Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 108709 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 544(@200wpm)___ 435(@250wpm)___ 362(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108709 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 544(@200wpm)___ 435(@250wpm)___ 362(@300wpm)
“There’s no way,” Aria breathes. “It couldn’t be.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I have no recollection of smiling for this photo,” she murmurs, her gaze shifting back to mine, a profound sadness flicking in her eyes. “But it’s just like everything else that I have no recollection of.”
I stare at her, my hand loosening around her throat at seeing real confusion in her eyes. She’s not faking this. She can’t be. I taught her how to lie, but nobody is this good.
“I . . . I don’t know who this menace is. I’ve never heard that name before, but I think it’s possible that I could be her. I just . . . I can’t believe that this could have been my life before. That I’d be involved with someone—” She cuts herself off, her lips twisting into an awkward cringe before she gets a chance to finish her sentence.
“What do you mean by your life before?”
“Before the accident.”
“What accident?”
She slowly shakes her head and shrugs before slightly turning and reaching up to her hair. Taking hold of her long, auburn strands, she pulls at her thick locks, parting them before showing me a large scar on the back of her head.
I rear back, caught off guard.
Like I said, I know every scar on this woman’s body, but that one is new. And it’s not small either. It’s almost the length of her palm, but an injury like that doesn’t come without side effects. “What happened?” I ask, slowly lifting my hand and running my fingers over the deep scarring on the back of her scalp.
“I don’t know,” she admits, her eyes growing watery as she hesitantly inches away from my touch. “It was maybe eight years ago. Something happened to cause this scar. A fire, maybe. I’m not sure. All I know is that it landed me in a coma for eight months with a fracture and severe brain swelling. I had burns across my body that were mostly healing, but I had no memory of what happened. Of who I was. The doctors said that nobody came looking for me. Nobody tried to claim me. I was just . . . alone.”
I shake my head. I would have known if she were in a coma for eight months.
“The doctors said there was a chance that I might get my memories back, but they weren’t hopeful, and with nobody coming to claim me, I had no choice but to start a new life,” she tells me. “I don’t know who I used to be. My name—Aria Ashford—was made up just to try and give me some kind of identity. I don’t know where I lived, where I grew up, what friends I had. I don’t know if I had a family. Parents or siblings who were missing me. I just had . . . nothing, but I know myself. I know what kind of person I am on the inside, and you . . . There’s no way. You’re—”
A shaky breath tears from deep in my chest, and my hand completely falls away from her throat as I try to piece together everything she’s said, trying to figure out her timeline. Because eight years ago . . . fuck.
“You said there was a fire?”
She shrugs her shoulders. “I assume so,” she murmurs, reaching for the hemline of her top and lifting it enough so that I see the healed burns across her waist. “Third degree burns. There’s more on my thighs. I had to have skin grafts, but for most of it, I was in a coma. When I woke, the hard work was pretty much done. Still sucked though.”
Fuck.
There’s no way. That night with the fire. That was the night everything changed.
I thought she’d gotten out. I thought she was okay. I was being dragged away by the police after slaughtering six men in cold blood, but I saw her through the smoke, and if I hadn’t gotten to her, the cops would have. I taught her to get away. I knew it in my gut. She had to have been okay, because the alternative is that I left her there to die. I didn’t protect her like I should have, like I always vowed to do.
I shake my head, stepping away from her. “No, no, no.”
If she was trapped that night, burned, injured so badly she was in a coma for eight months without a clue who she was, then she never betrayed me. My sweet menace never came forward to clear my name because she was lying in a hospital bed alone. She didn’t know who I was, didn’t know how desperately I was counting on her, didn’t know that I needed her to speak up and save me from a hundred and ninety-two years behind bars.