Page 183 of One of Those Amnesia Stories

I walked past him and slid into the passenger seat.

Michael was having a drink.

Whiskey, probably. Something expensive. Something he thought he deserved. He sat behind his massive desk like a king surveying his domain, a faint smile, a smile as slick as tar, playing at the corners of his mouth.

My friend was in a hospital bed, surrounded by machines, fighting to breathe.

My other friend had been crying for hours. Her eyes were swollen, her face blotched and wet with tears she seemed physically incapable of stopping.

Cassian and Liam’s work—months of it—was tainted.

The Garcia family’s first collaboration in history had become a catastrophe, their name dragged through the ashes of a fire that should never have happened.

All while Michael Hartley sat comfortably in his office chambers, behind his mahogany desk with his drink and his little smile, as though none of it had cost him a thing.

He was lucky—so fucking lucky—that he was sitting on the other side of that desk. Lucky that I needed answers more than I needed to feel his blood on my hands. Otherwise that glass would have been smashed into his skull before he could blink. His desk would be painted red.

“Alessia! Cassian!” He rose from his chair, arms opening in welcome, his eyes glinting with something that looked dangerously close to amusement. “I was waiting for you. What took you so long?”

Cassian shifted beside me. I felt the tension in him. He glanced at me, his jaw tight, then back at Michael. He looked like he wanted to say something—to talk, to confront, to do something.

I didn’t let him.

I smiled at Michael and moved to the chair facing his desk. Then I sat, crossed one leg over the other, and settled back as though I had all the time in the world and nowhere else to be.

“Did you know, Michael,” I began, my voice pleasant, conversational, “that I like knowing things about people?”

He looked at me as though I were a child showing him a trick he’d already seen, his expression amused and mildly patronizing, with not so much as a flicker of unease beneath it.

“My grandfather taught me a lot growing up. Half of it was useless, just his selfish, narcissistic obsession with turning me into a smaller version of himself. But the other half?” I let the pause stretch. “The other half was about how to keep yourself safe from vultures.”

I watched his eyes. Watched the calculation behind them.

“Or, in this case,” I continued, my voice softening, “a dying rat pretending he still has teeth.”

His smile flickered. Just a twitch at the corner of his mouth, there and gone so quickly that anyone else might have missed it.

I didn’t.

That’s alright. He wouldn’t be smiling for much longer.

“I did the same thing to him, you know.” I leaned back, casual, unhurried. “I studied him. Learned everything there was to learn. And eventually, I found the one thing he wanted more than anything—the one thing he believed he could never lose. His company. So I took it from him.” I smiled. “That’s what I do when I think someone’s coming for me. I learn them. I find the cracks. The weaknesses. The secrets they’ve buried so carefully that, after enough time, they start believing those secrets have become untouchable.”

I watched him intently. “And once I know where they’re vulnerable, I use it. Every weakness. Every hidden truth. Every scrap of leverage they were careless enough to leave within my reach.”

I smiled again, wider this time.

“Good thinking, wouldn’t you say?” The silence stretched between us. I watched him wait for whatever came next, his finger tapping against the glass patient, rhythmic.

Then I leaned forward, my voice lowering to something soft and lethal.

“Michael Baylee.”

The name landed like a bomb.

His face drained of color.

The glass slipped from his fingers, caught the edge of the desk, and shattered on the floor, sending whiskey across the polished wood and down onto the carpet. He didn’t even flinch. Didn’t look at the mess. Didn’t seem to hear the glass breaking at all.