(Cassian’s POV)

The moment she walked into the room, my breath caught.

At first, I thought my mind was playing tricks on me again. That’s what it usually does—throws me fragments of faces, shadows of voices, things that don’t belong. But this wasn’t a shadow. This was real.

It was her.

The woman from the club.

The woman whose laugh had somehow cut through the blur of alcohol, whose presence had burned into me even though I’d tried to forget. The woman I woke up to in that hotel room, her warmth still lingering on the sheets after she slipped away.

And now she was standing here. Across from me. Calm, professional, dressed in quiet authority.

But I knew. I knew.

My chest tightened, my pulse thundering in my ears. I wanted to say something—demand an answer, ask her why she was here, why she hadn’t said anything—but the words stuck in my throat. My tongue felt heavy. My mouth was dry.

She didn’t let it show. Not at first. She greeted me like I was nothing more than another case file, another broken mind to dissect. But I caught it—the flicker in her eyes, the quick stutter in her breath. She knew too. She was just hiding it better than I could.

And that made something twist painfully inside me.

Why hadn’t she said anything? Why pretend we were strangers when we both knew we weren’t

I didn’t expect that. I never expect anything anymore. My world has been stripped bare—names, faces, whole years gone like they never existed. I’ve lived with that emptiness for so long, I thought nothing could surprise me. Nothing could stir me.

But then she entered.

Lyra Calloway.

Her name barely registered when the assistant said it, but her presence… her presence was like a strike to the chest.

I watched her carefully as she settled in front of me, her hands steady, her eyes trained, her posture perfectly professional. She was trying so hard to control the space. But I could see it—the flicker in her eyes, the way her breath caught for half a second when she finally looked at me.

She knew me.

But the second she sat across from me, I wasn’t empty. I wasn’t numb. I felt… something.

“Close your eyes,” she said. “Breathe. Let the memories come if they want to.”

And for once, I did, but not because I trusted her. I did it because my head was already filled with her. The way she had looked at me in the dark, not as a billionaire with a name that carried weight, but as a man. A stranger. And she hadn’t walked away—not that night.

And then it happened.

the memory came.

The park.

The swing set. The sound of laughter that doesn’t belong to me but haunts me like it does. For months, I’ve been living with fragments—images that flash and burn out, sensations that vanish before I can grasp them. But with her voice in my ear, with her presence pressing into the quiet, the picture sharpened.

Chains creaking. The taste of dust. The sound of a girl running ahead of me. Always ahead. Always slipping away.

And in that moment, as I spoke the memory out loud, I didn’t just remember the girl—I remembered the feeling. The ache of chasing someone who never turns back. The sting of being left behind. The loneliness that crawls under the skin and stays.

When she asked if I saw a face, my throat tightened. I wanted to lie. To say no. But the truth hovered close enough to sting.

Because when I pushed further into the haze of memory, for the briefest second, I thought I did see a face. Not clear. Not certain. But her.

Lyra Calloway.

The woman sitting across from me now.

My chest burned with it.

So I opened my eyes and looked at her—really looked at her. And there it was again. That flicker in her gaze. The stillness that only comes when someone recognizes a truth they don’t want to admit.

She asked me to describe the park. I did. But it wasn’t her question I heard echoing in my head—it was mine.

“Do you know it?”

I watched her carefully when I asked. The way her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. The way her pen pressed harder into the page, as if she was grounding herself. She deflected, but she was hiding something. I could feel it in the silence between us.

When I asked her if she knew the park, her eyes gave her away before her mouth did. She tried to smile it off, to brush it aside, but the truth was there—in the way her throat tightened, in the way she avoided my gaze for just a second too long.

She knew.

She was hiding it.

And that terrified me more than the missing years ever did.

Because for the first time since this nightmare began, someone else wasn’t a stranger. Someone else fit into the cracks of my broken memories. And if she fit there… what else did she know about me?

The session ended. She stood, closing her notebook, her voice carefully even. “That’s enough for today.”

But I wasn’t done.

When she stood to leave, her voice steady but her eyes avoiding mine, I didn’t move. I just let my silence hold her there, heavy, the question unspoken but screaming between us: Why didn’t you tell me?

Her hand hesitated on the door handle. Just for a second.

And that second told me everything I needed to know.

She remembered. She felt it too.

And now, no matter how hard either of us tried to pretend, we weren’t strangers. We were tied by something bigger—something I didn’t understand yet, but I knew would destroy me if I let it.

Because Lyra Calloway wasn’t just another psychologist. She was the woman I couldn’t forget. The woman I shouldn’t want. The woman I already want.