Page 119 of King of the Cage

“Tell your boss I’m here for my wife. Now.”

“Brandon!” A female cry reached me across the cavernous room. Regina, Archibald’s wife. She hurried toward me, her face pale with worry.

“You’ve heard that Giada’s here?” she asked with wide, doe-like eyes.

“Yes, I have. Why wasn’t I your first call? Why would you call Casa Nera?” I demanded.

She paused. There was a look I couldn’t quite decipher in her eyes, and then it passed. She put a hand on my arm.

“I just did what she asked me to,” Regina said.

“Take me to her.” I shrugged off her hand and brushed past her, leaving her to run after me. I stormed through the building, my worry growing with every step. “You said she showed up at the hospital? She’s hurt?”

Regina trotted behind me. “Yes, kind of, it’s hard to explain.”

“Try.” My tone was iron.

“She seems to have suffered a head injury.”

Fear hit me hard in the gut, stealing my breath. My clever little selkie, hurt?

“Which way?” I growled at Regina when faced with endless glass walls and white hallways stretching in both directions.

“This way.” She pointed to one.

I took off and came to a secured door. I slammed it with my hand, the entire thing rattling.

“Open it,” I instructed shortly.

Regina typed something into the keypad, and then I was in.

The suite was laid out like a private hospital ward. One of the doors was closed. I made for it. She was in there; I could feel it.

I marched down the hall, trying to slow my thundering stride so as not to scare her, and burst into the room.

Giada lay in a bed, surrounded by machines and snowy pillows. She was wearing a hospital gown. She turned toward me as soon as I walked in, my eyes immediately taking in the bandage on her temple. Her dark eyes fixed on me, and I waited to hear her voice. I waited for some emotion to appear in those huge, dark eyes. Something other than confusion. Anything.

But there was nothing. Nothing at all.

“Giada? Selkie?” I murmured, slowly stepping closer, like she was some wild creature I might spook.

She continued to look up at me, a puzzled expression spreading across her beautiful face. “I’m sorry. Do I know you?”

“If it’s not amnesia,then what is it?” I asked, my frustration on a barely controlled leash. It had taken all of a few horrifying seconds to realize that my wife wasn’t relieved to see me, because she didn’t know me.

It was the finishing blow.

Now, Giada rested, while I stood in a room next door with Regina and two doctors she’d brought in to talk us through the problem, plus Elio and Sol.When asked who she wanted to call, she’d told Regina to phone Sol and her brother.Not me.

“Trauma from the blow? Willful forgetting something upsetting? The brain is a tricky thing, Mr. O’Connor. We don’t know a lot about memory centers and how they can be affected,” one of the doctors explained.

I glared at him. “Then find someone who knows more.”

“Willful forgetting of something upsetting,” Elio repeated quietly and gave me a look that would freeze a lesser man’s blood. “What did you do, O’Connor?”

I blew out a long breath and shook my head. “Nothing. I fucking swear it. We were—” I trailed off.At the start of everything.“We were good,” I said instead.

“But I bet there’s something, right?” He sneered at me. “Of course there is. There always is with you.”

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