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KYRA

T he hunting cabin looked exactly as Max had described—rustic, isolated, nestled among tall pines that whispered in the mountain breeze. Kyra studied it through the windshield of their rental car with trepidation, suddenly reevaluating the wisdom of her decision to meet Boris.

She'd faced Doomers, gunfire, and torture with less anxiety than she felt now, facing a weathered wooden structure and a piece of her past that needed closure.

"Are you sure about this?" Max asked, his hand covering hers where it rested on her knee.

Kyra nodded, glancing at the small mirror in the rental's sun visor. Eva's handiwork was remarkable—fine lines etched around her eyes and mouth, subtle graying at her temples, a softening of her jawline, and a little padding but not as pronounced as the fat suit she'd worn on the mission.

The woman had aged her twenty years with such skill that even Kyra had been startled by her reflection.

"It needs to be done," she said. "For his sake and for mine."

It wasn't pure altruism on her part. Boris held missing pieces of her past she had no other way of reconstructing.

Max squeezed her hand. "Then let's do it."

They'd agreed on a cover story that contained as much truth as possible. Her father's dastardly deed, shock treatment, and drugs that robbed her of her memory, and finally being found in Kurdistan by chance. The rest she would improvise, though Max had assured her that Brundar's suggestion to Boris to accept that her disappearance wasn't his fault had taken root.

Nodding, Kyra opened her door before she could reconsider.

The air was cooler up here in the mountains, carrying the scent of pine and other vegetation. The cabin was not well kept—peeling paint, sagging gutters, and an accumulation of fallen branches on the roof.

Perhaps it was because Boris was getting older and didn't have the energy to do the upkeep, or maybe his finances were not allowing him to hire help .

Max knocked on the door, then moved aside.

The door swung open to reveal Boris, looking older and more worn than she'd expected given the pictures of him that Jasmine had shown her. His hair had thinned and grayed at the temples, his face was puffy and slightly lined, and his middle had thickened considerably. But his eyes were sharp, intelligent, and a beautiful shade of blue.

She had a feeling it had been his eyes that she'd fallen in love with.

They widened with shock as they fell on her.

"Hello, Boris," she said softly. The name felt strange on her tongue, divorced from any emotional context.

He staggered backward, one hand reaching for the doorframe to steady himself. "Kyra?" His voice cracked around her name. "My God... Kyra?"

He'd been expecting Jasmine, who had called ahead to make sure he was there, and at first, the plan was for her to come along, but in the end Kyra decided that she needed to do it alone. Max had to be there in case thralling was needed following their talk, but that was it.

"May we come in?" she asked.

Boris nodded mutely, stepping aside to allow them entry. The interior of the cabin was dimly lit and smelled strongly of whiskey and cigarette smoke. Empty bottles stood in haphazard formation on a coffee table littered with old magazines and an overflowing ashtray .

"I apologize for the mess," he said, hastily gathering some of the debris. "I wasn't expecting guests."

Evidently, he didn't count Jasmine as a guest, which made sense. He was her father after all.

His eyes shifted back to Kyra's face, drinking in every detail with desperate intensity. She felt a pang in her chest—not the rekindling of old feelings, but a profound sadness for what had been lost, for what this man had endured.

"Please, sit," he offered, gesturing to the sofa. "Can I get you anything? Coffee? Whiskey?"

"Nothing for me, thank you." Kyra lowered herself onto the sofa.

Max sat beside her, his presence steady and reassuring. Boris had met Max before when he’d come here with Jasmine, but from what Kyra understood, Max had been erased from Boris’s memory with a thrall, so she should introduce him again.

“This is Max, my fiancé,” she said.

Boris nodded and sank into an armchair across from them. "How are you here, Kyra?" he said, ignoring Max. "What happened to you? Why did you leave me?"

The questions were direct and poignant.

"I didn't leave voluntarily," Kyra said. "I was stolen from you, just as you've always suspected, but instead of killing me, they made me forget my family and who I was. Many parts of what I'm going to tell you are reconstructed because I have no recollections of them, but the information I've gathered is pretty reliable."

She told him how she'd been abducted by her family, taken back to Iran, subjected to drugs and shock treatments that had erased her memories, and how she'd eventually escaped with the help of the Kurdish rebels who had been imprisoned with her in the asylum and joined the Kurdish resistance, living as a rebel with no knowledge of her past.

"I don't remember our marriage, Boris," she said, watching pain flash across his features. "I don't remember anything from before I woke up in the asylum. Not meeting you or falling in love with you, not our wedding, not our life together, not even Jasmine's birth or her childhood."

His hands clenched into fists on his knees. "Nothing at all?"

She shook her head. "The damage is most likely permanent by now. I don't even have glimpses of the past."

The only clues she'd ever had were the dreams about Jasmine that she'd thought were about her own childhood.

Boris's eyes misted with tears. "I looked for you," he said, his voice ragged. "For months, I drove everywhere and showed your picture to everyone. I called the police every day until they threatened me with arrest." He shook his head. "I knew it was your family. You said they would come for you. I thought your family had killed you, and then the divorce papers came, and I was angry but also hopeful that you were at least alive."

Jasmine had told her about that.

"I don't remember signing them. My father probably wanted a clean break. Or maybe I insisted on that to set you free."

He nodded. "That thought occurred to me. You were never cruel. You wouldn't have wanted me to suffer. To be alone. You loved me."

Kyra felt a deep ache for this man with whom she'd shared a life. "I believe I must have," she said.

It was the most honest answer she could give, and it seemed to comfort him somewhat. His shoulders sagged, and he reached for a half-empty whiskey bottle on the end table near his armchair.

"Every time I looked at Jasmine, I saw you, and it hurt."

"She understands," Kyra assured him, though the knowledge of his emotional abandonment of their daughter still stung. "She knows you were trying to protect yourself and, in your own way, to protect her too. It's not too late to make amends, though."

This was the other reason she was here. Boris and Jasmine had both been injured by her disappearance, and they needed to heal their wounds and become a father and daughter again.

Boris nodded. "She looks happy with that guy, what's his name?"

"Eli," Max supplied. "He adores her."

Boris looked at Kyra, studying her face as if committing it to memory. "And you? Are you happy now?"

The question caught her off guard.

She glanced at Max and smiled. "Yes. I have my family back—Jasmine, my sisters,their children. And I have Max."

Boris's gaze shifted to Max, assessing him with the wariness of a rival. "Take good care of her, you hear?"

"Of course," Max said with a smile. "Kyra takes care of herself, though, and I just have the privilege of standing beside her and watching."

Boris seemed a little confused by his answer, but he nodded and then looked back to Kyra. "Thank you for doing this. I've carried the pain of your loss for all these years, and seeing you alive and well has lifted a weight off my chest."

"I know," Kyra said. "As soon as Jasmine told me about you, I knew I had to come and give us both closure. Neither of us deserved what happened to us, but you built a new life with a good woman, and now I'm building a new life with a good man."

A smile lifted Boris's lips. "A much younger man. Good for you, Kyra. You always went for what you wanted despite the way you were raised. You are a fighter. No wonder you ended up in the Kurdish resistance."

He sounded so much more upbeat now that Kyra felt the weight of her own guilt lift off her chest. Even though she hadn't been the one who had caused his misery, she'd been at the center of it.

They talked for another hour—about Jasmine's childhood and Boris finally accepting her choice of becoming an actress instead of doing something more tangible with her good brain. He told her about his wife and his two stepsons and even about his insurance business woes.

She'd guessed correctly that finances had been tight as of late. Insurance companies were becoming stingier with paying their agents and brokers.

When it was time to leave, Boris walked them to the door, looking years younger than the man who had opened the door an hour ago.

"Will I see you again?" he asked, hope and hesitation warring in his expression.

"We have a daughter, Boris. Jasmine and I live in California now, but we will both make an effort to come visit you from time to time."

"I'd like that."

She would have to learn Eva's techniques of making herself look older.

"Goodbye, Boris," she said.

He hesitated for a long moment, his blue eyes boring into hers. "I never stopped loving you, you know. Not for a single day. That doesn't mean I don't love my second wife. I do." He put his hand over his chest. "But there will always be a place reserved for you in here, Kyra. "

Her throat full, she nodded. "Take care of yourself, Boris."

He watched her and Max as they got into the rental, and as she looked in the rearview mirror, she saw him standing in the doorway until they turned onto the road.

They drove in silence for several miles, the mountains gradually giving way to gentler foothills. Kyra stared out the window, watching the landscape blur past as she processed the encounter.

"How are you doing?" Max asked.

"Sad and glad at the same time," she admitted. "I'm sad for what was, for Boris, for the pain he carried, for Jasmine, for her growing up with a distant father who was licking his wounds." She turned to look at Max. "But I'm glad I eased his burden and mine."

"He loved you very much," Max said. "Still does."

"He loved the woman I was," Kyra corrected. "That woman is gone. She died in that asylum in Tehran."

Max squeezed her hand. "You're still you, Kyra. Even without those memories. The core of who you are remained, even when everything else was stripped away. I could hear it in every word Boris said about you."

She considered this, feeling the truth of it settle in her heart. "You're right. And now I'm ready to move forward and build a life not defined by what I've lost or what was taken from me."

Max brought her hand to his lips, pressing a kiss to her knuckles. "We have eternity ahead of us, love. "

Time stretched before her like an endless horizon, full of promise.

As the sun dipped toward the western sky, Kyra felt a profound sense of rightness settle over her. Her journey had been long, painful, and full of obstacles and detours, but it had led her here—to this moment, to Max, to her family, and to this new life.

And what a glorious beginning it promised to be.