Mistakenly Forgotten

10. She will be useful...

“So, you’re telling me, this girl all alone did this?”

Xavier stood with his hands crossed against his chest, while studying the unconscious petite girl in front of him. She seemed weak and fragile, in a distorted white wedding gown. He turned his gaze towards the rest of the room, where around twenty mobsters, sat holding their wounded and bandaged heads and arms and groaning in pain.

“Do we need a f*****g translator for him?” Vincent groaned, holding his hand against his ribs, which seemed certainly damaged.

“Yes Xavier! She did it!” Ariana groaned, holding an ice pack against her bruised nose.

“I’m telling you she’s a f*****g cyborg!” Eve complained.

“Shut Up!” Lucas groaned and shouted. He rubbed his fingers against his eyes. Brian rushed into the room, opening it wide open with a loud noise making everyone look up at him.

“What’s going on?” Vincent asked, approaching Brian, who walked up to Lucas and handed him a file.

“You sure, it has everything?” Lucas asked, opening the file.

“Everything, I could get my hands on within three hours.” Brian notified and turned to look at everyone else in the room and squinted, noticing their battered and bruised faces.

“Wow! She really is something.” He crocked his neck and checked out Xavier’s shoulder to see Arya lying unconscious on the bed.  

Lucas turned towards Xavier, “I will be going through her file, if she wakes up before I come back, just sedate her or something. Would that be too much? Just take her to your institute and get her checked?”

Lucas’s expressions were too soft than usual, he never addresses Xavier with much importance and concern and seemingly the task of handling this one girl who took down an entire force, seemed an important task at hand and Xavier’s only chance to prove himself worthy in Lucas’s eyes.

“Of course, don’t worry, I’ll take complete care of it.” He assured Lucas, who nodded with a smile and made his way towards his office, grabbing Eve, Ariana, Vincent and Brian along him.

As the four were following behind him, he stopped in the middle of the corridor and turned towards them.

His eyes went straight at Ariana and Vincent, “Your parents are here in Amalfi and I’m guessing they’re expecting you two.”

Ariana rolled her eyes and groaned, her worst day couldn’t have just gotten any worst, given to the fact she now had to face her parents, who had no idea about her sexuality. She turned towards Eve who simply shook her head, showing her clear disappointment in Ariana and walked ahead of everyone. Lucas noticed the tension and let it go by, knowing he had a much important matter at hand to attend to.

Ariana and Vincent left in a completely foul mood, to visit their parents, whereas Brian and Lucas entered his office, where they saw Eve, standing near the minibar and taking a shot of vodka down her system.

“This is new.” Brain pointed out.

“Happens almost after every quarter whenever uncle and aunt visit.” Lucas informed him and walked down towards the center table, aligned between the three two seater red plush couches. His office was now completely tidied and braided into a new one. No trace of his old breakdown visible anymore.

Lucas opened up the file in front of him and laid down all the paper, while Brian and Eve centered towards the opposite side of the table.

“Why did she hit like a f*****g blizzard?” Eve complained. Even though her voice was hoarse and it was evident she was on a point break to her emotional instability and insecurity of Ariana’s secrets to her parents but she still tried dodging the conversation.

“Because she is trained in jujitsu, taekwondo, karate….” Lucas began surfing through the file pages that had all the information on Arya, with her pictures in each fighting style lessons, holding down medals and wearing belts and extending her legs out in the white fighting uniform and kicking at her opponents, looking fierce, “…kung-Fu, mixed martial arts, Hapkido and what the f**k is Capoeira?”

Lucas looked up at Brian.

“It’s a Brazilian fighting thing. Googled it!” he answered.

“Why the f**k would someone like her, need all that training? And how long has she been trained?” Eve asked.

“Because she is amnesic.” Lucas c****d, looking up at her, finally understanding the mystery case of the girl in the wedding dress.

“Which means… she forgets things!” Brian added.

“I know what amnesic is!” Eve retorted, “But, I still don’t get it what was she doing in a wedding dress if she’s not the bride.”

“The bride, Valerie and her parents wanted to take a picture of all four sisters together before the real wedding in wedding dresses. Now, no one knows the reason to that but that probably was the reason why she was in a wedding dress, while the rest of the family was at a photo studio.” Brian explained him.

“And about David leaving her in the room…?” Eve raised another question. Nothing at the moment seemed to make sense to her.

“For all we know, she might had gotten knocked unconscious he was just helping her.” Brian answered.

“Then why did he escape from the back door?” Eve debated to which Lucas c****d his eyebrows, curious to know the pledge of the situation.

“It doesn’t matter!” he concluded, standing up straight and making his way towards the minibar and fixing himself a drink.

“If this girl wakes up with no memory of her whereabouts…” he walked towards his desk, carrying his bourbon and picked up the remote from the desk, turning on the curved Smart OLED screen. The screen turned on to show a hysteric Gordon family, undergoing a press conference, explaining about their daughter’s disappearance.

“…. Her family, panicked the same way!” Lucas pointed at the TV and turned towards Brian and Eve, who stood with utter silence and attention.

“She could prove to be very useful.” He smirked, finishing off his drink, while the family shown at the TV, sitting in front of a desk panel, filled with members of media raising questions after one another.

Jack Gordon sat in the middle, while Valerie sat on his right side, with a crying distorted Laura sitting on his other side.

Valerie’s phone beeped with a text, while bright camera lights where still focused on the three. Gordon sat reading the official statement from the family, that concluded a cash prize for anyone who helped bring their amnesic niece back home.

Valerie checked her phone only to find a text from her fiancé.

David: I am at the lobby!

She leaned into her father’s ear and whispered about her emergency departure and left the conference, passing the security and reaching the lobby where David stood in his well-mannered tux. She leaped into his arms, while he held her closely.

“Hey! It’s going to be fine.” He whispered slowly into her ear, putting up a masked confident face but deep down, his eyes held a glint of concern. Concern – that he was pretty sure that he had left Arya in her bedroom unconscious, so there weren’t any much bright chances of her disappearance, unless she still remembered everything he was doing with Lana and planned to expose them in a big fashion.

Valerie, slightly pulled back and cried again, “It was supposed to be our wedding and she was supposed to be here.”

“Don’t worry Valerie…” David pulled her into his arms and she rested her forehead against his shoulder, “She is safe, you know her muscle memory, wouldn’t let her get hurt.”

Valerie stayed quiet in David’s arms, listening to his assuring words, soothing her soul. After a moment, the two left in his car for his penthouse. Throughout the entire ride Valerie was quiet, staring out the window, deep in her own thoughts. She felt alight squeeze over her bare thigh by David.

“Don’t worry… everything will be fine.” He smiled assuringly while she simply nodded back.

“I just don’t get it…” she spoke into thin air, earning David’s entire attention. Deep down he was still scared that Valerie might come to know something about his infidelity.

“There’s no trace of her leaving the house, the last footage we have of hers is roaming around the corridors, probably looking for mom and dad.”

Her words, dropped a huge anxiety bomb over David’s brain, “You guys have surveillance inside the house?”

“Just the corridors.” Valerie added mindlessly, focused on connecting the dots. “The footage is so abrupt, it’s like… she was in the corridors, then there is no footage, the cameras just stayed still and blank and then she is gone.”

David nodded his head with a stiff expression, something already clicking his mind.

“And you know even with her phone, it’s switched off at the moment but her last location was our home.”

The mere mention of Arya’s phone, made David c**k his eyebrows and a memory hit his brain. He remembered Arya’s phone ringing when she came inside Lana’s room and saw the two having s*x. His body went stiff but he maintained his posture and kept driving, while listening to Valerie’s, as she revealed the investigation so far.

He parked inside the condo complex and asked Valerie to go upstairs, while he needed to make some calls.

As soon as Valerie left the car, he dialed in a number. The phone on the other end of the line rang. It was vibrating placed over a nightstand, while Lana sat in a sports bra and jeggings of the same color, her legs crossed, eyes closed, sitting over a mat, and calming her breaths and exercising yoga.

She groaned, hearing her phone vibrate, extending her hand, she answered the phone, without seeing the caller ID.

“Yes?”

“Do you have any idea where Arya’s phone is?”

Hearing David’s voice boom over the phone, crippled Lana’s heart with anxiety. She was keeping herself busy with yoga and other exercises, only to avoid the topic at hand ringing constantly inside her brain. ‘What if she and David are the reason behind Arya’s disappearance.’

If she were to be honest with herself, she didn’t trust David even a bit and that’s why she was afraid that he might be behind Arya’s disappearance but she was afraid to question him. So, she had been ignoring the entire scenario for the past 32 hours.

“What would I know anything about her phone?” She tried to sound casual but there was a glimpse of terror hidden underneath her tone. She wasn’t just scared of being caught; she was actually scared of David.

“Don’t run that stupid mouth of yours… just listen, I remember when Arya came into your room, she had a bag in her hands, in which her phone was ringing. I didn’t take her bag with her so did you know where her bag is?”

David’s tone was stern and unconcerning to Lana, at the moment all he cared was hiding his infidelity.

“No, I don’t remember taking care of her bag.” Lana stood up, starting to panic as she searched around the place.

“Find it before someone else does, because either if Arya woke up in amnesia and ran away, freaking out of the place and somehow the surveillance footage of me taking care of her got removed magically, her phone could still be found. So, find it!” With that he abruptly cut the call.

He wasn’t there to share any responsibility of Arya’s disappearance; he just wanted his name clean.

Lana gulped hard, fearing David’s potential to be dangerous and manipulative. She knew even if he was proven guilty of all his misdeeds that led Arya’s disappearance and Lana’s current mental and emotional state.

Lana panicked, knowing if she were to be found guilty in anything that slightly happened to Arya, Valerie was going to cut her into pieces. She began searching around the place, looking everywhere, behind the nightstands, drawers, inside the closet, praying that none of the housekeepers found Arya’s white clutch bag.

She bent down in front of her bed and peeked across the floor, only to find the shiny, squared, small diamond studded clutch lying over the floor. She gasped, grabbing it off the floor, only to have her room’s door fly open right behind her.

Her instincts worked as she threw the bag right back where it belonged and stood straight up. Bianca stood at her doorway, confused to see her sister bent on her knees, in front of her bed.

“What are you doing?” Bianca asked in a confused tone.

Her entire hair and face were in a mess, dark bags were visible underneath her eyes, while red veins surrounded the white of her eyes. She wore a smudged tank top, while her nose and cheeks were puffed with red, given to her constant cries.

“What do you want? And can’t you guys ever learn to knock?” Lana retorted back in her venomous tone.

Bianca, who would usually reply back with equal venom in her tone, simply shrugged her sister’s answer.

“Mom and dad are here and asking for you.” With that, Bianca turned over her heels and left, leaving Lana behind who stood with a heart full of guilt.

But that didn’t stop her from picking up her phone and leaving David a text.

Lana: Got the bag!

David smiled with satisfaction, standing in the elevator reaching his penthouse and reading Lana’s text, which made him feel even more powerful.

David: Good girl! Might give you something extra tonight.

His phone immediately hit back with a reply.

Lana: No need, we should avoid seeing each other. Now more than ever.

Her words scrunched David’s mind, he was never the one to listen to a ‘no’ from someone, especially a woman. The elevator doors opened up directly into his large, classic rim covered penthouse, where Valerie stood talking over the phone, looking right outside the large wall windows. Keeping his phone back inside his pocket he reached for her. She smiled, cutting the call.

“It was Dad. They appointed Adam on Arya’s case.” She informed him, with a satisfactory smile.

“Adam? Captain Adam?” David asked in a confused tone. He was well aware of how much of a moral and dignified person Adam was and given to his feelings towards Arya, he would go to any extent to find her.

“Yes! He would go to any boundary to find her. I know that.” Valerie smiled in peace, leaping her arms around David’s neck and resting her head over his broad chest.

He slowly smiled at Valerie, but deep inside he wished that Adam’s investigation, didn’t reach his network.

His phone vibrated inside his pocket and Valerie pulled away, “You might want to answer it, I’ll go and get fresh.”

She moved upstairs, through the metallic case spiral stairways while David took out his phone.

An unknown international, extension number flashed right on his screen with a twenty seconds video message notification. He opened up the multimedia message and was rendered shock to see the surveillance footage of inside Gordon mansion from when he was carrying an unconscious Arya into his room.

Just as he was done watching the video another message popped into the chat window.

“Imagine, if commissioner Gordon finds this!”

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