One Night with the Forgotten Heir

CHAPTER 2 — NO NAMES

The ceiling was wrong.

Ottoline stared at it for a while before her brain agreed to start working. Not her ceiling. Not her apartment. Too high, too clean, the kind of room that cost more per month than her rent for a year.

She sat up too fast, and the room spun once before it settled. Her head hurt in a way that told her this wasn't a normal hangover. Four or five drinks had never left her feeling like this before.

The sheets were expensive. The bed was empty except for her.

"Hello?"

Her voice came out rough in the quiet apartment. Nothing answered.

She was naked. There were marks on her skin, her hip, her wrist, one at the base of her throat that she found in the mirror and stared at longer than she meant to. The marks weren't violent. They were careful. Someone had taken his time, and that thought bothered her more than the marks themselves.

She tried to picture his face and got nothing. Just a voice, low and close to her ear. A hand at her waist. One sentence she couldn't fully remember, something about waiting.

Waiting for what.

Her dress was folded neatly over a chair. That detail caught her attention even through the fog in her head. Men who used a woman for one blackout night didn't usually fold her clothes for her. She got dressed fast, hands shaking a little, and checked the room for anything that might tell her who he was. A name. A bill. A photo.

She found nothing. No mail. Nothing personal anywhere. The apartment felt staged, like no one actually lived there. She pushed that thought away. She was hungover and embarrassed, not paranoid. Not yet.

She found the cufflink on the nightstand on her way out.

It was small and heavy, dark metal, with two letters engraved on it. C period R period. She turned it over twice. Something pulled tight at the back of her mind, like she almost recognized it and couldn't quite reach the memory. She didn't know anyone with those initials. She should have left it there.

She put it in her coat pocket instead.

The elevator down had mirrors on every wall. She studied her own reflection the whole way, smudged makeup, last night's dress, the look of someone who had made a decision she couldn't remember making. The doorman in the lobby didn't meet her eyes as she passed. She realized why. He had seen this before. Other women. Other mornings just like this one.

That thought didn't sit well either.

Farrow was already waiting at the café when Ottoline arrived. Two coffees sat on the table, and Farrow's face said she'd been rehearsing this conversation since Ottoline's last text the night before.

"Okay." Farrow slid one coffee across the table. "Start with the part where you disappear from the group chat at eleven at night and don't answer for fourteen hours."

"I lost my job." Ottoline wrapped both hands around her cup without drinking from it. "Yesterday. The Bramfield case fell apart. Someone tampered with the evidence log, and somehow that became my fault instead of theirs."

Farrow's face sharpened at once.

"Tampered with how?"

"I don't know yet. Halvard shut it down before I could ask." Ottoline let out a breath. "I went to Onyx after. Got drunk. Really drunk."

"How drunk?"

"Four or five drinks, and then nothing. I woke up in a penthouse I don't recognize with no memory after that." Ottoline said it fast, like ripping off tape. "No name. No face. Just—"

She stopped.

"Just what?"

Ottoline set the cufflink down on the table between them.

Farrow picked it up, turned it over, read the letters, and looked up with an expression that was half worried, half something sharper.

"Ottoline. Four drinks doesn't put you under like that. I've watched you drink six and still win an argument about case law."

"I know."

"So either the bartender was pouring doubles all night—"

"Or I didn't just get drunk." Ottoline finally said the thing she'd been avoiding all morning. "I don't feel hungover, Farrow. I feel wrong. Like something was off in my system, not just the alcohol."

Farrow didn't answer right away, and the silence said more than panic would have.

"Do you want to get checked out? Tested?"

"For what. It's been over twelve hours. Whatever it was is long gone by now." Ottoline took the cufflink back and closed her fist around it. "I don't even know if I'm right about any of this. Maybe I drank more than I remember, and I'm making up a story because it's easier than admitting I made a mistake."

"Or maybe someone put something in your drink, and you woke up in a stranger's penthouse with zero memory of his face. You should be a lot more scared than you're letting yourself be right now."

Ottoline didn't answer that. She turned the cufflink over one more time, the letters catching the light, and felt that same pull at the back of her mind again. Recognition with nothing behind it.

"I'm keeping this," she said finally.

"Why?"

"Because somewhere out there is a man who knows exactly what happened to me last night. And I'm going to find him." She put it back in her pocket. "When I do, he's going to explain himself."

Farrow studied her for a long moment, then reached across the table and squeezed her hand once, quick.

"Fine. But you're not doing this alone. And you call me the second you find anything about who owns that penthouse. Anything at all."

Ottoline nodded, already turning it all over in her mind again, the marks, the cufflink, the dress folded so carefully over the chair, a stranger who had known exactly what he was doing to her body and had taken nothing from her except her memory of him.

She had no idea, sitting there with her coffee going cold, that the man who owned that penthouse was about to become her employer in three months. Or that he already knew her name, her history, and the exact shape of the fear now sitting in her chest, because he was the one who had put it there.