Chapter 2 Cold Eyes, Familiar Hands

POV: Damian

The house felt wrong and different.

Damian stood in his study, staring at the skyline through the window, and tried to name what bothered him. Everything in this room belonged to him. His desk, His chair. The framed photo of himself shaking hands with a senator he apparently knew well, according to Nate, though Damian couldn't recall the man's face if his life depended on it.

Five years gone. Just gone, like someone had reached into his skull and scooped them out with a spoon.

"You look like hell," Nate said, dropping into the chair across from him without asking. His younger brother always walked into rooms like he owned them, easy and loose in a way Damian no longer feel is normal.

"I feel like hell."

"Doctor said the memories might come back in pieces. Give it time."

"I don't have time, Nate. I have a company to run and a mother breathing down my neck about a wedding I don't remember agreeing to."

Nate's mouth twitched, some private thought crossing his face before he shut it down. "Vanessa's not so bad." She is young and charming.

"That's not what I asked."

The study door opened before Nate could answer, and Margaret swept in wearing the kind of smile that made Damian's shoulders tense on instinct, before his mind even caught up with why.

"Darling, you missed breakfast planning," she said. "Vanessa wants the engagement party to be an event people  will talk about for years."

"I was there for breakfast," Damian said flatly. "I remember that much, at least."

Margaret's eyes flicked, just barely, toward the door. "Yes. Well. I hope the staff didn't bother you. I've been meaning to review the household again. Standards have slipped."

Something about the way she said standards made his jaw tighten, though he couldn't have explained why if she'd asked him directly. His mind offered him nothing. His body, apparently, held opinions of its own.

"The housekeeper," he said before he could stop himself. "Ivy."

Margaret's expression didn't change, but something in the room did. Nate suddenly found his shoes very interesting and started inspecting them.

"What about her?" Margaret asked, too lightly.

"Nothing." Damian shook his head, frustrated at himself for even bringing it up. "Forget it."

But he couldn't forget it. That was the problem. He'd spent all morning trying to forget the way his skin had lit up like a struck match when her sleeve brushed his arm. It made no sense to him.She was a stranger. Small, quiet, unremarkable in the way she clearly tried to be.

And yet his hand had curled into a fist at the table, some old animal instinct rising in him he didn't recognize and couldn't control.

Margaret left with a few more instructions about tailors and flower arrangements, and Nate lingered behind, watching Damian with an expression too careful to be casual.

"You okay?" Nate asked.

"I keep having this feeling," Damian admitted, hating how it sounded out loud. "Like I'm standing in someone else's life. Like everyone around me knows the ending to a story I never got to read."

Nate's throat moved as he swallowed. "Maybe you should talk to your doctor about that."

"Maybe you should tell me what you're not telling me."

Nate's smile faltered for just a second, cracked at the edges, before he forced it back into place. "I don't know what you mean."

He left the study too fast for a man with nothing to hide.

Damian didn't sleep that night. He rarely did anymore. He laid  in the dark of a bedroom that was supposed to feel like his and stared at the ceiling, chasing threads of memory that dissolved the moment he reached for them.

Around midnight, he heard it.

Humming. Soft, low, drifting from somewhere just outside his door.

He didn't recognize the tune, not consciously. But something in his chest pulled tight, an ache blooming behind his ribs so suddenly it stole his breath. He sat up in bed before he'd decided to move, feet already on the floor, body already walking toward the door like it had made the choice without him.

He opened it.

The hallway was empty.

But the air still held a trace of something floral, jasmine maybe, fading like the last note of the song he could have sworn he almost knew. His heart hammered against his ribs, fast and confused, grief without a name attached to it.

He stood there a long moment, one hand braced against the doorframe, feeling like a fool for the way his eyes had gone hot and stinging over nothing. Over an empty hallway and a smell that meant nothing to him.

Except it didn't feel like nothing.

It felt like standing at the edge of something enormous, something with his name carved into it, and not being able to see past the fog.

He was about to close the door when movement caught his eye at the far end of the corridor. A shadow, slipping around the corner too quickly to be casual. Small. Quick on her feet.

Ivy.

"Wait," he said, low, before he could stop himself.

The shadow froze.

For one suspended second, neither of them moved, the distance between them charged with something Damian had no memory to explain and no logic to dismiss.

Then, from the top of the staircase behind him, his mother's voice cut through the silence, sharp and immediate.

"Damian. What are you doing out of bed?"

He turned toward her voice for only a heartbeat.

When he looked back down the hallway, Ivy was gone.