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Kane shot out of his seat, sending the chair flying backward and clattering to the floor. “Get. Out!” He pointed to the front door. Rage rippled through him, and his face glowed with fury.
I stood, then walked over to him, an eerie calm cloaking me. The toes of our shoes met, and my heart jackhammered against my chest as I struggled to speak the next words. I had to—for him and for me. This man was in so much agony, it was fucking killing me. I had to make it right. I had to try, at least.
“I will leave, but first …” I placed my palms against his warm cheeks. “I never thought about you, Kane. I wish I had. I wish things had been different for you. For both of us.” I ran the pad of my thumb across his jawline, trying to soothe his battered soul.
“Why?” he choked out. “We loved each other.”
Tears welled in my eyes.
“Kane … I have amnesia.”
From his expression, my words had slammed into him like a freight train, and my chest tightened so much it physically hurt.
His cheeks turned red. “You’re fucking with me. Can’t you just tell the truth and stop lying and accept responsibility for what you did?”
“I’m not lying to you, Kane. I wouldn’t lie to you about something so serious. I don’t have any recollection of my life before I was almost sixteen. My now-parents found me unconscious on the side of the road when I was fourteen. Mom and Dad said I was diagnosed with amnesia almost immediately. On top of a knot on my head, they said the time before they found me and the year after were so traumatic that I shut down. Doctors told them I blocked it all out in order to survive.”
He stepped away, disbelief flashed across his face, then shock. “Nothing?” he whispered.
I dropped my hands. Somehow, I had to fix this. I’d hurt him, and he was right. I needed to take responsibility and try to correct it. Plus, for some reason, there was something so recognizable about Kane. A pull to him that I couldn’t break away from. “I’m so sorry I hurt you. What happened to you should never happen to a human being. For as long as I live, I’ll take your secrets to my grave—both the ones from your past and present. It’s the least I can do. I can tell you that I do feel something for you, Kane. Something familiar, but I’m not sure what it is. But I’ll say this. I’ve seen glimpses of the man I think you really are, the guy I’ve heard about from others on campus who know you. I don’t think you’re a vicious asshole like you want me to believe. I think I nearly destroyed you, and I had no idea.”
A heavy, suffocating weight crushed me.Why couldn’t I remember? What happened?I backed away, my stomach dropping to my toes.
Scrubbing a hand down his face, Kane took a seat at the table. “Nothing? You don’t remember sneaking off after curfew and making out when we were ten? We were each other’s first kiss, first love, first ...Youwere my everything, Brie.”
I tried to breathe past the agony that filled the room, but I couldn’t. It pummeled my heart into the ground, leaving me gasping.
I wiped the moisture from my cheeks. “I don’t remember. If I had, I would have come back for you, Kane.” I sniffled, taking a moment to try and compose myself. “To hear that you were tortured after I left is fucking killing me. I don’t know how to help.”
Kane’s emotions were trapped inside his tense stare as he looked at me. After several awkward beats of silence, his face crumpled, appearing defeated.
“I told myself you would be back. I would wake up in complete darkness, never knowing if it was day or night, but I rehearsed football plays over and over in my mind. The rest of the time, I thought about you. The plans we had together to see the world outside of the walls that had held us in captivity our entire life.”
I folded my arms over my chest, pretending that I could hold myself together and not break into a million pieces. Scrambling to remember what he was describing, I wanted to scream with frustration and horror at what I’d done to him.
“I know it’s hard to digest. When the doctors first told me, I didn’t want to believe it. I’ve been working with a psychiatrist for the last several years. She suspects that my night terrors are memories of what I lived through, and my brain is protecting me. But Kane …” I knelt before him, taking his hand in mine. “Please, you have to believe me. I would have come back for you.” Tears streamed down my cheeks. “I would have protected you the way you did me.”
He looked down at me, uncertainty clouded his expression. “How do you know? If you can’t remember, how can you say that?”
I swallowed over the churning in my stomach. “I might not know who I was, but I know who I am now. I’m not the kind of person that breaks her word on purpose. I would have never left you, Kane. Especially if we were ...”
“In love,” he finished for me. Kane reached out and touched my face, his fingertips tracing my cheek. “I loved you so much. I gave up everything to get you out and to keep you safe.” He gulped, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat.
“Thank you. From what you’re telling me, you’re the only reason I got away.” My forehead creased. “What did I escape from?” I peered up at him, desperate for answers that were hovering right beyond my grasp.
He smoothed my hair, his eyes never leaving mine. “It’s best that you don’t remember, Brie.”
I stood, stepping back from him as my heart sank to my toes. Until now, I hadn’t had anyone to help me find the missing pieces of my past. I’d nearly destroyed the one man that could, and he despised me.
“Kane, you’re the only person that knows what we went through. What memories I’ve lost. Please, tell me who I am. There’s a hole inside me with only flashes of visions and flickers of thoughts. Sometimes I think I’m going to lose my mind. I need to know. I need to remember.” I turned away from him, embarrassed that my fear and desperation drove me to beg.
Kane quickly leaned forward. “Brie, I can’t imagine what you’re going through, so I won’t blow sunshine up your ass and pretend to. But you have to believe me. You’re better off not knowing.”
I sank my teeth into my lower lip, willing myself not to break down completely. Once I composed myself, I slowly pivoted my attention to him. “Will you at least tell me where we were?”
His mouth slammed closed, and the muscles on either side of his jaw pulsed. “Brie … we were just kids. What happened there, we didn’t know any better since we’d been born into it.”
“Born into what?”Please tell me.Raw agony clawed up my throat as my brain tormented me with unanswered questions. Silence filled the room as I mentally pleaded with him for even a speck of the truth. Maybe it would jar my memories loose, and I could finally feel whole again. The ugly truth sank deep into my bones. The only man that knew my truth hated me.
