Selena Kitt - Beauty

“You’re safe here,” Silas assured her.

“I’ve never been safe anywhere.” The feeling was true even if there was no real memory to accompany it. She struggled with trying to remember anything about her life, even her own name. Again, it was that feeling, like it was all on the tip of her tongue, if only she could speak.

Silas had been patient, prompting her often, but she could tell he was worried. She was worried too, but the snow falling outside kept them from making a much-needed hospital visit.

She turned toward the big man sitting on the edge of her bed, wondering about him. He seemed to have as much of a missing history as she did. He was quiet to the point of being laconic, giving her lots of space and privacy, although she had caught him checking in on her a lot in the past day or two. And the mask thing was strange, but everything felt weird, off-kilter, and he hadn’t given her any real reason not to trust him, after all.

She gasped as a low, silvery flood lit the room from the window pane, a cloud moving from across the face of a full moon. The light was dim but she could see his profile.

“You’re not wearing a mask.” She reached out without thinking, but he grabbed her hand, shaking his head, turning away.

“Don’t.” Silas stood, his back to the window, his face in shadow. “I should go to bed.” The light dimmed, the moon playing hide and seek, as he moved away.

“Do you think the wolf will come back?” she asked as he opened the door.

“She was a lone wolf.”

She nodded. “My father always said they were the most dangerous kind.” They were both silent, the air pregnant with the pause.

“My father…” She said the words again and they both let them dangle at the edge of comprehension. Her breath had turned to ice in her throat, her body moving from hot to cold and back to hot again. The world tilted up and down and back and she opened her mouth to speak, the first memory coming, the rest falling like dominoes behind it. It was a horrifying relief, that flood of memories, and all she could manage was a distressed cry.

Silas was by her side in an instant, pulling her trembling body into his arms.

“He killed my father,” she choked, hiding her face against his chest. He wore a pair of white long-underwear and moved like a ghost in the darkness.

“Who?” he asked sharply.

“Oh my god.” The tears came in a flood like the memories and she clung to him, feeling his arms tighten at her back. “Carlos killed my father! He tried to kill me too!” He prompted her like he had been for days. “What do you remember?”

“Everything. Everything.” It was true. Her name, her life, her near-death, Jolee remembered it all in one terrifying, mind-blowing instant. “I’m so afraid.” She quivered. “I want to go home.”

He stroked her hair. “You’re safe here.”

“I don’t have a home.” She sobbed against his chest. This realization was the worst. For days she’d wondered about her family, the people who might be missing her, worried and waiting for her to return. Did she have a husband? Children? A mother and a father?

“Your father’s dead?” he asked.

“Years ago.”

“So where is home?”

“With my husband,” she whispered, closing her eyes at the memory of Carlos, who he was, what he had done. Her emotions hadn’t caught up with her brain, but they were coming-

she could feel them lurking in the shadows, ready to spring her limbs and squeeze her heart.

Silas stiffened at her response. “But you said you don’t have a home…”

“I can’t ever go back there,” she confessed, realizing the truth of her statement. Home wasn’t safe. There was nowhere in the world that would be safe from Carlos.

“Why?”

She realized how cryptic and strange her words must be and tried to explain. “Because Carlos is my husband. He’s the man who tried to kill me. Those men you found, they were his.

He hired them, told them, to kill me.” They both sat in silence, letting that knowledge sink in.

“What am I going to do?”

He sighed, rocking her in the darkness. “You don’t need to think about it now.”

“You found me,” she whispered, incredulous. He had been her rescuer from the beginning, but she hadn’t understood just what he had saved her from, and clearly he hadn’t either. It wasn’t just the accident-in fact, the accident had been part of her salvation. “You saved me from those men. They were going to kill me.”

“They’re dead.” His voice was like steel.

“If that elk hadn’t come along…”

“But it did.”

She tried to hide the sob rising in her throat and it came out anyway. He tried to hold her but she struggled, pushing at him. “I thought if I could remember, everything would be okay again. But it’s worse. Everything’s worse.”

She twisted and buried her head in the pillow, still hiding her tears, although they were coming, whether she wanted them or not.

“I’m sorry,” Silas murmured. She felt his big hand pressed against her shoulder. “You’re welcome to stay here for as long as you need to.”

She turned toward the window. The moon was a high, yellow, silver-lidded eye. “I guess I don’t have anywhere else to go…”

Silas stood. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

“I want to go to sleep.” She closed her eyes. “I wish I hadn’t remembered anything.”

“Try to sleep.” He moved to the door and then turned to ask, “Do you remember your name?”

“Jolee Mercier.”

He stood for a long time. So long she turned to see if he was still there, framed in the doorway.

“Silas?”

“You should know.” He cleared his throat. “Carlos Mercier is my brother.” Jolee gave a short, sharp laugh, but the man didn’t return her mirth. He was serious. It wasn’t possible, couldn’t be true. Carlos’s brother was gone, dead, that’s what he’d told her, told everyone. But that was all she’d ever known about her husband’s only sibling. She tried to remember more and couldn’t.

“Goodnight, Jolee.”

She tried to see him in the moonlight but could only discern his outline. “Goodnight, Silas.”

Overwhelmed with the crushing impact of chance, she turned her face to the wall and closed her eyes, wishing again for oblivion.

* * * *

The woman was impossible.

He’d wanted to take her into a hospital when the snow finally stopped, but Jolee refused, too afraid Carlos could find the records, trace her somehow.

“There are privacy laws,” he’d reminded her, but she just gave him a long, steady look and shook her head.

She did seem to be getting better, her cut healing, memory returning, but he would have felt better if he’d had confirmation from an emergency room doctor, or at least a few x-rays or an MRI.

Then he’d tried to take her into town for clothes. “You can’t live in my t-shirts forever,” he’d teased. But she didn’t want to go. Even when he’d offered to drive three hours away, to a different town, she refused.

“He’ll find me.”

Silas didn’t point out the holes in her logic. If Carlos found the car, if he discovered her body missing from the wreck, that would prompt a sweep of the area-and being anywhere near the accident site would then be the worst place to be. No, he didn’t emphasize that fact at all.

But he did bolster his security around the cabin-not lights or alarms, but traps and snares. And he watched, and waited and tried not to leave her alone. But he couldn’t always be there. He’d had to run to town for supplies, going three hours away, as he promised, getting them staples like sugar and salt, things he only had enough stocked of for one. He’d bought her clothes too, some jeans and shirts, both a little too snug-she seemed smaller to him than she was, apparently-along with underwear and socks.