Nick
She hasn’t unclenched her jaw since we boarded. No, actually. Since we left the hotel.
I have to wonder what’s cooking in that head of hers.
She didn’t put up a fight when we left. When she walked alongside me out of the hotel, then got into the car waiting for us at the curb.
She never said a word and didn’t drag her feet.
She didn’t even argue when I refused to let her have her weapons.
Is she planning to contact Gabriel once we’re home?
If I’m lucky, she won’t want to. She’ll start remembering who she is. I’m willing to let her plot and scheme if it gets her home.
The jet is small. It’s Liam’s, chartered through a shell company that doesn’t trace back to anything useful.
Two pilots, one attendant, and enough leather and polished wood to make you forget you’re up in the clouds, hurtling through the sky.
It’s the kind of luxury Liam takes for granted now, reminders of the empire he built out of grief and rage, and a thirst for vengeance.
I’ve texted him twice since takeoff. The first was brief. Got her on the jet. En route.
His response came in under ten seconds. How is she?
I looked across the cabin at the woman cuffed to nothing, sitting in a cream leather seat with her hands white-knuckled on the armrests and her face the color of old paper. Alive, I typed back. We’ll talk when I land.
That was twenty minutes ago. Since then, I’ve been pretending to read something on my phone while watching her out of the corner of my eye.
She’s sitting across from me, angled toward the window with the shade pulled down, which tells me the view isn’t something she wants to deal with.
The floral blouse she hated putting on this morning is wrinkled at the elbows where she’s been gripping herself.
I guess she got tired of trying to crack the armrests.
Her breathing is controlled. Too controlled, the kind of deliberate rhythm you use when you’re trying to keep something from boiling over.
She’s terrified.
It took me a while to piece it together. At the hotel, when I told her about the flight, I read her resistance as stubbornness. Defiance. The same refusal to cooperate she’s thrown at me since the moment we met.
And that was part of it. She’s not the type to go anywhere willingly, especially with a man who drugged her and handcuffed her to a bed.
But this is something else. This is physical.
I can see it in the tension of her neck, the rigid set of her spine.
The way her breath catches every time the plane shifts even slightly.
A trained assassin, who doesn’t flinch when she puts a bullet in a man, is sitting five feet from me, holding herself together with sheer willpower because she’s afraid of flying.
I don’t say anything. Not yet. I give her another few minutes, because if I’ve learned anything about this woman in the last few days, it’s that pushing her before she’s ready is the fastest way to get shut down. Or shot. Or both.
My phone buzzes. Liam again. When do you land?
Estimated seven hours from now. Midafternoon your time.
His reply almost overlaps mine. I want to see her.
I expected it. Of course he wants to see her.
He’s waited twelve years. The second he found out his sister was alive, the only thing keeping him from getting on a plane himself was Aurora and the fact that I convinced him I could do this without him.
Liam in Europe, searching for his brainwashed assassin sister while simultaneously running an empire and keeping his pregnant wife safe?
Yeah, right. It was better for me to go alone.
He agreed, but it cost him. Every day I was out there, every dead end I reported, I could hear it in his voice.
The frustration. The fear he wouldn’t admit to.
The part of him that wondered if Gabriel had lied, if this was all some elaborate game, if his sister was really gone and this was just another way the universe was twisting the knife.
Now she’s real. She’s here. And she doesn’t know who the hell he is.
Give her time, I type. She doesn’t remember anything. She doesn’t believe she has a brother. Showing up at the airstrip is going to overwhelm her.
The three dots appear and disappear. Appear again. I can feel his frustration through the screen. Finally: Take her to the cabin. I’ll have it stocked while you’re en route and meet you there.
Understood, I reply.
I set the phone down and look at her again. She hasn’t moved. Her eyes are fixed on a point somewhere on the cabin wall, unfocused, the way people stare when they’re concentrating all their energy on not falling apart.
“Laura.”
“Ivy,” she corrects automatically. But her voice is thin, strained. She doesn’t look at me.
“You’re afraid of flying.”
Her jaw tightens. For a second, I think she’s going to deny it—she denies everything, on principle—but something stops her. Maybe she’s too tired. Maybe the altitude and the enclosed space, and the hum of the engines have worn down her defenses just enough.
“I don’t fly,” she announces, clipped and flat. “I travel by train. Always.”
“How long has it been?”
“How long has what been?”
“Since you’ve been on a plane.”
She’s quiet for a beat. “A long time. Years.”
I stand up and move to the small galley at the front of the cabin. The attendant—a woman in her thirties, who Liam’s people vetted thoroughly—looks up from where she’s been staying pretty much invisible. “Can we get two glasses of wine? Red, if you have it.”
She nods and pulls out a bottle that’s probably worth more than my hotel room in Prague. I carry both glasses back to our seats and set one on the small table next to Laura’s armrest. She looks at it like it might bite her.
“Drink it,” I say, sitting back down across from her. “It’ll help.”
“I don’t need help.”
“You’re about to crack the armrest off your chair, if you don’t crack your teeth with all that clenching.”
She glances down at her hands, seems to realize how hard she’s gripping, and forces her fingers to relax. One by one, deliberately, like she’s manually overriding her own nervous system. Then she picks up the wine and takes a sip. Then a longer one.
I drink mine and wait.
It takes about half a glass before her shoulders drop a fraction of an inch. Her breathing eases from rigid control into something closer to natural. She’s still tense. I doubt this woman has been truly relaxed a single day in her life as Ivy. But the sharp edge of panic is going dull.
She takes another sip and stares at the wine as if it’s personally offended her by being effective. “You remember things about me,” she murmurs.
“I do.” She has no idea, and I won’t bother bombarding her with my memories now.
“Things I loved. Things I hated. How I liked my French fries. Where my birthmark is.” She pauses. “How I used to sleep.”
“All of it.”
“That’s…” She takes another drink, like she’s pulling her courage from the glass.
“That’s unnerving. You understand, right?
You sit there and talk about my life as if you were in it, and I have nothing.
No memories or images, no feelings attached to any of it.
It’s like listening to someone describe a movie I’ve never seen. ”
“I know.”
“You don’t know.” There’s heat in it now, but not the sharp, weaponized kind she usually throws at me.
Something rawer. “You look at me, and you see someone you loved, and all of that history informs everything you do. The way you talk to me. The way you touch me.” She swallows.
“The way you look at me like I’m supposed to remember. ”
“I don’t expect you to remember.”
“Yes, you do,” she insists, and she isn’t wrong. “Every time you tell me something about my past, every little detail you drop like a breadcrumb, you’re watching my face. Waiting for something to click. I’ve seen you do it. The French fries. The birthmark. You’re testing me.”
She’s right. I hate that she’s right, but she is. Every detail I’ve offered—the food, the birthmark, the way she slept—wasn’t just conversation. It was a probe. A careful attempt to trip a wire somewhere in her brain and spark a connection between who she is and who she was.
And she sees right through it, because of course she does. She reads people for a living.
“You’re right,” I admit. “I am.”
She blinks. Surprised, maybe, that I didn’t deny it.
“I’m watching for something to land,” I continue. “Because I believe your memory is still in there, somewhere. Buried, not erased. And I think the right trigger could bring it back.”
“And if it doesn’t?” She sets the wine down and looks at me directly.
The fear of flying is still there, underneath, but she’s pushed it aside in favor of something harder.
“If nothing comes back? If I never remember any of it? What then? You drag me to the States, you put me in front of a brother I don’t recognize, and I’m supposed to…
what? Play along? Pretend to be someone I’m not? ”
“You wouldn’t be pretending.”
“I would.” The wine loosened her fear and her control, from the looks of it.
She’s not half as guarded now. She doesn’t bother hiding her anger or contempt as she lashes out.
“Because Laura Knight doesn’t exist anymore.
I’m not her. I haven’t been her in twelve years.
Whatever girl you fell in love with, whatever sister Liam lost?
She’s gone. Twelve years of a completely different life happened to this body, and none of it included any of you. ”
The words hit like shrapnel, and she knows it. I can see her watching me for the impact, the way she’d watch a target through a scope. Measuring the damage.
I take a breath and let it out. “Maybe you’re right.”
That surprises her. Her mouth snaps shut, and her eyebrows lift a little.
“Maybe Laura is gone,” I muse, even though the words stick in my throat.
“Maybe she’s never coming back, and you’ll always be Ivy.
I don’t know. Neither do you. But I made a promise, and the first part of that promise was finding you.
The second part is bringing you home. What happens after that, who you decide to be, that’s up to you. Not me. Not Liam. You.”
At first, she looks confused. Searching my face like she’s looking for the truth under my words. There is no hidden truth. I wonder if Vincenzo ever allowed her to think for herself.
No, I don’t have to wonder. Not really. I know the answer.
She’s quiet for a long time after that. The cabin lights are low, casting everything in a warm amber that makes her look softer than she’d ever allow herself to be in full daylight. She finishes her wine in small sips, staring at nothing, and I leave her alone with her thoughts.
After a while, her eyelids start to droop. The wine, the altitude, the exhaustion of fighting and being fought—it’s all catching up. Her head tilts toward the window, then rights itself. Tilts again. She’s losing the battle against sleep.
Within ten minutes, she’s out. Really out, not the shallow, twitchy sleep from last night.
Her face goes slack, her lips part slightly, and one hand falls from the armrest to her lap.
She looks like a kid. Or like someone who has been carrying something impossibly heavy for a very long time and has finally set it down, if only for now.
I watch her sleep and think about what she said.
She’s gone. Twelve years of a completely different life happened to this body.
What if she’s right? The thought has been lurking at the back of my mind since the moment she looked at me with zero recognition and told me her name was Ivy.
I’ve been running on faith and stubbornness and the conviction that Laura is still in there, trapped behind walls someone else built.
But what if she isn’t? What if the explosion and the amnesia and twelve years of being remade by the Russos didn’t just bury Laura Knight?
What if they erased her?
What if I bring home a stranger?
I pick up my phone and open the thread with Liam.
She doesn’t remember anything. Not me, not you, not any of it. She’s convinced Laura is gone. I’m starting to wonder if she might be right.
His response takes longer this time. A full minute, which for Liam is an eternity.
What did Dr. Feld say?
I know what he said. Liam and I sat in that office together after Gabriel’s revelation, after we’d both stopped reeling long enough to think clearly.
Dr. Feld specializes in traumatic amnesia, and he was blunt about the prognosis.
Memory loss from trauma isn’t always permanent.
The memories aren’t necessarily destroyed.
They’re dissociated, locked away by the brain’s own defense mechanisms. The right stimuli or environment, or emotional triggers, can bring them back.
Not all at once, not overnight, but in fragments.
Flashes. Familiar tastes, smells, sounds, faces.
The brain recognizes what the conscious mind can’t access, and sometimes, with enough exposure, the door opens.
Sometimes it doesn’t. He was honest about that, too.
He said familiar things could trigger recall, I type. That we have to surround her with her old life. People she knew. Places she’s been. Things that mattered to her.
Then that’s what we do, he responds.
And if it doesn’t work?
Another pause. Then: It has to work. Bring her home, Nick. We’ll figure out the rest.
I set the phone down and lean back in my seat. Across the cabin, she sleeps on, her chest rising and falling in a slow, even rhythm. The floral blouse looks strange on her. It’s too soft, too normal for a woman who handles a gun the way she does.
But in the low light, with her guard down, I can almost see it. The girl underneath the weapon. The Laura underneath the Ivy.
Almost.
Dr. Feld said the triggers have to be emotional, not just intellectual. It’s not enough to tell her facts about her past. She has to feel something. A taste that brings back a kitchen. A song that brings back a car ride. A face that brings back a feeling she can’t explain.
My face hasn’t done it yet. Hours together, and she looks at me like a stranger.
Maybe Liam will be different. Maybe seeing her brother will shake something loose. Maybe being at the cabin, the smell of the air, will do what I couldn’t.
Or maybe she was right, and Laura Knight is gone, and I’ve just kidnapped a woman who will hate me for the rest of her life.
Either way, we’re committed now. The wheels are in motion. Vincenzo will find out she’s gone, if he hasn’t already. The handler she ignored will report it. And then we’ll have a whole new set of problems that make a fear of flying look like a minor inconvenience.
But that’s tomorrow’s problem. Today, somewhere over the Atlantic, I watch the woman I love sleep in a cream leather seat on a jet she didn’t want to board, wearing clothes she didn’t want to wear, heading toward a life she doesn’t remember.
I hope like hell we’re doing the right thing.