The Forgotten Heir

The Stranger In Aisle Nine

Elias walked into the the local market which was lit with fluorescent lights, a whole contrast to the usually oppressive gloom back at the Shaw mansion.

Elias walked slowly down the snack aisle, the cheap, worn plastic bag he carried feeling heavy.

Victoria had sent him out with exactly thirty dollars and a verbal list of half a dozen premium, imported items.

"Don't spend a penny over, you leech," she’d hissed that morning. "And if you buy the cheap brand of salmon, Seraphina will be disappointed. And when she’s disappointed, I'm disappointed. Do I make myself clear?"

It was a setup. Thirty dollars wouldn't even cover the imported butter, let alone the wild-caught salmon and the French brie.

He was being deliberately sent to fail so Victoria would have yet another reason to scold his wife for her poor choice of spouse.

Elias was painfully aware of his presence. He was dressed in a faded, patched shirt and old trousers—the designated "chore clothes."

His quiet, handsome features and reserved demeanor drew glances, particularly from the older women, who looked at him with a mix of pity and fascination.

"Poor thing," he heard one whisper. "He looks like he should be a CEO, not running errands for that hag Victoria Shaw."

Elias just kept his head down, trying to reconstruct the list from memory. Imported Dijon, artisanal bread...

His lack of a shopping list, his cheap clothes, and his obvious confusion in the upscale market made him an immediate target for pity and patronizing smiles.

He felt his anxiety spike.

He needed to be invisible.

He needed to get out.

Trying to duck away from a group of women who were starting to giggle and point, Elias turned the corner too sharply into Aisle Nine. Aisle nine was the high-end specialty foods section.

BAM!

He collided heavily with a man, scattering a pyramid display of expensive Italian olive oil bottles.

"I—I am so sorry!" Elias stammered, immediately dropping to his knees to assess the damage, ignoring the sharp pain in his recently cut hand. "I wasn't looking."

The man was still, calm, and unnervingly watchful. He was mid-thirties, impeccably dressed in a dark, expensive suit, and his cold eyes locked onto Elias.

It was Dr. Alistair Rhys.

Rhys didn't move to help with the olive oil. He simply stood there, watching Elias scramble around.

Elias reached out, his hand brushing the man's polished leather shoe.

The physical contact had been a mistake, but instantly, a searing, white-hot migraine exploded behind Elias’s eyes, worse than the pain he’d felt the night before.

His vision blurred, and the sound of the store became a deafening roar.

In the flash of blinding pain, the man standing over him suddenly wasn't a stranger. He was in a different place—a sterile, concrete room, the air thick with tension. The man was speaking with a strange, icy reverence.

“Don’t worry, Sir. The extraction point is secure. They won't find you.”

The voice was Rhys's. The title—Sir—was directed at him.

The memory was gone as fast as it arrived, leaving Elias gasping, sweat beading on his forehead, his knuckles white against the cold floor.

"Are you alright?" Rhys asked in a smooth voice, as though he'd asked this line time and time again. He didn't sound concerned; he sounded like he was testing a hypothesis.

Elias scrambled back, adrenaline flooding his system. The panic was so raw, it frightened him. Whoever this man was….. he knew him. This man was part of the chaos that had been erased from his memory.b

"Yes. Fine. I—I apologize again. I’ll pay for the oil," Elias choked out, pushing himself clumsily to his feet. He couldn't stay here another second. The whole incident was too terrifying.

He turned and bolted, abandoning the mess and the rest of the errand, escaping out of the market doors and into the relative anonymity of the town street.

He failed to see the tiny smirk that touched Dr. Rhys’s lips.

Elias walked for ten minutes, his breathing finally slowing down, the searing migraine reducing to a dull throb. He found refuge on a low park bench, gripping the cheap plastic bag until his knuckles hurt.

Who was that man? Why did he call me Sir? The memories were still fragments, but they were growing sharper and more insistent.

He checked the contents of his plastic bag: a packet of cheap tea bags and a small carton of milk—the only items Victoria had explicitly demanded.

Then he remembered the remaining items: the salmon, the brie, the artisanal bread. Items that would cost far more than the remaining twenty dollars Victoria had given him.

If he returned now, Sera would face a barrage of criticism for his "incompetence" when they served dinner. Her mother would make sure the whole table knew how the useless son-in-law failed to buy the imported fish.

The thought of Sera enduring that wave of humiliation, after the watch incident and the party, stiffened Elias's spine. The Shaw family was cheap, hateful, and determined to crush him, but he wouldn't let their malice reach his wife.

He pulled out his own wallet—a battered thing he kept hidden from Victoria.

Inside were the meagre earnings he'd managed to save from odd jobs he’d taken outside the house—about eighty dollars. It was his escape fund, his last resort.

Elias walked back into the store, avoiding Aisle Nine. He went straight to the seafood counter and bought the wild-caught salmon, then the imported cheese, using nearly sixty dollars of his own savings.

He walked out with the full, correct, expensive list. He would endure the hardship. He would never allow Seraphina to pay for his humiliation.

Meanwhile, Dr. Rhys was now sitting in an unmarked, black sedan, parked two streets from the Shaw mansion. He watched Elias walk past, the bag of expensive groceries clutched tightly in his hand.

Rhys was connected to a comms line. He could see Elias’s biosignals on a small, internal display.

"He's back on the property," Rhys reported in a crisp,  emotionless voice.

A moment of silence passed before a dry voice—Dr. Hargrove’s—responded. "Did the target exhibit the expected memory trigger?"

"Affirmative," Rhys confirmed. "I saw the initial physiological spike. He recognized me, or at least the role I once played. And look at the purchases," Rhys added, glancing at a quick data ping from the market surveillance he'd accessed. "He spent his own meagre savings to cover the deficit. Still the same absurd sense of obligation. Still prioritizing others over his own welfare."

Rhys leaned back against the leather seat, his eyes fixed on the Shaw gate.

"He is alive. And he is beginning to react. The amnesia is wearing thin. It's only a matter of time before Subject V fully comes back."