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As he pours a generous splash into one of the tumblers, the aroma calls to me. I do want it. He looks up. Raises an eyebrow. “You sure you’re sure?”
I turn my head quickly to one side then the other.
His eyes darken as he shrugs and takes a slug. Even from here it smells like sin in a glass.
“Don’t worry yourself about schedules and deadlines. Getting up and about was a big step. You just bring yourself back and we’re all going to be grand.”
The Mastermind comes in with a fresh pot of coffee.
Seeing the bottle, he puts a shot in the empty tumbler, offering it to me. He looks puzzled when I decline the offer. The two men share a look. They are being careful not to use names around me.
I say, “It seems crazy that you won’t even tell me my name.”
The Mastermind takes on an arch look as he says, “You heard the doctor.”
Climbing back onto the bed with my coffee, I shrug. A wave of drowsiness makes my eyelids bat and flutter. “Is he right about everything?”
Still directing his dark glint my way, the Mastermind says, “If I knew that, then I’d be the doctor.”
Even the double dose of caffeine isn’t going to keep me awake. The two men talk in low voices. Maybe they think I’m already asleep, or perhaps my hearing is extra sharp now.
The Warrior talks about problems in ‘the waterfront clubs.’
“Two consignments are late.” the Mastermind says, “Missing, presumed fucked.”
Slowly I drift away, back into the deep embrace of sleep.
CHAPTER NINE
Something nags at me, things I need to be be doing. I urgently need to get back onto something, but I can’t remember what it is.
I don’t remember anything. I think there was somebody – somebody I recognized. Who? No. It’s gone.
All that I remember is there was a crash. Two crashes? I remember two. How can that be?
When I wake, my head is under the covers. The lights are low. It still takes me a moment to blink my way out of the comfort of sleep, though.
When I can see, the first thing I notice with a shock is, brooding in the chair across the room, the huge frame of the Emperor. His face is in shadow.
“I can feel you watching me. It’s unsettling.”
“Unsettling is it? Well allow me to convey my deepest regrets and consolations. I trust I didn’t intrude upon your beauty sleep.”
“Are you making fun of me?”
He rises. As he stands and draws himself up to his considerable height, my breath catches in my throat.
He tells me, “You’d never have a cat’s chance in Hell of ever working out who I was if I didn’t do that.” My chest rises again as he strides toward the bed.
“Given the totally baffling fact you’re not already writhing on the floor howling my name at the top of your voice, I have to conclude that your natural responses to my movie star sex god looks and pantie melting charisma are still locked away somehow, buried deep among your most treasured memories. How that could happen will no doubt be a mystery for the ages.”
I clear my throat. “You know who I am, don’t you.”
He comes even closer.
With a little difficulty, I tell him “It’s getting hard to breathe with you looming like that.”
The faintest trace of his smile could swallow me up. “The doctor says we should let your memories return naturally. To let them come back in their own time.”
