Page 226 of One of Those Amnesia Stories

He kissed my head. His lips lingered there. “You were right. I wouldn’t have stopped. I would have kept waiting for her to be someone she wasn’t. I hate that about myself. That it took me so long to cut her off. That I kept giving her chances she never deserved.”

“It doesn’t matter how long it took.” My fingers found the back of his neck. Held on. “You did it.”

He nodded, his face buried in my hair. I felt the breath leave him, felt the tension in his shoulders release.

I almost lost this. We almost lost this. The thought pressed against my ribs, cold and sharp. But we found our way back. Maybe he was right. Maybe we were meant to be, destined, in all the lives he’d talked about. Maybe we were that. Maybe we were just two people who kept finding each other, kept reaching, kept holding on.

“Hey, Cassian?”

“Hmm.” His lips brushed my neck. Soft. Distracted.

“When are you going to stop wearing my ring on your pinky and give it back to me?”

Chapter 37

Several months later

“Baylee!” His name practically sang out of me, bright and delighted, as if I’d spotted an old friend across a crowded party rather than a man sitting behind a sheet of reinforced glass in prison.

He couldn’t hear me, of course. The glass made sure of that. But he could see my face, and apparently that was enough. His jaw tightened. His eyes narrowed. He knew exactly who I was calling.

Then he turned and started to leave.

I stayed where I was.

I didn’t call after him. Didn’t wave. I simply sat there with my hands folded, watching him go and waiting for the inevitable moment when curiosity proved stronger than pride.

It took less than a minute.

He stopped. His shoulders went still as he stood there, visibly wrestling with himself, and I could see the argument taking place behind his eyes.

I smiled. “Remembered no one else would come visit you?”

Fifteen years.

That was what they had given him. Fifteen years for a lifetime spent constructing an empire around a name he’d lied, manipulated, and schemed to preserve, only to have that entire legacy reduced to a number printed on a sentencing sheet.

Mrs. Morris had testified against him. She had raised Cassandra. She had watched Michael raise her, too. She had seen what happened behind closed doors—the conditioning, the isolation, the years of teaching a girl to think of herself as something owned rather than someone who belonged to herself, a product rather than a person. She had painted the picture of a man who had spent his entire life learning how to turn people into possessions and, eventually, into casualties. The jury had believed her.

Liam’s evidence had been the final nail. Money laundering. Enough of it, and enough evidence of it, to make sure there was no tidy little escape route waiting for Michael on the other side of his conviction. No secret reserve of money. No company he could quietly reclaim. No carefully constructed future in which he walked away bruised but wealthy, leaving everyone else to clean up what remained.

Henry had gotten immunity for his testimony and probation for his part in everything that had happened. He’d been given the chance to walk away, too, with the possibility of having his record sealed once he proved he wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.

He would carry what he did for the rest of his life.

But he would carry it outside of a prison cell.

Michael ground his teeth so hard I could see the muscle pulsing beneath his skin.

“What do you want?”

“Don’t be like that, Baylee.” I leaned back in my chair and made myself comfortable, because if there was one thing I had earned, it was the right to enjoy this. “I come bearing news.”

His expression darkened.

“So, what do you want to hear about first?” I tilted my head thoughtfully. “Your kids?”

A pause.