Page 83 of Help Me Remember

“Dmitri,” I said, rolling the name through my head and finding only the smell of scotch bubbling up in my memories. “Wait, what about Gabriel?”

For the first time I saw annoyance flash over her features. “Dead.”

“And that’s not a good thing?” I asked in disbelief.

“No,” she said stiffly. “Not when the entire point of this operation was for you to feed us as much information as you could get to chip away at their empire steadily. That would be enough to keep you in there while you gathered more and more evidence to go after the various heads of the hydra.”

I arched a brow. “Even without my memories back, I can tell you that’s a nonsense plan. Anything I found while committing a crime would have been inadmissible in court and had me locked away along with half of your department.”

“What the public doesn’t know won’t hurt them, not when it comes to taking down the monsters who would happily throw them into the local dumpster,” Ivy said in a clipped tone.

“Fine,” I grunted. “I can get on board with the whole ‘greater good’ bullshit, but that doesn’t make what I said any less true.”

“Because you weren’t feeding us evidence, you were feeding us ways to find evidence. You were in the heart of things and got deeper than anyone else, and you did it in only a few years. You were able to feed us ways to dig up information on all of them and tie it back to them. In another couple of years, or less, we could have easily gathered enough evidence to bring them crashing down,” Ivy told me, and now I understood the source of her frustration.

“Until…this,” I said.

“You were supposed to be here with Gabriel, helping to formulate a better business arrangement between your people and Los Muertos. You were to drop off all the information you’d gathered in the past few months and signal when it was safe.”

“My old house,” I said thoughtfully. “Since I wasn’t Dylan anymore, that meant the house couldn’t be tied to me. Especially if I hadn’t used it in a while.”

“Exactly. We were nervous about your return to Port Dale, but you were confident you wouldn’t be spotted by anyone you knew,” Ivy said with a snort. “Clearly, you were wrong.”

“I probably wouldn’t have been if it hadn’t been for a little bit of sabotage and betrayal on Gabe’s part,” I said, then winced at the casual nickname. “Gabriel.”

The corner of her mouth twitched. “Don’t worry, we already knew about your relationship with him. You were open about it, and it also gave us an avenue to keep an eye on local male prostitution and escort services in cities where he used them.”

“Fantastic,” I muttered. Of course, I would have thought my personal life was on the table to be shared. Then again, the more I thought about it, the more it made sense, and I felt my annoyance fade.

Then I remembered her.

“Wait, before we go any further, I need to know two things.”

“O…kay.”

“One thing at a time.”

“Alright, first thing.”

“I…there was a woman…she was important to me, and I got her killed, or I killed her,” I said, looking away from Ivy for the first time as the familiar shame welled up.

“Katya,” Ivy said instantly, though her husky voice went soft. “She was the first time we were worried about what was happening with you. A cousin of Gabriel’s and a free spirit, if one can exist in that sort of family.”

“You thought I might have been going native,” I whispered, a dawning suspicion creeping up on me. “Did you—”

“No,” Ivy said instantly with a shake of her head. “They found out she was passing information freely to the CIA, of all things.”

“The CIA was involved too?” I asked in surprise.

“Which we didn’t know,” Ivy said with an iciness that told me she still wasn’t happy about that bureaucratic fuckery. “She was angling to bring down a few family members in exchange for a life far away from her own family.”

“We don’t have to live this life forever, you know?” I whispered, hearing her voice in my ear as I repeated Katya’s words. We had been curled up on an oversized chair outdoors, staring out at Lake Michigan as the sun crept beneath the horizon. For all the darkness and horror of my life at the time, she was so bright and warm, and I hadn’t noticed the ulterior message in her words.

“Dylan?” Ivy asked.

“The family found out,” I said dully. “They killed her. That’s what happened, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Ivy said, lips thinning. “We thought we would have to extract you right then and there. We hadn’t realized how deeply you felt for her, but…you refused. Made vows that you would keep to your mission and then went dark.”

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