Hope could hear words pounding through her head and could see images flashing even though her eyes weren't open. Yet she found that she couldn't focus on one. It hurt too much. And it made no sense.
And then her vision cleared and she was slammed with one image.
"Tyler Vaughn!" she screamed, sitting up and looking around wildly. The words continued to echo through her head as she tried to get her frantic breathing under control.
Tyler Vaughn. Tyler Vaughn. Tyler Vaughn.
That meant something important. There was a connection there. She just couldn't reach it.
It took her a moment to get herself under control to the point where she was no longer shaking and her mind had calmed down. She took a look at her surroundings. She was in a bed in room.
"Okay. Get more specific," she said, sitting up. Her head immediately started pounding and she winced. "Sitting up. Not an option right now. All right."
She moved her head slightly. There was a window to her right with a door on the wall opposite it. Two possible escape routes should she need them. She had a funny feeling, though, that she hadn't been kidnapped or coerced.
'God. Can this room get any more white?" she said. The walls were white. The bed was white. Hell, she was even in a white dressing gown.
The door opened and a small woman let herself into Hope's room. "I see you've woken up."
"I'm confused," Hope said.
"You will be. These procedures usually take a lot out of the patient."
"Procedure?"
"And apparently they cause memory loss. You call me up, Miss Lazarey, and told me about your situation. I offered to reverse the problem, and so you came to Berlin. You don't remember any of this?"
"No." Hope tried sitting up again and was happy to feel the dizziness stay away. She had always been a fast healer.
"Do you remember having that implant be placed in your head by your employer?"
"Yes." A light went off in her head. "I got you to remove it."
"Yes. It wasn't too complicated. You didn't tell me your reasons."
Hope's mind immediately jumped to Tyler. That must have been why she had his name on her lips when she woke up. She had done this for him.
Not that that really made any sense.
"I don't remember anything new, Doc. It seems to me like whatever you didn't really stick."
"First off, you can call me Dr. Vander. Or Angela is you wish. Second off, the effects aren't going to be automatic. That would be too traumatic to your system. You should be returned to normal within the next hour or so. It'll feel like a nagging suspicion that you've forgotten something important at first and then things will start coming back to you."
Hope narrowed her eyes at her. "How much have I told you about my situation?"
"Little to none. By my request, actually. The less I know, the easier it is for me to avoid kidnapping and imminent death."
"Biting sarcasm. I can see why I picked you to do this."
Angela smiled and walked over to stand by the bed. "So you look like you're doing fine. Has anything new come back to you?"
"I woke up saying my boyfriend's name. That's new. I usually don't acknowledge his existence."
"Don't we all wish we could just forget our boyfriends sometimes?" Angela said with a laugh, checking a few of the machines next to the bed.
Hope was about to correct her and explain that she actually wanted to be able to tell everyone about Tyler but there was that whole spy mess thing. But she thought better of it and merely sat still while the doctor went through her obvious post-operation routine.
"So. Do I have a scar somewhere on my body that I should know about? Because I'm going to have to come up with a good lie if I do."
Angela laughed. "There's a little bit of burning from the lasers I used to disintegrate whatever got put into your head."
She held up her hand to stop the doctor before she continued. "Lasers? Beamed into my head? Two questions. Why would I let you do something as crazy as that? And when did my life become the sci-fi movie of the week?"
"You said the exact same thing when I intro-ed how this procedure was going to go. But the way you put it, you really didn't have the time to go find a more believable method to get it done."
Hope nodded. She liked this Angela character, but there was still a nagging feeling inside of her that kept telling her not to relax. That there might be something a little too odd and convenient about this whole scenario.
"Anyway, as I was saying, the burns should go away within the next few days. You can pass them off as sunburn if you need to." The doctor turned to look at her. "You seem like you're just fine. As soon as you feel like you can stand, you can get dressed." She pointed to the small closet right behind her. "You'll find your clothes safely tucked away in there."
Hope nodded. As soon as the doctor had left the room, she flung her legs over the side of the bed and tried to stand up. Immediately, the dizziness came back. She ignored it this time. She wanted out of whatever this place was fast.
Her memory was starting to come back. She had come here to get the blocks off, thinking that if she had her whole mind about her then she should decide whether this whole Tyler relationship was the right thing to do. If it was good enough for her to risk everything for.
So, she knew her motivation and she kind of knew what had exactly happened to her under the knife. Now she just had to wait to see if it had worked.
True to the doc's word, she found the close she had worn to her little rendezvous in Paris folded up neatly in the closet. She couldn't throw that ugly white gown off any quicker.
Quickly she ran through the contents of her jeans pockets. Passport. Airport locker key. Small firearm. Yeah. It was all there. She was a minimalist when she was somewhere she wasn't supposed to be.
She grasped the key tightly in her hand and tucked the gun into the waist of her pants. No need to not be prepared for anything.
The hallways were empty. Hope thanked whoever had been in charge of having her wake up during what appeared to be a mini-siesta. She made her way to the elevator and patiently waited for the car to reach her floor. There was still no one around.
Maybe it's not one of those places where they don't want you to leave so they end up shooting at you frantically and with little to no aim. She shrugged her shoulders and stepped into the elevator as the doors slid open.
"I'm on the freaking sixty-third floor!" she whined as she saw all the buttons on the elevator. "Great. This is going to take forever."
Maybe she would end up getting shot at.
The elevator jolted as it passed each floor, and she could begin to feel her head ache. There was that nagging feeling the doctor had been talking about. She just had no idea why she was associating it with Tyler Vaughn. It seemed like she couldn't get him out of her head. Which wasn't exactly a new development, but it had never really been connected to the missing pieces of her life that damn implant had been blocking out.
Her mind suddenly flashed back to her childhood. She could see herself playing in her yard in San Antonio with a young boy. She was three. Then there was the time she went to the Pittsburgh Zoo and ended up dumping a whole cup of Slushie onto his head. She was four. There was the fort she had built with him in their backyard in Honolulu. She was five. That horrible accident with the skateboard, the neighborhood stray cat, and two peaches. She was about to turn six.
And then nothing. Or to be accurate, everything. Everything after that point she remembered clearly. Conning her parents into moving back to L.A. Her Aunt Nadia kidnapping her mother. Learning how to fight from Will. Joining a spy organization. Meeting Tyler.
Jesus. It always came back to him.
Something in the back of her head kept reminding her that it had all started with him, too. And she had no idea what that was supposed to mean.
Again, Tyler's name kept ringing through her head. Why was everything so caught up around him?
The elevator hit the bottom floor and jolted to a stop. And that was when it felt like there was a damn bursting in her head. Details came flooding back.
And suddenly it made sense.
Tyler Vaughn. The man she loved. The child she grew up with. The man who was going to either kill her or be killed.
She stared out into the busy lobby in front of her as the elevator doors slid open.
"Oh shit."