Chapter 428: I Will Always Love You

Poisoned. The word sat in the middle of my mind and didn’t move. I turned it over, pressed against it, tried to make it fit into something real — and couldn’t. It belonged to a different kind of story, a different kind of life. Not mine. Not this.

“Carl, are you sure? I’ve seen the prenatal reports. The pups and I are both healthy. Did someone alter the data?” I heard how desperate I sounded, the words tumbling out before I could shape them properly, but I couldn’t stop. Part of me had already begun to wonder if I was losing my grip on reality entirely — if everything I thought I knew had been quietly rearranged while I wasn’t paying attention. My hand dropped to my belly without thinking, the way it always did now, automatic and instinctive. Rounded and noticeably so, carrying two lives I could feel even when everything else felt uncertain and shifting beneath me. They were still there. Solid and real and entirely themselves. That much I could hold onto.

“Come back inside,” Lewis said quietly. “Let’s talk.” He didn’t wait for an answer. He lifted me the way he always did — like it was simply the natural thing, like my weight was something he had always been prepared to carry — and brought me back to the room, setting me down on the bed with a gentleness that made my chest ache. I clung to his hand when he tried to pull away.

“Tell me what it is. The poison — what is it called?”

“Scifen.”

The name meant nothing to me. It didn’t sound like anything dangerous. It sounded almost ordinary, almost forgettable, which perhaps was the point. “What does it do?”

He held my hand tighter, his grip firm and steady, like he was anchoring himself as much as me. “It won’t harm the pups. But it targets your senses — your perception. The most significant effect is memory loss.”

The air left my lungs in one slow, silent exhale. “So the repetition, losing track of time, reaching for things that weren’t there anymore — that’s all been this?”

He nodded slowly, his eyes never leaving mine. “I didn’t tell you sooner because I didn’t want to frighten you. I’ve spent days consulting people, reaching out to anyone who might know something. There’s no antidote available. Nothing we can give you, and with the pregnancy, we can’t force any kind of intervention. We have to let it run its course.”

A heaviness settled deep in my chest, the kind that doesn’t announce itself loudly — it just arrives and stays. “Carl. What’s going to happen to me?”

He exhaled, long and careful, the breath of a man choosing every word before he let it go. “The first sign was the drowsiness. We assumed it was the pregnancy — it made sense, it fit. Then when everything happened with your sister, we thought you were grieving, that your mind was protecting itself the way minds do. But when the memory gaps kept coming back, kept widening, I had you tested. Most doctors here had never seen it before. Matthew had to track down a research facility overseas that had been studying it in isolation — the substance isn’t even classified as a poison yet because it’s still in development. The original purpose was to erase a specific window of memory. A few years, perhaps a decade, surgically precise. Since you haven’t been exposed for long, it’s only touched recent memories so far. We don’t yet know how far back it will eventually reach.”

I went very still. The room felt smaller suddenly, the walls closer. Then something shifted at the edge of my thoughts — a flicker, a thread I hadn’t noticed before.

“Scifen,” I said, almost to myself. The word turned slowly in my mind. “Vito. He once asked me to pass some medicine to Whitney — said it would make her forget him. He framed it as kindness. Could that have been it?”

Lewis nodded, his jaw tight. “Your sister isn’t here, and the bottle is gone. I’ve reached out to Amber to see if she can get her hands on it.”

“Any answer?”

He shook his head. “It looks like she and Vito separated after everything that happened. Besides the hairpin, she left nothing behind. She was being careful about it.” A wave of disappointment moved through me, dull and familiar. Yael was probably somewhere safe by now — I had to believe that. The Blackwells felt like a Chapter that had already drawn its own curtain and closed. But mine hadn’t. Mine was still open, still bleeding.

“Carl.” I looked at him steadily, even though something inside me was shaking. “Who did this to me?”

The answer felt like it was already somewhere inside me, hovering just beyond the reach of my own mind, close enough to feel but not to touch.

“Sergio.”

It took a moment for the name to land. My old therapist. And even then, even with the name sitting right in front of me, all I could produce was a vague and formless shape — the glasses, the compulsive precision of his office, everything lined up as though disorder were something to be feared. No face. Nothing with eyes or expression or humanity attached to it. He was already mostly gone. And it wasn’t just him. People I hadn’t known as well — Nelson, others whose names surfaced briefly before sinking again — were already fading too, their outlines softening at the edges like photographs left in the rain. This thing didn’t erase you all at once. It was slower than that, and quieter, and far more patient. Like someone moving through a darkened room, lifting things from their shelves so carefully, so deliberately, that you didn’t notice the absence until you reached for something you needed and found only empty space where it used to be.

“Why would he do this?”

Lewis’s expression shifted. Something darker moved behind his eyes — not anger exactly, but something older and more complicated than anger. “You.”

“Me? Do I have some history with him?”

“No,” he said. “He was in love with you.”

A faint memory stirred — a figure sitting across from me in a sterile, over-organized office. Calm. Professional. Measured to the point of feeling constructed. The image had no weight to it, no warmth, nothing that suggested obsession or love or anything hidden beneath the surface. It didn’t fit the shape of what Lewis was describing. But Lewis wouldn’t lie to me about this. Not now.

“He loved me, so he made me forget?” The logic refused to assemble into anything coherent. I turned it from every angle and it still made no sense — love twisted into something unrecognizable, hollowed out until only possession remained.

Lewis cupped my face in both hands, his palms warm against my skin, his touch so deliberate it felt like a statement. “If I’m right, his real target was never your past. He wanted you to forget me.”

My eyes went wide.

I threw my arms around him before I could think, before I could find words or reason or any kind of composure. I pressed my face into his chest and held on with everything I had — every ounce of strength left in me, every piece of myself that was still intact. His heartbeat was steady beneath my ear, his scent so deeply familiar that it lived somewhere below thought, written into the oldest part of me, the part that didn’t require memory to know its mate. How could I ever lose this? How could anyone reach inside a person and take something this fundamental, this cellular, this bone-deep?

But even as I held him, I felt it — faint and terrible and undeniable. Something like an hourglass turning slowly inside me, grains slipping through a gap I couldn’t find or close no matter how tightly I pressed my hands together. Every grain was a moment. Every moment was him. A laugh I might lose. The exact way he said my name. The particular weight of his silence when he was thinking. All of it moving through me and away from me at once, and nothing I could do to stop it.

“Don’t be afraid.” His voice was low, his arms wrapped around me completely, one hand at the back of my head, the other at my back, holding me like I was something worth guarding. “Even if you forget, Elena — as long as we’re breathing, as long as we’re together, we can find each other again. I’ll tell you every day. I’ll remind you every single time. I’ll make you fall in love with me as many times as it takes.”

He pulled back just enough to see my face, and wiped the tears from the corner of my eye with his thumb, so carefully, so gently, like the gesture itself was something he wanted to remember.

I looked up at him and held his gaze — really held it, the way you hold something precious when you know it might not stay — wanting to press his face into some place inside me so deep that nothing, no substance, no absence, no slow erosion of time or memory could ever reach it.

“Carl,” I said, and the word came out like a vow, because that was exactly what it was. “No matter when. No matter where. No matter how many times I have to find my way back — I will fall in love with you again.”

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