside my home without permission, moving with the quiet confidence of predators who know their prey won’t be able to escape before they strike.
I should call the police.
I should scream.
I should grab something to defend myself with and barricade the bathroom door until help arrives.
Instead, I find myself moving silently back down the hallway toward the living room, drawn forward by a curiosity stronger than self-preservation, following instincts I don’t remember developing but that feel etched into muscle memory deeper than conscious thought.
Two figures stand in my living room, silhouetted against the streetlight filtering through my curtains.
One is tall and broad-shouldered with a presence that fills the space despite his absolute stillness, power coiled beneath skin too pale in the ambient light.
The other is muscular, moving with a predatory grace that makes my hindbrain scream ‘danger’ even as something deeper, something I can’t name, whispers ‘familiar.’
The broader one speaks first, his voice a low rumble that vibrates through my chest like distant thunder. “Well… this is interesting.”
And the muscular one turns toward the spare bedroom doorway, toward the wall covered in my obsessive research, and goes utterly, perfectly still in a way that speaks to shock so profound it momentarily overwhelms even predatory instinct.
I step into the living room, and both figures whip toward me with inhuman speed.
Blue eyes meet mine across the darkness—cold and furious.
And underneath the anger, something that looks almost like relief before it’s buried beneath glacial rage.
“What the fuck is this, Roxy?” The voice is familiar in a way that makes my knees weak, though I can’t place where I’ve heard it before.
I can’t attach it to any memory that survived the accident or the hospital or the three weeks of trying to rebuild a life from fragments and guesswork.
But I know him.
I know him.
Recognition slams into me with physical force, memories flooding back in a torrent that steals my breath and nearly drives me to my knees.
The clubhouse.
Iron chains burning my skin.
A crystal dome with an impossible flame.
Faces, names, violence, and belonging.
Captivity that became something else, something fierce, claiming and absolutely forbidden.
Raze.
President of the Kings of Anarchy MC.
An ice dragon, cursed by a witch to contain his rage.
The man, the creature, I was supposed to help and then leave, before everything became complicated and I fell in love with a monster who kissed me like I was salvation and claimed me with frost-kissed touches that should have killed me, but instead made me feel more alive than any moment in my entirely human existence.
The witch wiped my memory.
She took this from me.
Took him from me!
“I…” My voice comes out rough, shaking with the force of remembering, with the weight of three weeks spent mourning something I couldn’t name and searching for answers that were locked inside my own skull. “I know you.”
The other figure—Scar, my memory supplies, vampire and vice president, the one who told me about the years blurring and holding onto moments—lets out a low whistle. “Memory’s coming back. The witch’s magic is weakening.”
Raze moves toward me with a predatory stillness that characterized our early interactions, when I was his prisoner, he was my captor, and neither of us understood yet that captivity would transform into something that defied every law governing his world.
His eyes blaze with cold fire as he gestures toward the spare bedroom, toward evidence of my premeditation and deception spread across the walls.
“Y-you weren’t supposed to find m-me,” I whisper, and the admission tastes like grit on my tongue because it’s true.
I came to the mountains on purpose.
I researched dragons and supernatural creatures for years before that night on the road, before the hunter, the crash, and stumbling into the clubhouse with no idea that I was walking into exactly the situation I’d been seeking while simultaneously ensuring my own imprisonment.
Because I am the witch’s daughter.
And I was supposed to observe, report back, maybe help break the curse that kept Raze caged in ice and aggression, then disappear before attachment became something that violated the fundamental laws separating the human world from the supernatural one hiding in plain sight.
But I made the catastrophic mistake of falling for the dragon I came to save.