didn’t register the way it should. I snapped out of the thought once a phone was shoved in my face though. “See?” The woman questioned me snidely as she thrust the thing at me. “This is us.”
“Shit! I look half dead there,” I answered. It was true. She’d shown me a picture of her lying naked next to me in bed, but my eyes appeared to be closed or rolled back and I was incredibly thin. I tried to look closer because I thought I saw bruising on my body too, but she yanked the phone away.
“Whatever, you were sick for a while,” was her answer.
“I’ll say. I was a fucking junkie when I was brought here.”
She waved away my statement. “Pssh, you weren’t a junkie, baby. You just enjoyed having a good time,” she countered.
I narrowed my eyes on her once again and glanced between the phone in her hands and the rounded belly she was sporting. “That’s the kind of man you want to be the father of your baby?” I asked her, not understanding why a woman who was about to be a mother would blow off that type of behavior from the man she claimed was hers.
“Well, you’re all better now, aren’t you?”
“Which begs the question, where were you all this time, and how did you find me?”
“I knew who you were with, just not where.”
I cocked a brow up at her in question. “My brother has kept you here, away from me. He told me you were no good for me, or the baby,” she added, almost as an afterthought. “So, he wouldn’t allow me to know where you were until you were healthy enough.” She wouldn’t look at me as she explained, and the rolling in my gut suggested that she might be lying.
“We’re supposed to be married and you only have one picture of us?”
“Don’t be silly, of course there are more.”
“Show me,” I demanded when she didn’t seem inclined to do so.
“Fine!” She did something on her phone and continued to swipe her fingers across it. “See,” she offered again. This time when she showed me a picture it was of a much younger couple. It could definitely be the two of us, many years ago. “We’ve been together a long time. We met when you were still in the Army.”
“I was in the Army?” I asked, but the minute the word left my mouth, several flashes of memory hit all at once. None of them had the woman in question, but they definitely supported the idea that I had, indeed, been in the Army. I could have fucking shot myself in the foot for all the clues that had been around me all this time. I glanced down at the tattoo on my arm and traced the image there for the longest time. There were others all over my body, but this was the only one anywhere near that part of my arm. Why the hell hadn’t I bothered to look closer at the images I wore on my skin? It was a question that didn’t need an answer because I already knew why. Fear. The way I had been found and picked up and put back together made me fear the story that my ink would tell. As I traced a finger around the ink on my arm though, all I felt was warmth and a tingle of a memory that involved a letter, a sketch, and coming home.
“Are you even listening?” The woman shrieked at me as she smacked at the finger that was still tracing over the tattoo. “What the hell, Declan?”
“Zoned out for a minute,” I admitted.
“You zoned out?” Her voice had taken on the edge I’d only think to associate with a harpy. Maybe a banshee. They were the ones that shrieked until your ears bled, right? I shrugged my shoulders in response to my thought, but the woman just hissed out a long, exaggerated breath before smacking at my head. I ducked out of the way and she nearly stumbled over from the momentum. Suddenly, me having a head injury didn’t seem so far-fetched if this woman had really been in my life. Hell, if it weren’t her smacking me, I had probably attempted to do myself in. Fit with the fact that I’d been drugged out of my mind for an ungodly amount of time.
“That’s it! We’re going home. I’m taking you out of here. Obviously, these quacks don’t know what the hell they’re