Page 40 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

CHAPTER SIX

Cassandra

I’ M AFRAID THAT he’s lying to me. Except he’s bleeding profusely, and I know that I need to help him. He was following me. He has been for days. I’m sure of it. Every time I thought I saw someone. It was him. I’m not in any doubt of that now.

I am shocked, furious. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with this or him.

But I love him. And I hate that I love him. I love him, and I can’t let anyone… Hurt him.

“You’ve always been paranoid,” I say.

Though his paranoia might be rooted in reality, I have to now admit.

“I have?”

“Yes,” I say. “You would never let me go anywhere without security.”

“That’s very controlling.”

I laugh. I can’t help myself. Of course the amnesiac version of my husband, a man who has never been afraid to call out bullshit of all kinds, is quick to call out his own as long as he can’t remember that it’s his.

But I know that we need to get out of here and quickly.

Because suddenly I think… Perhaps he wasn’t only controlling for the sake of it.

What I know is that he’s a very rich man, and I know that people hate him.

I still wish that I knew more about why somebody might actually try to kill him, but unfortunately since the man never let me into a single thing in his life, I wouldn’t know.

“Okay. Do you have your phone?”

“Yes,” he says. “I think.”

“I’ll find it,” I say, leaning in and fishing my hand into his left pocket, where I know he keeps his phone, because he’s left-handed.

I’m so close to him, and suddenly, I start shaking.

Because he’s here, after two months of me not seeing him, and he was very nearly killed.

We might not even be safe. My heart squeezes so hard I think I might die.

He might’ve been killed. Right there in front of me.

I can’t handle that. And so I open his phone up and I call his head of security. “Where are you?” I ask.

“In London, where Mr. Apostolis has asked me to be. Why are you on his phone, Mrs. Apostolis?”

“Someone tried to kill him. And he has no idea who he is.”

“We’ll send an emergency vehicle to the location.”

It goes dead. I have a fair idea of exactly where we’ll go, because I’ve been there before, and I recall him saying it’s a property that is listed in his name, and it even has a panic room.

He said this to me offhandedly, and I laughed, and now I think it was not a joke.

“We need to get down the stairs,” I say.

Thank God he can move on his own two feet, because there’s no way I could carry a man his size down those stairs.

We wait behind the door until the phone lights up, and everything after is a blur.

He is rushed to a private medical facility and I’m on edge the whole time.

They scan his brain to make sure he isn’t dying.

A concussion, but nothing more. I’m given instructions on how to safeguard him, but I want to ask for…

for help, for something else. Something more. But I am his wife.

And then his security team says the larger imperative is to get him somewhere safe and private, they trust no one, not even these doctors enough to have them come with us, to have them know the location of where we might go.

We’re instructed to go to the roof of the facility and await a helicopter, which touches down the moment we reach the roof, the rotors causing windstorm that throws my already chaotic heart into disarray.

As we climb up inside, and are whisked off into the Parisian sky, I feel like I’m leaving behind everything again for him. And I don’t know how I keep doing this. Maybe he is lying to me. Maybe this was all an elaborate ruse to get me to come with him.

Maybe I’ve walked into a trap again.

All I know is that in spite of my best efforts, I’m back with Dragos.

I want to weep. For all of the reasons that a person can shed tears. I don’t. Maybe because I’d have to be connected to my body to manage that. Right now, I feel like I’m not just flying above Paris, but above myself.

Were the last few weeks a dream?

Or maybe the last four years were some dire fantasy and I’ll wake up at home in my bed.

The flight itself lasts two hours, and I’m thankful he doesn’t try to touch me. When we land in the snow at his mountaintop home above Geneva, I’m not surprised. This was where I thought we would go.

We spent our honeymoon here, and he told me then it was a secure property that only very few people knew about, and a helicopter is required for access.

It’s a beautiful home, set into the side of the mountain, nearly concealed by the craggy rock around it, the angles of glass designed to allow the house to fade into nature.

It’s beautiful. But that’s not my prevailing thought right now.

I usher him into the house, and the crew flies away. Which means that I’m alone on a mountaintop with Dragos. Who doesn’t know who he is. Probably.

I press a security lock on the wall behind us, like he showed me to do the first time we were here.

He’s looking around, pacing like a caged panther as he regards the parameters of this place. It’s dark outside, but the snow still glows a fearsome white. It’s eerily quiet. So different than the apartment in Paris I was in only a couple of hours before.

I feel like I can’t catch my breath. I’m not sure if I’ve been able to catch my breath for weeks.

I wait. To see if he’s going to pounce on me. To see if he’s going to collapse. I still haven’t decided whether or not I think all of this is a ruse. Or whether it’s really happening.

“Sit down,” I say. In spite of myself. “We need to call a doctor. We need to figure out how to get him up here.”

“Not necessary. I simply won’t sleep.”

“Oh. I suppose I’m going to stay up with you, then?”

“You are my wife.”

It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell him I’m trying to not be his wife. I don’t know what to do with an amnesiac, though. If you’re supposed to tell them, or if telling them the truth is like waking up a sleepwalker.

“How do you know you’re not supposed to sleep?” He’s so confident and certain in some things and I have no idea how or why.

I want to laugh, though, because the truth is he’s no less confusing with amnesia. I’ve never understood what was happening inside of him. He’s a wall and I’ve never known how to climb him.

“I don’t know,” he says. “There are certain things that I know, and many that I don’t. Some of this is simply feelings. A gut instinct.”

“You knew me,” I say.

He nods slowly. “Yes. I told you. I remember meeting you.”

“Okay,” I say.

He doesn’t remember that. He thinks he does. He probably would have felt this way about any woman he happened upon after this accident. Though, he clearly did go up my stairs to my door for a reason. Which means he knew where I was living. He has been watching me this whole time.

Impossibly, foolishly, my heart begins to beat faster. Because he came for me .

I thought he wasn’t going to. I thought he didn’t care or that he had another woman in our bed already but he did come for me.

The joy that gives me is momentary and then I want to fling myself out a window. Because how is it that I can be joyous that my husband chased me down? When I was afraid of it. When I knew that it was necessary for us to be apart.

Truly, I am tired of myself. Of my obsession with him.

I’m in shock, I realize. I want to rage at him, at the world, at everything. I realize that the problem with myself and Dragos is that there was never a pattern for us from the start. There is no guidebook for this.

One thing I never imagined, though, is that it could get more absurd. So kudos to the universe. Hilarious stuff.

“I don’t think you know me,” I say. “Not in some magical way. I think I was maybe the last thought in your head because you were in front of my apartment, and clearly you knew that.”

I’m desperate to prove to both of us that me still existing in his washed-out memory doesn’t mean anything.

“I do know you,” he says, his tone fierce, his blue eyes wild. “And you know me. You painted me.”

I am wretched that he saw that. It was humiliating enough to let myself exist in that cycle where all I could think about was him, but I never imagined him seeing it. I never imagined him witnessing my obsession.

The trouble is, I think he’s unhealthy. Unwell.

The trouble is, so am I.

“ Everyone has to have a model for painting,” I say, gritting my teeth. “You’ve been mine.”

“The paintings are erotic .”

Heat races over my skin and my face gets hot. “How nice that you understand the concept of the erotic there among your scattered memories.”

He regards me, his perusal slow. I feel that gaze like hands on my skin and it’s far too easy to remember what it’s like. We have a very low success rate with not touching each other when we’re alone together.

We don’t even do that well with it when we aren’t alone together.

I can recall a business event he took me to where he put his hand in my lap beneath the table and…

No. I’m not going to remember that.

“For my wife, you seem to not like me very much,” he says.

Well, not-waking-the-sleepwalker approach be damned, because I’m going to tell him.

“I’m trying to become your ex-wife,” I say.

Silence settles between us. “What?”

“I left you.” I’m shaking as I say this, my whole body threatening to vibrate apart.

“Why did you leave me?” He looks desperate then, upset. How strange, because he doesn’t remember anything, so why should that upset him?

I wrap my arms around my midsection. Maybe that will keep me together. “Our marriage wasn’t going well.”

“Then why was I in Paris?”

I clutch my head. I’m sure I look like my painting of Dragos right now.