Page 2 of Royally Romanov
“I’ve been better.”I think.
The detective dragged the chair closer to the bed, allowing the legs to scrape against the tile floor. The hideous noise reverberated throughout his body, from his injured head to the tips of his toes poking out from beneath the covers in blue hospital socks.
“I’m here to ask you some questions about the night of your injury.” His visitor flipped open the smaller of the two notebooks and squinted at one of the pages. “Three nights ago. Is that correct?”
“I think so.” He wasn’t sure. Time had taken on a blurry, disorienting quality since he’d woken up in the hospital. He’d been on a steady stream of pain medication, punctuated by brief moments of clarity. As soon as he’d come close to remembering, he’d feel himself slipping under again, succumbing to sleep.
And her. Always her.
The detective’s gaze lingered on the morphine drip at the head of the hospital bed. “It says here you were found unconscious in the cathedral square at Notre Dame at around three in the morning. Can you tell me what you were doing in that area at that time of night?”
“I’m afraid I can’t.” His eyes were beginning to feel heavy. He fought to keep them open.
“Can’t.” The officer lifted a brow. “Or won’t?”
“The former. I suffered a grade three concussion. It’s left me with no memory of the incident.” Or much else.
“None whatsoever?”
“I’m afraid not, but the doctors tell me it’s not unusual to suffer short term memory loss around the time of a head injury.” A blessing, they’d called it. As if remembering how he’d ended up this way would be more terrifying than forgetting who he was.
“What’s the last thing you remember doing that day?” The officer’s pen remained poised over the notebook.
“I can’t answer that either. My memory loss is rather...” He swallowed. “Extensive.”
“I see. And do the doctors assure you there’s nothing unusual about that either?”
Why did he feel guilty all of sudden? He’d done nothing wrong. At least he didn’t think he had.
But it didn’t sound altogether good, did it? Was he the type of person who roamed the streets of Paris in the middle of the night? He didn’t think so.
Yet something about the scenario sounded familiar. Once or twice since he’d awakened in the hospital, he’d been struck by an image so vivid, so precise that it couldn’t be anything but real. He’d seen a copper sun embedded in cobblestones and a pair of feet. His feet, surrounded by coins.
It was an odd thing to remember, but the doctors had told him time and time again that head injuries were unpredictable. There was nothing to worry about. His MRI and CT scans were both clear. His brain would fill in the gaps in his memory eventually.
Probably.
“They expect me to make a full recovery. It’ll just take time. Believe me,Détective, no one wants me to get my memory back more than I do.” It was strange how the human brain worked. He remembered being carted off the grade school playground in an ambulance after his skinned knee wouldn’t stop bleeding. He remembered how he liked his coffee—black. He remembered the metro stop closest to his apartment in Montmartre—Lamarck Caulaincourt. He even remembered the cool fragrance of the orange tree on his balcony.
But he couldn’t remember if he even lived in Montmartre anymore. Nor could he remember his own name.
Whenever he tried, his mind went blank. The pain in his head became unbearable. He kept thinking it’d come back to him when he least expected it, that one day he’d open his eyes and say, “I’m John,” or “My name is Hugo.”
But it hadn’t happened. At least not yet. His identity remained as elusive as the myriad of other things he’d forgotten.
To make matters even more unsettling, he remembered snippets of things that made no sense. The coins. The shoes.
The girl.
Thinking about her brought a smile to his lips until he realized thedétectivewas staring at him as if he were some sort of science experiment. “So you have no memory of visiting Point Zero on the night you were attacked?”
“Point Zero.” He frowned. “You’re right. I was there, wasn’t I?”
The officer’s gaze narrowed. “That’s where you were found. You remember now,oui?”
He wished he could say yes. But he didn’t remember. He’d simply pieced together what little information he had.
The Paris Point Zero marker was a circular piece of granite inlaid in the cobblestones at the location known as Kilometer Zero. It was the official center of Paris, the point from which all distances throughout France were measured. The place where everything in Paris began.
