Phoenix

Chapter Seventeen - Confusion

A haze of confusion shrouded her around even her vision and she opened her eyelids with the same effort during the day she remembered running on the woods and bleeding. She felt her arm and it was fortunately not bleeding but a medical patch replaced the gash that was there. Immediately, she needed to see the stranger's face though it was not as strange as it was right now; she knew him very well though she wanted him personally fill in the details. Favorably, she was not alone in that warm bedroom where she had been lied down by somebody.

Phoebe slid her head to the left gazing at the door and just beside it, the man with a hair the color of grey ash moved towards her instantaneously and looked her in the eyes like a disturbed owl in the middle of his watch. Phoebe reacted immediately with a question.

"How do you know me?" She asked him pretending she still knew everything. It wouldn't be mere coincidence that the truth DK told her has exactly coincided with this different man's truth.

"You are my wife. Where have you been?" Garreth couldn't still believe his eyes until now especially when she spoke, it was still Stella's voice.

"I am no wife of yours."

Garreth was surprised. "Then who you are who looks exactly like my wife? Tell me you're a Dark Knight and I shall kill you myself."

"I am no Dark Knight." Phoebe told him embracing the truth that the Dark Knights had fooled her to believe in a different reality. "I remember you and the phoenix statue."

Garreth smiled widely like an amused child. "That is where I took you in our first date. We went to the Phoenix Gardens in Miami. You are surpr—"

"Who are you? And why have you—you saved me. How do you—"

"I killed my own brothers for you. . . I am your husband, Garreth Grounds and we had been married for almost five years. We all thought you were dead together with your parents but I was right and I didn't give up on searching for you and even if you were really dead, I needed to see you for the last time. Please tell me you are her . . . tell me you are Stella." His eyes were drenched in billowing tears.

"How can I trust you?" Phoebe thought she couldn't despair about everything. She needed to do things to save her remaining life. Even the stranger was an enemy just like what the Empress had made them believe, she needed to judge her for lying about the truth and besides, the man, Garreth, had saved her and her now recollected memories coincide with his.

"Kill me if you don't trust me." She could tell his sincerity. She had an urge to find her weapon and threaten him but it weakly rested on a cupboard, which I stared at, and thought it was foolish of him to leave it there.

Garreth noticed her. "I took it for my defense against you killing me even before I could speak. I'm sorr—"

"It's alright." She thought she could trust this time and to find the truth, she would need him. "I had amnesia but I could remember walking into the woods wounded and hurt."

Garreth took a second to think. "That could be somewhere near the Bahamas island. Your trackers told me there were traces of you in that island and that it was possible you took shelter in it. I didn't really believe you were dead all this time." Then, he took my hand clutching it ever tightly. "But how? How did you become one of them, Stella?" He stared down her dark suit.

Phoebe suddenly felt disgusted with her suit caused by a different emotion she was feeling right now. She felt different and she could recall a few events with him now! "They found me and made me one of them." She was now improving by combining the separate truths. She could understand now.