Sold the Amnesiac Billionaire

"Useless." Silas didn't look down to say it. He just leaned his weight onto the shoe pinning a man's fingers to the floor, slow, until something gave.

His eyes were the cold that comes off a blade. Three years ago, I dragged that man out of a snowbank. He was halffrozen and out of his mind. Couldn't tell me his own name.

So I lied. I told him I was his fiancée. I fed him, I kept him warm, I kept him. Then someone set half a million in front of me and asked me to hand him back. I took it. I sold him.

Turns out the stray I'd been splitting my last bowl of noodles with was a billionaire's son. He went back to that life and never once looked back. Didn't leave so much as a note.

Two years later, we're in the same room. And it looks like this.

I turned to leave before he could get a clean look at my face. "Fiancée." His voice stopped me where I stood. "Did you lose your memory too?" Chapter 1 I saw Silas again at my own university.

He'd donated a library, and the school had packed a theater to interview him. I sat in the back and watched.

A hundred feet of stage air between us, and it might as well have been a canyon.

Three years ago, that man in the thousanddollar suit, the one answering every question like the words cost him money, had lived in my house. He'd eaten at my table for over a year.

He'd slept on my floor, and on the coldest nights, in my bed, with my arm slung over him like he was something I got to keep. No one in this theater knew that.

No one ever would. "Mr. Sinclair, you're so young for this.

What made you put money into education?" His voice barely stirred the air. "I want the people who want to read to have something to read." "Does that come from somewhere in your past?" Silas went still.

Three years ago he lost his memory. Someone dumped him in the poorest nowhere in the country, and he spent the worst year of his life there. No one knew that either.

A few seats down, my roommate had both hands pressed to her cheeks. "God, look at him.

That's my husband." "He's mine," the other one said. "Wait, did you hear he went missing three years ago?" "I heard he studied abroad.

He didn't go missing." "Neve." My roommate elbowed me. "You'd know, right?

You're practically from out there." I shook my head. "No idea." "They found him way out in the sticks, and that's your whole deal.

You never heard a thing?" "Not a thing." I'm a bad liar. Thank god for the dark. Because three years ago, he wasn't just out in the sticks. He was in my house.

The interview thinned out into questions from the floor. A student's hand went up. "Mr. Sinclair, word is you've got your fiancée's name tattooed on you.

That true?" The whole room leaned in. People live for this part.

Beside him, a woman moved to smooth it over. "That's not really today's—" "It's true." Silas said it himself, before she could finish. "Right over the pulse." He drew back his cuff.

One word, inked at his wrist. Snow. The theater came apart at the seams. The woman next to him was named Winter. His assistant, close enough to touch.

Childhood friends, people said, families that went back generations. Who else could Snow be? She dipped her head, gone pink, and let the whole room believe it. Good for them.

Matched set. It made sense. Nothing moved in me. I just wanted to get back to my dorm and finish my homework.

And then, without deciding to, my thumb found the inside of my own wrist. The same spot. I made myself stop.

On my way past the wings, the studentbody president caught my arm. "Neve, perfect timing. Can you run a coat back to one of the guests?" "What?" "Cramps. I'm dying.

Please?" She'd gone gray, hunched around her middle. Not acting. She'd walked me through my financialaid paperwork when I had no one else to ask. I didn't have grounds to say no.

Except the guest was— The interview was already over. Silas came around the curtain on those long legs, headed backstage. Headed for me. I wanted to vanish. Too late.

He turned his head. He saw me. His eyes caught on me and held. Running now would look like guilt. So I didn't. I stood exactly where I was and let him look. Thank god for the mask.

Chapter 2 Silas's brows pulled together. "You go here too?" I nodded. He was already moving toward me. "What's your name?" "Yu—" I got the surname out and nothing else.

Winter caught his arm. "Come on. It's freezing back here." She steered him away. By the time he looked back for me, I was already gone. But not far.

Their voices carried down the corridor. "Stop looking. Her name's Yu. It's not her." "The eyes are the same." "And if they are?

She's the one who conned a fortune out of you and walked." I kept my eyes on the floor. My hands weren't quite steady. She wasn't wrong. I got greedy. I sold him.

There was a reason. A dying one. But a reason and clean hands have never been the same thing, and I knew the difference even then. I used to go by another name.

Home was a village so poor that one winter my mother pulled someone's thrownout noodles from the trash, washed the maggots off, and boiled them for the three of us.

The winter I turned seventeen, the snow came down like the sky had given up. The pass was already closed when I found him at the edge of the village. He was just sitting in it.

Eyes glassy. Going nowhere. "What's your name?" I asked. He worked his mouth. All that came out was the front of a word. "Si." That was everything he had.

Something in him was broken. I turned to go.

He caught my wrist and held on, looking at me like I was the last thing standing between him and the dark. "Cold," he said. "Hungry." One night out in that would kill him.

Our village lost someone most winters, some drunk who lay down in the snow and never got back up. I didn't want him.

But a life is a life, and I've never once managed to step over one. So I took him home. I called him Si, after the only sound he could give me. He had nothing on him.

No wallet, no card, no name stitched into a collar. Blank, like someone had wiped him down on purpose. I hauled him to every office that might help me find his people.

Not one of them did. Small towns run on favors, and no bored clerk was going to burn a workday on a stray and a poor girl. Go home, they told me. Wait for a call. We waited a year.

The idiot stayed. I had my own reasons. My mother was slipping. Forgetting the small things first, then forgetting them worse. In college I'd finally get the name for it.

Alzheimer's. Nothing to be done. I nursed her, I studied, I took whatever work I could get.

Once Silas was strong enough to haul and lift, that was at least the odd jobs off my back. Though he was strange about it. Big as he was, he was soft.

Useless at everything at first, all thumbs, tired three times an hour.

Watching him eat food he hadn't earned, I finally snapped. "Keep this up and I don't want you anymore." He panicked on the spot. "Snow, you can't not want me.

I'm your husband." Right. I'd told him that. Eat my family's food, and you owed me a wedding someday. It was a kind lie.

He was too much to look at, and half the county had started trying to marry him off. A boy already spoken for was the only thing that made them back off. Poor towns marry young.

Nobody blinked at a girl my age with a claim already staked. When I said I didn't want him, he came undone.

He had the face of a man built to break hearts, and he was using it to look at me like a kicked dog that couldn't work out what it had done wrong. So I softened.

God help me, I softened. "Then be good," I said. "I only keep a husband who does as he's told." "Okay." Fast. Like I might take it back.

After that he worked like it could save his life. Like being useful was the only thing keeping him under my roof. Back then I believed all of it. The clumsy hands. The empty eyes.

The way he needed me. I had no idea what he really was. Or that he'd be the one to leave. Chapter 3 Over time, the strangeness started to show.

One day I got my period and didn't realize I'd bled through my jeans. Walking out the school gate, the boys were laughing at me.

Silas had come to walk me home. "Look at Neve's pretty husband," one of them called. "She's bleeding. Bet he's the one who broke her in." Silas heard it.

He crossed the distance and put the first boy on the ground before I understood he'd moved. He hit like something feral.

Every blow landed where it would do the most damage, and nobody could get near him. I didn't know the man doing it.

I grabbed his arm. "Si, stop!" He stopped between one breath and the next.

Let me pull him back by the sleeve like he weighed nothing. "Snow says stop," he said. "So I stop." The boys came away purple with bruises.

Their parents showed up wanting medical costs we couldn't cover. On a house that was already underwater, it was one more thing pulling us down.

That night Silas sat in the corner like he knew he'd done wrong. When I went to talk to him, his face was wet. "I'm sorry, Snow. I know I messed up. I won't do it again. Please.

Don't stop wanting me." He cried like an oversized dog.

Something in me caved. "Then be good," I told him. "I only keep a husband who behaves." "Okay." The next day he came home holding a wad of cash. He'd sold the watch.

When I found him, he'd been wearing one.

Heavy, expensive, the kind of thing that had no business on a boy sitting in the snow. "How could you sell that?" I was frantic. "That watch was how we were going to find your family." He grinned, easy and bright. "You're my family.

I'm not going anywhere. I'm staying with you." He'd been robbed blind, obviously. That watch was worth ten times what he'd carried home. Silas didn't care.

He'd gone soft and obedient, and the only voice he answered to was mine. That boy from the school gate, though. His luck turned. Nails turned up in his shoes. Bugs in his clothes.

Gravel in his rice. His bike tire blew on a footbridge and dropped him in the river. Funny, how much bad luck one kid could carry. I looked at Silas. He smiled back, sunny as ever.

Looking back, the signs were all there. He corrected my English once. The way I'd said a word. "You've studied English?" I asked. He went blank. "I don't know.

Have I?" The memory was gone, but the language had stayed in his hands somehow.

My mother watched him and said, quiet, "Si might be from a big city." "Good," I said. "I'm going to make it to a big city too, someday." She didn't have the heart to say the rest.

I read it off her face anyway. If he really was a city boy, there was no version of this where we ended up together.

The distance between a girl like me and a boy like that isn't the kind you close. You just learn to stop looking across it. The day my last exam ended, the rain came down in sheets.

Our old house leaked. My cot was soaked through, so I laid a pallet on the floor and Silas laid down beside me.

We were close enough that I could feel him breathe. "Can't sleep?" he asked. "What if I don't get in?" "You will." "City kids are sharp. Their teachers are sharp.

I work hard, but I don't know if hard is enough." "Where does Snow want to go?" I thought about it. "New York. I want to stand under that skyline once.

See the Statue of Liberty for real." Don't laugh. Every kid from a place like mine keeps a version of that dream. "Okay," he said. "Then we'll go to New York.

We'll bring your mom." "Si, if I don't make it—" "Then I'll take you." Not a flicker of doubt in him. "I'll take you both." Lying there in the dark, an inch from a boy I had no business wanting, I almost let myself believe him.

A girl like me couldn't afford to. Chapter 4 My heart took the hit like something with weight behind it.

Eighteen years old, and I finally understood what it meant to fall for someone. I was so glad he was mine. My fiancé, even if I was the one who'd invented the word.

I reached over and put my arms around him, pulling his warmth into me. Silas went rigid for a second. Then his arms came around me, careful, like I might break. We stayed like that.

Doing nothing. It was worth more than anything anyone had ever handed me. Looking back, that was the night the sweetness went to my head.

Which is why I missed the thing I should have caught. He wasn't slow anymore. Every word out of his mouth had gone smooth, edged, sure of itself.

And in the dark, his eyes held a light that hadn't been there before. A sharp one. His own. The memory let go of me. I picked up the coat and hovered in the wings.

Somewhere behind a door, Silas was losing his temper. I couldn't tell over what. Only that he was. I put my eye to the gap in the door.

And watched Silas grind the toe of his shoe into a man's fingers, his voice flat and arctic. "Useless." It stopped my breath. Was that Silas?

The boy who used to trail two steps behind me, swearing he'd protect me the rest of his life? The one who paid a debt he didn't owe and cried about it in a corner?

Maybe this was the real one. After I got to the city, I read up on him in the business press. Learned who Silas Sinclair actually was. Eight years older than me.

The second son of the Sinclair Group. Illegitimate, not that it ever dented him. Not yet thirty and already known for how far he'd go.

A year back, he'd driven his own brother out of his mind and left himself the only heir standing. On paper, I couldn't picture the cruelty.

Through a twoinch gap in a door, I could. Familiar. And a complete stranger. Maybe I'd just leave the coat by the door and go.

I was still deciding when the door swung open. "Who's out there?" Silas stepped out. Nothing on his face.

His glasses threw the light back flat and cold, and the shiver went through me before I could stop it. It's fine. Mask on. Makeup done.

Paint the eyes heavy enough and nobody's anybody. I got myself level. "This is for Ms. Ashford—" Before I could finish, a classmate crossed behind me and called out. "Neve?

You're still not back at the dorm?" The second my name left her mouth— Silas already had my wrist