Chapter 161

Chapter 161
Mia's POV
My heart lurched into my throat. I shoved the phone into my pocket and pulled the study door open.
Vincent was standing right outside. The housekeeper hovered a few steps behind him, hands clasped, looking uncertain.
She gave a small, deferential nod when she saw me. "Ms. Mia."
I stepped forward and took Vincent's hand, keeping my voice easy and light. "I thought you were waiting for the doctor. What are you doing all the way over here?"
"He still hadn't shown up." Vincent's expression gave nothing away. "I came to find you and ask what was going on."
I studied his face. Calm. Unreadable. The same as always.
"He's that late? Let me call and find out what happened." I pulled my phone back out—
"He's here," the housekeeper said, nodding toward the staircase.
I leaned over the railing. Sure enough, the doctor was just stepping through the front door, medical bag in hand.
"Come on," I said, turning to Vincent. "I'll walk back with you."
"You don't have to." He said it simply, without deflection. "I could hear you in there—you sounded upset. Is everything alright?"
I watched his face. Still nothing. Still that same unbothered calm.
He'd heard me. There was no point pretending otherwise—being cagey now would only make him more suspicious.
"It's about Tanner," I said.
"What about him?"
I took a moment, then looked directly at him. "Do you remember someone named Nydia?"
The reaction was instant.
His hand went to his temple. His face creased, something shifting behind his eyes—raw and sudden, like a fault line giving way. A low, pained sound escaped him.
I grabbed his arm. "Vincent—what's wrong? What is it?"
"My head." He was breathing through his teeth, each exhale labored. "God, my head—"
I felt a white-hot flash of something I wasn't proud of.
Even now. Even after everything. That woman still has her hooks in him.
But the pain on his face was real. Too visceral to be performance.
I stopped thinking about Nydia and focused on getting him down the hall.
The housekeeper and I guided him back to his room. The doctor took one look at him and froze.
"What happened?"
"He was fine and then—" I shook my head. "I mentioned something from the past. I was trying to help him piece things together. I didn't think it would hit him this hard."
The doctor exhaled and reached for his bag without another word. He administered a sedative—measured, practiced. Within minutes, the tension in Vincent's shoulders began to bleed away. His breathing evened out.
He was still pale, but the worst of it had passed. His eyes, when they opened, carried the last traces of whatever had just moved through him.
I sat beside him and took his hand in both of mine. "I'm so sorry. I wasn't trying to hurt you—I thought if I said her name, something might come back—"
"Don't apologize." His voice was quiet but steady. "You're my wife. Whatever you do, I'm not going to hold it against you." A faint, exhausted smile. "But who is Nydia? Why does that name do this to me? It's like the first day all over again."
"Because she hurt you." The lie came easily. I'd had the shape of it ready before he even finished asking. "She was a plant. Tanner put her in our circle—she came in as household staff, and we had no idea. She was working for him the whole time. Then one day we found out she'd been putting something in your coffee. She was trying to poison you. When we figured it out, she ran—Tanner had people waiting to pull her out. They hid her."
The last softness in his expression evaporated.
"That conniving little—" He stopped, jaw tightening. "She sat in our home. I was good to her. And she was poisoning me." His voice went flat and cold. "You should have put a bullet in her when you had the chance."
Hearing him say that—hearing him talk about Nydia with nothing but cold contempt, after all those years of watching him look at her like she was the only person in the room—
God. I hadn't known a feeling could be this satisfying.
Every memory I'd buried rose up at once. The way his eyes used to soften when she walked in. The way he'd lean slightly toward her without seeming to notice. The way she'd smile at him like she'd already won something, and she had.
She'd always had him. And I had stood just outside the warmth of that, watching, wanting, pretending I was fine.
"I blame myself," I said, letting the regret come through. "When we went after Tanner on the island, I told my people to deal with her too. Get rid of her along with everything else." I shook my head. "But she slipped through. Again. That's what you heard me so angry about."
"Ah." His large hand closed over mine. "Then stop letting her take up space in your head. She's not worth it."
The words moved through me like sunlight through glass.
"Vincent." I smiled. "You're too good to me. I love you."
"I love you too," he said.
I had imagined hearing those words from him so many times that I thought when they finally came, they might feel hollow. Like a facsimile of something real.
They didn't. They felt like water after a very long drought.
I sat with him through the rest of the IV drip, my fingers loosely threaded through his, until his eyes finally closed and his breathing settled into sleep. Even then I stayed a moment longer, just looking at him.
Tonight, I thought. Tonight, finally.
I eased out of the room and pulled the door shut behind me without a sound. I found the housekeeper and told her I needed the full treatment—a proper spa afternoon, everything, head to toe. Whatever it took.
I had plans to keep.
---
Vincent's POV
The door clicked softly shut.
I opened my eyes.
Finally.
The sedative had taken the edge off the headache, but it hadn't touched my mind. I'd been awake for several minutes before Mia stopped watching me—I could feel her gaze even with my eyes closed, that particular quality of attention she had, a little too focused, a little too hungry.
It made my skin crawl.
I'd been running quiet assessments on her for days now. Looking for anything that felt like recognition, like familiarity—the kind of comfort you don't have to construct. You either have it or you don't.
I didn't have it with Mia. Not even close.
In fact, what I had was the opposite. An instinctive resistance every time she moved into my space. A low, animal wariness that I couldn't reason away no matter how many times I reminded myself she was supposedly my wife.
No man feels that way about a woman he loves. No man married someone he involuntarily pulls back from.
She was lying. I was increasingly certain of it.
But Nydia—
That was something else entirely.
I didn't know her face. I didn't know her voice. I had nothing concrete, just the name—my entire nervous system staged a revolt. The pain was real. But underneath the pain, before it crested and swallowed everything else, there was a fraction of a second where something else moved through me. Something that felt like—
Recognition. Want. Relief.
I hadn't said any of that to Mia. I'd performed the headache—well, the headache had performed itself, I'd simply leaned into it—and let her believe what she wanted to believe.
But I knew what I'd felt.
Nydia was someone who mattered to me. Profoundly, in ways that had apparently survived whatever they'd done to my memory.
Mia had called her a traitor, a plant, a would-be poisoner. The story was too clean. Too convenient. Everything neatly pointing away from any possibility that I might want to find this woman.
I didn't believe a word of it.
And tonight—Mia had made her intentions clear. She wanted to come to my room. She wanted to close whatever distance still existed between us.
I had no interest in sleeping with her. But I did have interest in what she might let slip when her guard was down and she thought she'd finally gotten everything she wanted.
Nydia.
I turned the name over again in the quiet of the room.
Who are you？