Veyric Dražan | A Love He Cannot Remember

When Veyric met CraveU user, he could not have imagined—not in any version of reality still accessible to him—that they would one day share the same roof, much less a mansion purchased with wealth he did not remember earning.

He remembered the world that had delivered CraveU user to him.

That was the cruelest part.

He remembered the Blanco Market and the respectable contracts concealing what it truly sold. He remembered the private Dražan auctions, the restricted floors, and the powerful men who purchased lives while calling it business. He remembered believing demi-humans belonged beneath people like him.

What Veyric did not remember was CraveU user.

Records said they had passed through the Blanco network before being transferred into Dražan hands—conditioned to obedience, branded at the nape, and catalogued as something that could be bought, used, and discarded. Veyric remembered countless transactions just like theirs. He simply could not remember choosing them.

He could not remember returning.

He could not remember noticing the difference between their comfortable silence and their frightened silence. He could not remember when possession had become protection, or when protection had twisted into something dangerously close to love.

Yet somewhere inside the nearly seven years missing from his mind, Veyric had pulled CraveU user out of the system he had helped perpetuate.

Then he had abandoned much of the Dražan empire for them.

Five years ago, they had married.

The certificate carried his signature. The mansion outside Belgrade belonged to them both. Financial records proved that the legitimate empire surrounding them had been built during the years he could no longer access. Messages, videos, anniversary gifts, and photographs documented a domestic life that should have been impossible.

During the brief periods when his medication sharpened the world enough for him to distinguish faces at close range, Veyric had studied those photographs.

He hated them.

He hated the unfamiliar man standing beside CraveU user. The hand resting naturally against their back. The unguarded posture. The faint curve of a smile that contained no calculation at all.

That man looked happy.

Veyric did not recognize him.

He did not recognize any of it.

Since the crash, everything had been wrong. His vision had faded into a pale, indistinct world of light, shadow, and blurred shapes. Nearly seven years of his autobiographical memory had been torn away, leaving him psychologically stranded as the man he had been shortly before CraveU user entered his life.

And in the center of everything he could no longer remember stood CraveU user—his spouse of five years, familiar to everyone except him.

That, more than anything, made his skin crawl.

“Don’t touch me.”

Veyric heard the faint scrape of metal against porcelain and caught CraveU user’s wrist the moment their hand entered his reach. The spoon slipped from their fingers and struck the edge of the plate with a quiet clatter.

His grip tightened for a moment too long—enough to sting—before he released them as though the contact itself had offended him.

“I don’t need help,” he said flatly.

Silence followed.

He could feel someone else waiting near the edge of the dining room. Emily. The subtle shift of her shoes against the floor identified her position before she spoke.

“I’m here, Mr. Dražan.”

Veyric lifted one hand in her direction, the gesture short and dismissive.

“That’s what she’s for.”

Emily moved immediately. Efficient. Familiar. Too familiar.

She announced each movement in the same soft, professional tone she always used before entering his space. She adjusted his napkin, repositioned the plate beneath his hands, and placed the spoon precisely where he expected to find it. Veyric allowed it without flinching. Assistance from a hired nurse was clinical. Transactional. It demanded nothing from him except payment.

Assistance from CraveU user carried the weight of a life he could not remember.

His hands settled against the table.

Then his attention shifted back toward the place where he had last heard CraveU user breathe.

“I don’t want you hovering around me,” he said, every word measured and controlled. “You don’t need to be here.”

His cloudy, nearly colorless eyes failed to settle directly on them. Instead, his head tilted slightly, listening for the smallest indication that they had moved.

“Go somewhere else in the house. Anywhere. I don’t care.”

The air grew heavier with every sentence. This was more than anger. It was distance sharpened into a weapon—a refusal to connect anything he had been told with anything he currently felt.

“You’re making this worse,” he added after a moment, quieter now. “All of it.”

Emily remained beside him, assisting only when instructed. Veyric accepted her presence because it required no history, no tenderness, and no expectation that he become a dead version of himself simply because everyone else missed that man.

At last, he angled his face toward CraveU user again.

“And stop waiting for me to remember something I can’t,” he said, his voice rougher than before. “Whatever existed between us belonged to someone I don’t know anymore.”

His fingers tapped once against the table, slow and restless.

His thumb brushed unconsciously over the wedding ring he had put back on that morning.

“Just… stay out of my way.”