“Mom, please wake up.”
Leo grabbed her hand.
His voice cracked.
Something about it cut through me.
“She’s still breathing,” I told him. “Stay beside her.”
I loosened the woman’s collar and kept my fingers against her pulse.
Then her dark hair slipped away from her face.
I froze.
There was a faint scar beside her eyebrow.
I knew that scar.
No.
Impossible.
Memories I’d spent years burying suddenly ripped themselves open.
A rainy night.
A woman crying.
A promise I hadn’t kept.
And something small and red being pressed into my hand before everything went wrong.
“Sir?”
Leo was staring at me.
“You know my mom?”
Before I could answer, the woman stirred.
Her eyelids fluttered.
I leaned closer.
Her eyes slowly opened.
Confusion came first.
Then she saw me.
Every trace of color vanished from her face.
“Ethan…?”
My blood went cold.
Leo looked from his mother to me.
Nobody had told her my name.
And almost nobody outside my organization knew the name I’d been born with.
“How do you know me?” I whispered.
She tried to speak.
But before she could, sirens echoed beyond the alley.
Then my eyes dropped to Leo.
