Page 105 of One of Those Amnesia Stories

She sobbed harder into my shoulder, her voice wet against my shirt. “Why can’t he just choose me? Why does it have to be so hard?”

I stroked her hair, my touch gentle. “I know, sweetheart. But real love is never easy, is it? It’s a battle. And you know how to fight, don’t you?”

She straightened, wiping her tears with the back of her hand. A fierce, unwavering determination hardened her gaze. “Yes. I do. I’ll fight for both of us until he’s mine.”

I smiled, a swell of genuine pride warming my chest. That’s my girl. She was my daughter through and through. She understood that love wasn’t a gift, something you simply waited around to be given; it was a prize to be claimed, no matter the cost. Cassian’s inability to comprehend the magnitude of the devotion being offered to him was a tragic oversight.

But that was temporary. He would come around.

He had to.

He would have already been my son-in-law by now if it hadn’t been for that woman.

The thought sent a bolt of cold fury through me.

The plan was perfect in its simplicity. He would build the business—a venture he had begun with my son—into a resounding success. I had allowed them their youthful “partnership,” their little amusements, because I understood what such things were worth. It was an investment. Once he had proved himself worthy, once he had established his position beyond question, he would naturally marry my daughter.

In the end, he would be my son-in-law. My son would return to the fold, bringing with him the business he had built, and everything which had been so needlessly disrupted and allowed to drift for far too long, would settle once more into their proper places.

Everything would be restored.

Then Alessia slithered into the picture, and poisoned everything.

She married him while his business was still a fragile seedling, before it had had the chance to grow into the mighty oak it was always destined to become. A foolish woman, acting on emotion as the young so often do, mistaking the intensity of feeling for evidence of its worth. They never seem to understand that a future built on nothing but love is a fortress raised on sand. Beautiful perhaps, for a time, but doomed by the weakness of its foundations.

She stole what was meant to be ours.

She stole the position my daughter had been born to fill.

My precious girl shut herself away in her room for weeks after the news of his marriage broke. She stopped eating. I had to coax water past her lips. It broke my heart to see her so diminished, her whole bright future snatched away before she had even been given the chance to claim it.

I had to rebuild her reality carefully, piece by piece. I sat with her and explained the obvious: it was all optics. He had not married Alessia for love. He had married her for appearances. A young, ambitious entrepreneur was a risk; a married man, by contrast, suggested stability, responsibility, trustworthiness. It was a cold, calculated business decision, nothing more. A strategic wife was simply another prop in the presentation of a successful man. There were no real feelings involved.

I repeated it until she stopped crying.

There were no real feelings involved. How could there be? He had known my daughter long before Alessia had entered his life. He had built his future alongside her brother. He knew our family. He knew where he belonged.

All Cassandra had to do was be patient. Wait a few years.

The plan to hasten their demise was flawless. I leveraged every connection at my disposal, pulled every string within reach. I orchestrated a perfect, sustained pressure campaign. The objective was never to destroy his company. That would have been crude, and ultimately counterproductive. I merely needed to cripple it sufficiently. To make the struggle constant, draining, inescapable. To make him need a lifeline.

Need me.

Nothing dramatic enough to arouse suspicion, nothing severe enough to kill the business outright. Just a steady accumulation of setbacks, each one small enough to dismiss and together impossible to escape.

A man drowning at work has nothing left to give at home. What kind of wife stays beside a hollow man, a shell slowly collapsing beneath the weight of a failing dream? Alessia’s so-called love would have withered under the strain. It was only a matter of time before she walked away. And when she did, when he was finally brought to the lowest point of his life, my daughter would have been there.

She would have stepped into the wreckage without hesitation, her devotion unwavering where Alessia’s had proved conditional. She would’ve been his salvation in every way.

His gratitude would have been absolute.

Then I would have proposed the final merger. With his company’s survival secured by my hand, I would offer him the means to preserve it—and, in the same breath, propose the union of our families. By then, he would have been in no position to refuse.

He was a man who believed in paying his debts. I had seen it myself, in the way he had cared for his mother. He could endure humiliation, hardship, even ruin; what he could not bear was the knowledge that he owed someone and had failed to repay them.

He would not have said no. I would have made certain of it.

The plan accounted for everything.