Blood on My Hands, His Ring on My Finger

Chapter 2: What I Know

Damien's POV

She was looking at me like I was a stranger.

After eight months of marriage, after everything we had survived together, after every night she had pressed her face into my chest and told me I was the only solid thing in her world, she was standing in front of me with blood on her hands and nothing in her eyes. No recognition. No warmth. Not even fear of me specifically, just a generalised terror that she was directing at everything in the room equally, including the roses I had placed there myself three days ago because they were her favourite.

I had prepared for many things in my life. I had built an empire from the ruins my father left behind. I had buried my mother with dry eyes because she had asked me to. I had sat across negotiating tables from men who wanted to destroy me and smiled like it was nothing. But I had not prepared for this. For Elena looking at my face and finding it empty.

I kept mine carefully neutral because if I let it slip, even once, she would see everything. And she could not see everything. Not yet. Not until I understood how much damage had already been done.

"They found the body downstairs, Elena," I repeated, because she needed to hear it again, needed to understand the urgency before the next few minutes swallowed us both whole.

Her grip on my arm tightened. Small fingers, short nails, the same hand I had held at the altar while she laughed through her vows because she had been too happy to be solemn. Now those fingers were stained red and trembling.

"Whose body?" she asked.

My phone rang again. Detective Harlow. Patient man, Harlow, but not infinitely so. I silenced it and looked at my wife, at the confusion carved into her face, and made a decision I knew I would have to live with.

"I need you to trust me," I said.

Something flashed in her eyes. "You just told me your name ten minutes ago."

"I know." I reached past her slowly and pulled the cream throw blanket from the edge of the bed, wrapping it around her shoulders, covering her hands. She let me. That small surrender cost her something, I could tell, but the cold had gotten into her bones and her body wanted warmth even if her mind refused to accept it from me. "But trust me anyway. Just for the next hour."

"Tell me whose body it is."

"Raymond Holt." I watched her face. Nothing. The name meant nothing to her, which told me the memory loss was real and not performed. Elena was many things but she had never been a convincing liar around me. I knew every tell she had. "He was my head of security."

She absorbed that. "And you think I killed him."

"I didn't say that."

You didn't have to." Her chin lifted slightly, that stubborn angle I knew better than my own reflection. "My hands, Damien. Look at my hands."

"I have looked at nothing else since I walked through that door." I said it quietly and something in my tone made her pause. "Elena, Raymond Holt was a man I trusted with your safety. Whatever happened last night, whatever you think those hands tell you, I need you to understand that I am not standing here ready to accuse you. I am standing here trying to protect you."

"From what?"

"From the people downstairs who are not me."

She searched my face for a long moment with those dark eyes that had always seen further into me than I was entirely comfortable with. Even without her memory she still did it, that careful, unhurried reading of me, like I was a text she was determined to understand.

"Why would you protect me?" she finally asked. "If you think I might have done this?"

The question cracked something open in my chest. I kept my voice even. "Because you are my wife."

"That's not a reason. That's a title."

She was right. Even hollowed out and frightened and stripped of every memory we had made together, she was still the sharpest person in any room she entered. I had fallen in love with that mind before anything else.

"Go into the bathroom," I told her. "Wash your hands. Change your clothes. There is a grey dress in the wardrobe, third from the left, put that on. Do not speak to anyone before you speak to me first. Can you do that?"

She stared at me. "You're giving me instructions."

"I'm giving you the next sixty minutes of your life." I held her gaze. "After that you can do whatever you want with the information. Walk away from me, call the police yourself, burn this whole house down. I won't stop you. But right now I need sixty minutes."

Something shifted in her expression. Not trust exactly, but a provisional, reluctant surrender to logic. She understood that the alternative was walking downstairs alone, without memory, without context, into a room full of people who would have questions she couldn't answer.

She nodded once. Sharp and small.

I exhaled.

She moved toward the bathroom and stopped at the door. Without turning around she asked, "The photograph on the dresser. Were we happy?"

I looked at that photo. The two of us on our wedding day, her laughing, me looking at her like the rest of the world had simply ceased to exist. I remembered exactly what she had said thirty seconds before that shot was taken. She had leaned up on her toes, her lips at my ear, and whispered that she hadn't known a person could feel this much without breaking apart.

"Yes," I said. "We were."

She nodded again, something private and unreadable in the line of her shoulders, and disappeared behind the door.

I waited until I heard the water running. Then I pulled out my phone and called the one number I had been avoiding all morning. It rang twice before he answered.

"Tell me you have it," I said.

The voice on the other end was calm in the way that only dangerous people manage to be calm. "I have it, Damien. The question is whether your wife knows what's on it."

I looked at the closed bathroom door, at the thin line of light beneath it, and thought about Elena's blank eyes and her bloody hands and the locked room at the end of the east corridor that she still hadn't asked about.

"She doesn't remember anything," I said.

A pause. Then, "That might be the most dangerous thing you've told me yet."

The line went dead.

From behind the bathroom door, the water stopped running. And in the silence that followed, I heard something that turned my blood cold. Elena wasn't moving. She wasn't opening the door or getting dressed or doing any of the things I had asked her to do.

She was completely, utterly still.

And then I heard her voice, low and shaking, talking to someone on a phone I didn't know she had.