The Villain’s Beloved by Bella J.

15

I stared out the window,the doctor’s voice echoing in the background. He was still talking and explaining, but I didn’t hear a thing. I had stopped listening when I heard the words ‘traumatic brain injury,’ and ‘damage to the inferior medial frontal lobe.’

Was this what an out-of-body experience felt like? Your mind drifting far from where your body was. Escaping. Fleeing. Eluding reality.

“Mrs. Mariano?”

I blinked.

“Mrs. Mariano?”

“Yes.” I lightly shook my head and glanced at the files in front of me.

“Are you okay?” Dr. Hillebrand asked. “I know this is a lot to take in.”

“I’m fine.” I swallowed. “Please continue.”

“It’s what we call confabulation. It’s like a type of memory error where gaps in memory are unconsciously filled with fabricated or distorted information. A patient who confabulates is basically confusing things they’ve imagined with real memories. In Mr. Mariano’s case, he filled the gap of the accident.” The doctor shrugged. “He filled the gap his father’s death left with an imaginary sister.”

“Ellie,” I whispered, my heart torn in two, reminded of the pain I saw in Elijah’s eyes every time he talked about his sister. How could one feel so much for someone who didn’t really exist? How could she not be real?

Dr. Hillebrand leaned back in his seat. “My guess is when Mr. Guerra died, the trauma of losing another father figure caused your husband to confabulate certain things. Certain things that involved you, Mrs. Mariano.”

I sucked in a breath. “So, nothing was real?”

“On the contrary, to him everything was and is still very real. A person who confabulates has no idea that the memories he has aren’t real.”

I clenched my jaw, pushing back the tears. “What do I do? Do I tell him?”

“It’s been my experience that trying to convince a patient that his memories are false only does more harm than good.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“What I’m saying is in your husband’s case these fake memories are so deeply embedded inside his mind. And my guess is the reason for that might be the fact that there are so many similarities. Ellie is a lot like the stepsister he had, Harley. It’s as if he took the image of Harley and created Ellie. And with you, the fact that you are the granddaughter of the man who raised him, the fact that you play the cello—it’s all connected to Gianni Guerra. It all fills that gap. I’m sure if you dig a little deeper, you’ll find even more similarities.”

“Edelweiss,” I said under my breath.

“Edelweiss?”

I inhaled deeply. “He has this music box he bought for…um, Ellie. The song it plays is Edelweiss.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “It’s also the song I played on the cello the first time Elijah heard me play.”

“See, another similarity.” The doctor placed his pen on the desk. “If you start searching for it, you will find a whole lot more.”

I straightened in my seat, trying my best not to break down. “What are my options here, Doctor? What do I do?”

He shrugged. “I can’t tell you what to do, Mrs. Mariano. But what I can say is if you stay with him, you’ll have to live with the fabricated memories your husband created.” He paused, and his expression softened. “His reality will have to become yours.”

My gaze cut back to the window. There was always that split second of silence between hearing something and having your mind make sense of it. A fraction of time when there was nothing. No sound. No thought. No reaction.

I’d experienced a few of these moments in my life. Moments when I no longer felt my heart beat or my lungs expand. Moments when I wasn’t alive, I merely existed, lingering in space within the absence of gravity. Yet, I was here, sitting in this chair, staring at the man across from me whose glasses would slip down his nose every five seconds, prompting him to push them back in place. The wall behind him proudly displayed the degrees he’d accumulated over the years, and judging by the wrinkles around his eyes, the grooves on his forehead, gray hair, and sharp widow’s peak, he was at least sixty.

His finger tapped on the file in front of him, the sound oddly in tune with my pulse throbbing in the side of my neck. So many things had happened during the last few weeks, my life forever changed because of one man who came like a thief in the night, snatching me from my world and forcing me into his. A man who, despite my inhibitions and instincts, had me falling into his arms as if it were the only place I belonged. A man who claimed to have been seduced by my music only to have me seduced by the magnetism of a wicked darkness that dripped off him like liquid temptation.

I should have known better. I should have guarded my heart more fiercely, fought harder. But I didn’t, and there were so many reasons I gave in so easily. Maybe because deep down I was intrigued by a man who felt so passionately about my music—music I was too afraid for the world to hear. Perhaps the knowledge of me being the object of his obsession fucked with my head and made me feel flattered in some twisted, fucked-up way. Or maybe I was just tired of being alone, desperate to have someone else to lean on other than myself. Perhaps that was what I thought Elijah could offer me. After all, who better to provide security and protection than a hitman who owned as much power as he exuded with every breath?

But now, as my mind slowly digested what I had just heard, word by word filtering through that one single breath of silence, I realized with a sinking feeling in my gut that I had made an ill-informed decision. I acted on my most vulnerable instincts, and now I stood on the brink of ruin with no hope of being saved.

Not by him.

Not by anyone.

Elijah lied. So many fucking lies and half-truths, I didn’t know where the truth ended and the lies begun. But it was too late now. I flung myself into this black hole, and there was nothing I could do to escape the darkness.

I smoothed my palm across my belly, the two-thousand-dollar silk shirt unable to hide the poor, struggling New York cellist I once was.

The man across from me cleared his throat. “I know this must be a huge shock. But I can assure you there is light at the end of this tunnel.”

“No.” I looked up and straight at him, swallowing hard as a tear slipped down my cheek, my insides being ripped apart with every breath. “There is no light in any of this.”

His thin lips pressed together, his gray mustache curving at the edges. He knew as well as I did that there was no end to this dark tunnel, and therefore no hope of any light.

I got up and straightened my skirt. “Thank you for your time.”

He pushed his glasses back over the bridge of his nose and stood. “Of course. If there is anything I can help with, you have my number.”

“I appreciate that. Have a good day.”

He shot me a sympathetic smile. “Good day…Mrs. Mariano.”