Not long after, a chance discovery shattered the fragile peace they had built. Sorting through a pile of trash, Anna found an old newspaper with the stranger’s picture on the front page. In the photo, he stood in a sharp suit in front of a downtown skyscraper, looking straight at the camera with cool confidence.
Beside him stood the same dark-haired woman from his dreams. The headline announced the mysterious disappearance of Timothy Gromov, CEO of a powerful investment holding company. The article also mentioned his business partners, Paul and Kira, who were supposedly leading the search.
In an instant, the pieces fit together. The watch. The tattoo. The commanding voice. Anna finally understood why he had been able to take over a clinic with nothing but a few words.
That evening she showed the paper to Olga. The older woman wasn’t surprised. She said the tattoo didn’t belong to street punks. It marked someone near the top of a much larger operation.
The real question now was what kind of man he would become once his memory fully returned. Anna sat for a long time thinking about Polly’s portrait and the way he had held her in the hospital. In the end, she decided he deserved the truth.
The next morning she sat across from him and placed the wrinkled newspaper on the table. The moment he saw his own face in front of that tower, he went still.
His eyes moved over the article, and something in him broke open. The wall in his mind came down all at once.
He remembered the betrayal. His deputy had slipped poison into his drink. He remembered the conference table, the false smiles, the faces of the people who had stolen his company and his assets.
Worst of all, he remembered that his teenage daughter Vera had been left in the hands of those same people. As the memory of the trunk of a car and the blows returned, he sat so long and so still that Anna began to worry.
When he finally looked up, the man in front of her was different. The softness was gone. His voice was calm, controlled, and cold. He said he remembered everything and knew exactly who had done it.
For the first time, Anna felt real fear. The gentle man who had fixed pipes and told bedtime stories seemed to vanish, replaced by the powerful and dangerous figure Olga had warned her about.
The man who had cared for Polly was still there somewhere, but now she could also see the wolf…
