Page 43 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

CHAPTER EIGHT

Cassandra

I’ M EXHAUSTED AND I need to sleep. This whole day has been an extended nightmare. But he is standing there implacable and immovable and I know he probably shouldn’t sleep anyway because of the head injury.

But I feel wretched.

Of course, even now with no memories, my feelings mean nothing to him.

Except…

Suddenly he looks at me and his expression changes.

“Cassandra, you are so tired.”

I laugh. “Of course, I am. I got stalked by my ex-husband when I was on a date and then he got shot at and now I’m in Switzerland with his amnesiac ass. That’s exhausting.”

“You were on a date?” he asks, and the moment of him actually caring about my feelings is clearly past.

“Yes.”

“Are you sleeping with him?”

“If I was?”

His eyes go black and I can see him grappling with a rage that terrifies me. I’m immobilized. I’ve never seen him look like this before. There is a violence in his stance that is unlike anything I’ve seen in him before.

Yet, I realize I’ve always known he was capable of this.

“I think… I think I would kill him,” he says, and there is a note of honesty and self-discovery in that statement that seems to jar him as much as it does me.

I know he isn’t speaking in hyperbole. He would kill that poor nice man.

It’s not the first time that I’ve looked at him and had the realization that he isn’t a bad-boy fantasy. He might actually be a dangerous man.

But I’ve told myself, always, that I can handle it. That I can handle him.

“I’m sorry,” he says, looking up at me with genuine regret in his eyes. “I cannot bear the thought of another man touching you.”

“He didn’t.” I don’t know why I feel compelled to give him peace of mind. He doesn’t necessarily deserve it. Maybe it’s for my own comfort. Because I don’t need to share space with him when he’s…like that.

“Good. Now I…” He puts his hand on his forehead. “I’m sorry. I’m not…myself.”

“I think you’re perfectly yourself.”

There’s a haunted look about him when he makes eye contact with me. “I am sorry, then. Sorry that this is who I am.”

“I chose you,” I say.

This is the fundamentally difficult part about all of this.

“I’m really angry at you. I have been. But the further I drill down into all of it, the more I realize I’m angry at myself too.

I married you without knowing you. I realized that what we had wasn’t enough for me, but it was exactly what you gave me when we were first together. I’m the one who changed the rules.”

I feel disloyal to myself admitting this.

Because it is true, but I also feel like my anger at him is justified.

I also feel that I’m owed my outrage. My hurt.

My heartbreak. I do feel sorry for the twenty-year-old who met him and thought she had won some kind of lottery.

Who thought that love was going to be that easy.

That desire was simply a magical thing she could get carried away on.

“What were the rules?” he asks me.

“Don’t you want to open the box first?”

He considers this, and then he sits down on the bed next to the box. “First, tell me the rules.”

“It was nothing quite that structured.” I look at him and I feel the first squeeze of pity that I felt the entire time.

He genuinely doesn’t know who he is. He’s genuinely lost. He doesn’t know what happened between us.

He doesn’t remember any of the unkind things that he said to me.

He doesn’t know who tried to kill him tonight.

He isn’t the architect of our disaster. Or maybe he is. Answering that question requires me to grapple with questions I really don’t know the answers to. Are we our memories? Is he even Dragos without them?

Is he someone innocent now?

Is he the man I love?

I remember that moment of violence on his face, and I know for certain that he is. In a way that terrifies me.

Because the violence in him does not repulse me as it should. I didn’t fall for him in spite of the edge of danger. No. I rather fear that I fell for him partly because of it. That part of me wanted a love that would hurt. That would skim too close to my bones.

It made me feel alive in a way nothing else did. When school and art and the rest of my life was perfection and hard work and contorting myself to be the very best.

Not with him.

He said we liked it rough, and he’s right. It always has an edge. It always has. I marvel at that, and wonder for the first time about my own part in that, and why I wanted it so very badly.

But none of that is an answer to his question.

“It became clear to me very early that you didn’t want to answer too many questions about yourself.

That there were certain things that were off-limits to me.

Aspects of your business. I’m not stupid, you’re a very rich man, and I definitely wondered if some of it was…

Not aboveboard. But everything was good between us, so I didn’t see the point of questioning it.

Not too deeply. That was one of the rules.

If I ask a question, and you don’t answer it, that means don’t ask again.

It means you weren’t going to answer. You also never liked to share details about your childhood. About your parents.”

He nods slowly. “I don’t remember them. Do you know where I grew up in Romania?”

“Yes. We went there. You don’t live in your family home, but you do still own it. We had our wedding in a church nearby.”

“What was it like?”

“It was a large estate. Very old. You said that it had been in your family for years. You said that one day our children…”

He frowns. “I said we would have children?”

I look away from him and stare at the wall as a crushing sensation in my chest makes it hard for me to believe. “Sometimes I wonder if both of us were living in a fantasy. Sometimes I wonder if you thought you wanted something that later you couldn’t actually take hold of.”

Those words settle between us. Hard and sharp.

He touches the box, and opens it. The first thing he takes out is a photograph.

It’s of him as a boy. I know, because it looks so much like him.

The man beside him must be his father. He’s tall and imposing, handsome and stern.

He looks so much like Dragos it’s startling.

The woman on the other side of him must be his mother.

He looks nothing like her. She is beautiful and tall, far too thin.

There is a deep unhappiness embedded in the smile she is giving to the camera.

And I feel instantly like I understand her better than I would like to.

His face is frozen, a mask of shock.

“These are my parents,” he says.

“I think so,” I say, my voice thin, choked.

“And me. I was unhappy. The house was very unhappy. It was…”

He closes his eyes. “I don’t like to remember this.”

“You don’t like to, or you can’t?”

“When I have my memories, I don’t like to have these.” He is insistent, his voice firm. And it takes me a moment, but then I understand. He doesn’t think about this time of his life. Not ever.

There is a strange, haunted expression in his eyes, and I hate to see it. So much more than I would’ve thought. I don’t want him to be hurt. That truth rings through me sharp and clear as a bell. No matter how complicated my feelings are for him, I don’t want him to be hurt.

It’s such a terrible thing. Because I love him, but I don’t know him. Because I love him, but it might be the death of me. I never thought in the literal sense, but now I’m beginning to wonder.

“Do you remember anything now, looking at it?”

He pushes the photo away. “My father’s a bad man. He hurts my mother.” He turns to me, and he puts his hand on my face. “Did I ever hurt you, my Cassandra?”

My Cassandra. Like he always calls me.

“No. You never put your hands on me like that, Dragos. I never feared that you would. You’re a brick wall, but you’re not a wrecking ball. Those are two very different things. You have never raised a hand to me. And I…”

“But you were afraid of me. When I found you in Paris, you were afraid.”

“Yes. Because you did come after me. You did come to find me, and as much as I never thought that you would hurt me, I didn’t know what you would do. And I did have to accept that there was very little that I knew about you.”

“You think I have the potential to be dangerous.”

“You said yourself, that if I were sleeping with the man that I went out with in Paris you would kill him. I don’t think that you would ever hurt me, but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t hurt someone else.”

“I see.”

I’m trying to be as honest as possible, but I feel guilty. Which is ridiculous. I’m only telling him the truth about himself. What I know to be in his character.

“What am I?”

“I don’t know. I spent a lot of years not wanting to know.”

“Then maybe I don’t want to know any of this.” He grips my chin. “Can we start over? Can I just have you? Can I just love you?”

This is absurd. It’s also the thing that I want more than anything else.

I want him to love me. I, in many ways, have been given the most absurd fantasy that I could’ve ever asked for.

This man, completely different in some ways, sitting there asking if he can love me.

Wanting to forget all of it. All of the negative things that we went through. All of the toxic things between us.

I’m weak. Because I miss his body. I miss his touch.

This isn’t him…

I stand up from the bed, my hand pressed to my chest. My heart is beating so fast I can hardly breathe. “I can’t. Dragos, we can’t have sex. That’s what we do. It’s what we do instead of talking, it’s what we do instead of getting to know each other.”

“But you don’t know me. And I don’t know me. We cannot know each other. Except through our bodies. I want you, my Cassandra.”