My Family Wiped My Mind, So I Stole Their Empire

After they declared me recovered, I was finally released from the psychiatric facility. My family stood outside the clinic gates, nervous, holding their breath. "Are you... still going to look for Lucas?" Julian, my older brother, asked gently. I tilted my head, eyes wide with innocent confusion. "Who is Lucas?" Instantly, the tension evaporated. My family threw me a lavish welcome home party, showered me with affection, and quickly arranged dates with high-society bachelors. Everything seemed so warm, so perfect. Everyone swore that Lucas Sterling never existed. They told me I had suffered a severe psychotic break and fallen in love with a ghost of my own imagination. Playing along was the only way I could leave that hellhole. The only way I could buy my freedom. But I knew the truth. Lucas was real. I was going to find him, and then I was going to run. "How is Summer’s mental state right now?" "She’s doing well. Very stable. But doctor, we’re terrified she’s just faking it. Is there any chance she still remembers that imaginary man?" On the speakerphone, the doctor’s tone was cold and absolute: "Impossible. I subjected her to the most aggressive neurological treatments. Every single memory except for her immediate family was wiped clean. A fictitious persona cannot survive that level of trauma." "Just remember: do not let her come into contact with any triggers. It could ignite residual memories." "Understood. Thank you, Doctor. The wire transfer to your offshore account will go through tonight." Click. Julian ended the call. Through the crack of my bedroom door, I heard him let out a long, relieved sigh. "Finally. It’s done." His heavy footsteps approached. I quickly turned and slipped silently through the dark back to my bed, my heart hammering against my ribs. It was true. My family had paid off the doctors to strip away my entire past. My mind was an empty canvas, filled only with vague memories of my parents, my brother, and an incident two years ago when I supposedly went crazy on the street, stabbed a stranger, and was committed. Everyone was lying to me. Everyone except my past self. I couldn’t remember the torture in that hospital, but behind the heavy desk in my old room, I had carved three lines into the drywall with my own bloodied fingernails: "Conspiracy! Summer, your family bought the doctors. They’re here to break you..." "I’m losing my mind. My memories are fading. But remember this: Lucas Sterling is real. Find him in New York. He is your only ticket to freedom..." "The iPhone 7. The red high heels. They are gifts from Lucas. They are the proof that he exists..." Fewer than fifty words, smeared with dried, dark blood. Just reading those jagged, frantic scratches made the terror and desperation of past-me sink deep into my bones. "Knock, knock, knock." A sudden rap on the door snapped me out of it. I froze, realizing I hadn’t killed the lights. I walked over and pulled the door open. "Summer? Why are you still awake, sweetie?" It was Julian. He looked at me with tender, protective eyes. It made my stomach turn. A cold chill ran down my spine. I didn’t know why they were drugging me. I didn’t know what they wanted from me. Julian was the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar corporation. My parents were retired elites with immense social pull. Meanwhile, I didn't even know who I was. I couldn't fight them head-on. My only choice was to smile, play dumb, lower their guard, and wait for the chance to run to New York. I forced a sweet smile. "Mom’s birthday is tomorrow. I was just agonizing over what gift to give her." "Don't worry about that." Julian reached out, affectionately ruffling my hair. "You know what Mom and Dad really want. They want to see you settled down. The guy we set you up with tomorrow is brilliant, ambitious, and handsome. Promise me you’ll give him a real chance, okay?" The match was Nicholas Thorne—heir to the massive Thorne Group. Polished, wealthy, charming, and impossibly sweet. Over the following weeks, I acted like I was completely falling for him. In front of my parents, I constantly brought up Nicholas, gushing about how thoughtful he was. My parents were ecstatic. They eagerly organized a formal dinner so both families could discuss our future. Nobody mentioned Lucas Sterling anymore. It was as if he had vanished into thin air. Julian even stopped having guards trail my every step. At the very least, whenever I went on dates with Nicholas, the shadows behind me faded. By Thanksgiving, our families officially gathered. The atmosphere was dripping with warmth and luxury. Amid clinking champagne flutes and a passionate kiss between Nicholas and me, the wedding date was set for three months later. I smiled until my cheeks hurt and drank until I pretended to pass out. Julian carried me upstairs and tucked me into bed. Believing I was dead to the world, they gathered in the hallway, their voices hushed with triumph: "Whew. It worked. He completely wrapped Summer around his finger." "Just three more months, and this nightmare is finally over." I lay beneath the duvet, staring blankly into the dark. So that was it. They erased my mind just to turn me into a compliant pawn for a corporate marriage alliance? I rolled out of bed, reached deep beneath my dresser, and pulled out an old storage box. Inside lay a battered iPhone 7 and a pair of designer red high heels. My eyes hardened. "Lucas," I whispered into the quiet night. "Wait for me. I'm coming."I couldn’t tell a single soul about my plan—not even Nicholas. Still, I loved going on dates with Nicholas. Being with him was the only time Julian called off his surveillance. Plus, Nicholas was often pulled away on urgent corporate calls, leaving me alone for hours. That was my window. I didn't know what waited for me once I walked down that aisle, but I knew I had to run before the wedding. I secretly pawned the expensive jewelry Nicholas gave me, converting everything into cold, untraceable cash. Once I had enough, I’d buy an unregistered, beat-up clunker and disappear without a trace. A month later, my chance came. Nicholas was accompanying me for a bridal dress fitting when his phone buzzed. He answered, and his face instantly darkened. "Another crisis? The second I walk away, everything falls apart! The Vance account isn't worth this mess! Hold them off, I'm heading over right now..." He rushed out the door and sped off in his sports car. Whenever work pulled him away like this, he was gone for at least two hours. I didn’t waste a second. I tore off the wedding gown, changed into plain clothes, slipped out through the back door, and hailed a cab to a sketchy car lot I had scouted weeks ago. I paid cash for a rusty, unregistered sedan. Time was running out. I couldn't risk leaving any digital footprints. The moment the keys touched my hand, I smashed my phone onto the pavement, kicked the pieces into a drain, and hit the highway toward New York. I didn’t know how to track down Lucas. Once I arrived in the city, I used my looks to land a cash-in-hand job at an exclusive underground lounge. It was bizarre. I slipped into the shady nightlife effortlessly, as if I had done it before. I poured drinks, charmed wealthy patrons, subtly listened for any mention of Lucas Sterling by night, and crashed in a dingy dorm room by day. I had abandoned the car on an obscure street corner. I was confident my family would never find me. Two weeks in, a strange customer sat down at my table. He claimed to be a personal chauffeur for the Thorne family, in town for a weekend wedding. I froze. I had seen Nicholas’s regular drivers. I had never seen this man before. I casually leaned in. "I heard Mr. Thorne’s fiancée went missing. Are they tearing the city apart looking for her?" The driver blinked, laughing loudly. "What kind of tabloid garbage are you reading? Mr. Thorne is engaged to the heiress of the Sterling family! They were literally photographed partying at a rooftop club last night. Missing? She’s living her best life." He pulled out his phone and showed me an Ins photo of Nicholas Thorne’s lavish engagement gala. The ballroom was packed. My parents and Julian were clearly visible in the front row, smiling. But the man standing on the stage as Nicholas Thorne... wasn’t the man I had been dating at all! My scalp prickled with raw terror. My breath hitched. If the "Nicholas" in my life was a complete fake, then my theory that my family wanted me for a high-society marriage fell to dust. Then what was the truth? What did they actually want from me? Before my racing thoughts could find an answer, the VIP lounge door was kicked off its latch with a deafening bang. Julian marched in, his face murderous. He lunged forward, grabbed me by the collar, and hauled me to my feet. "I knew you were hiding in a gutter like this! Summer Vance, you are a daughter of the Vance empire! Do you just love degrading yourself in places like this?!" My mind short-circuited. I couldn't even speak before Julian dragged me brutally out the back exit and threw me into a waiting black SUV. My parents sat in the leather seats. The gentle, doting warmth they used to show me was completely gone. In its place was an ocean of icy, hollow disappointment. "Summer," my mother wept, her voice trembling. "What on earth do we have to do to make you understand? Lucas Sterling does not exist! He is a fantasy!" I backed against the car door, shaking my head violently, incapable of uttering a sound. "They are liars," I screamed at myself in the silence of my mind. "Do not believe a single word out of their mouths." Julian’s patience snapped. He grabbed a handful of my hair, forcing my chin up. "Summer, in your entire life, you've only ever had one boyfriend." "You want to see him, right?" "Fine. I’ll take you to him right now!"The SUV tore through the city, finally braking in front of a crumbling, filthy apartment block on the fringes of the city. Julian shoved me up the graffiti-stained stairs and banged on a rusted metal door. A disheveled, hollow-eyed man with an obvious limp pulled it open. He reeked of cheap bourbon. The moment his bloodshot eyes landed on Julian, he recoiled in pure terror, falling backward onto the floor. "I'm sorry! Summer, I'm so sorry!" "It was all my fault! I shouldn't have done that to you!" "Your family already broke my leg! Please, just let me go, don't torture me anymore!" I backed away in horror, shaking my head violently. "I don't know him! He isn't Lucas! He can't be Lucas!" Julian let out a bitter, mocking laugh. "Then tell me, Summer. Who is Lucas? What does he look like?" I choked. Nothing came out. I couldn't describe his face. Yet in my gut, I knew that this pathetic, trembling addict was NOT the man I was yearning for while staring at the cold walls of that mental ward! "Enough, Summer! Wake up!" Julian grabbed my shoulders, shaking me hard. "There is no Lucas Sterling! The words you carved on that hospital wall were the delusions of an unhinged mind! This scumbag right here—Kyle Evans—he was your only boyfriend! He broke you! He ruined you so thoroughly that your mind shattered, and you invented a knight in shining armor named Lucas to cope!" "Do you know why we found you at that club so easily?" "Because when you were with him, he forced you to work in an underground lounge for six months just to pay off his debts!" Julian's voice faded into a deafening ring. A sudden, blinding spike of agony ripped through my skull. It felt as though someone was violently hammering a missing puzzle piece into my brain. Then, the memories rushed in like black water. I remembered. God, I remembered. The drunk on the floor was Kyle Evans. A con artist. He had charmed me in college, used me, isolated me, convinced me to elope to New York, blew all my money, and forced me into a nightclub to support his addictions. The club owner was his cousin. I had been trapped in that hell for half a year before Julian tracked me down, rescued me, and crippled Kyle as payback. No wonder Julian found me so fast. He knew I was in New York. He knew my trauma history. He just checked every underground club in the district. If this memory was real... Then was Lucas a delusion after all? My world spun. I vividly remembered the absolute despair of being abused by Kyle. That level of torture was more than enough to drive anyone insane. "Except..." My family were still liars! They had paid off doctors to fry my brain. And "Nicholas" was an actor! My entire new life was an orchestrated theater production! "Summer? Did you remember something?" Noticing my trembling hands, Julian took my palms into his, his voice softening into desperate affection. "Now do you see? I didn't lie to you. We're your family. Why won't you just trust us?" "Come home with us. Explain things to Nicholas. He truly cares for you. With our backing, the wedding will still happen—" My fear cracked, snapping into boiling rage. "Stop it!" I screamed, yanking my hands back. "Maybe Lucas is fake, but Nicholas Thorne is a complete lie!" "The man you brought to me isn't Nicholas Thorne! You are all frauds! Every single one of you!" Tears spilled down my cheeks as I glared at my brother. "Julian, please, I'm begging you. Just tell me the truth! What do you actually want from me?!"Back in the SUV, my parents and Julian laid out a stack of documents, police reports, and years of SnapChat chat logs. The mountain of evidence connected the dots of the lost years after I met Kyle. After college, against my parents’ furious objections, I had run away with Kyle to New York and cut all contact. They had spent months frantically searching for me. By the time they rescued me from that club, I was completely broken. Catatonic. Hallucinating. I had wiped Kyle from my mind and replaced him with a flawless fantasy named Lucas Sterling. I spent days screaming on street corners, attacking random pedestrians who looked like him, until I stabbed a bystander and had to be locked up. "Summer," my father choked out, his eyes glistening with tears. "I admit it. We paid the psychiatrist to use aggressive electroshock therapy to wipe your memory." "We were out of options! Medication couldn't touch your psychosis! The only way to save your life was to strip the trauma away completely!" "When you were finally released, we wanted to find someone who matched the perfection of your 'Lucas' so you wouldn't relapse. But where do you find a saint like that? Nicholas Thorne was the closest match." "We begged Nicholas to date you, but he was already engaged. In our desperation, we hired an ambitious young entrepreneur to pose as Nicholas..." They broke down, spilling the entire story. The man playing Nicholas was actually named Daniel Reed. He wasn't a billionaire heir, but he was a self-made tech founder worth tens of millions. Daniel knew the truth. He agreed to play the part in exchange for multi-million-dollar contracts and resources from the Vance Corporation. Julian swore that as long as the Vance family held power, Daniel would treat me like a princess for the rest of his life. He would become the living embodiment of my Lucas. "Summer, for the past two years, none of us have slept through the night," Julian whispered, his face pale. "Do we have to tear our hearts out and show them to you before you believe that everything we do is to keep you safe?" Their tears seemed impossibly real. The agony of Kyle’s abuse in my head was also undeniably real. And now, every suspicious thread had a neat, logical explanation. How could I not believe them? I collapsed into my mother’s arms, sobbing uncontrollably. "I'm sorry... I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to hurt you. But I woke up with no memories, and those words on the wall... I was so terrified. I couldn't stop spiraling." "Please, give me a little more time. I'll get better... I promise." After that day, my family treated me with even more delicate tenderness. And their surveillance grew ten times tighter. Whenever I went out with Daniel, Vance bodyguards stood in plain sight, their eyes never leaving me. Occasionally, when I showed signs of panic, Daniel would hold my hand and whisper, "Summer, your family is just terrified you'll hurt yourself again." "All the misunderstandings are cleared up now. Promise me you won't overthink things anymore, okay?" "We let you run background checks for weeks. If Lucas Sterling was real, wouldn't there be a single shred of proof?" I nodded quietly, squeezing his hand. "You're right. If he was real, he would have left a trace." "Thank you for bringing me back to New York today to confront Kyle. Beating the hell out of him finally gave me closure." Behind us, Kyle lay groaning on the floor of his apartment, bruised from my "closure." What Daniel didn't hear was the whisper I breathed into Kyle’s ear while I was pinning him down: "If you want to live, retrieve that old iPhone 7 I sent to the back-alley repair shop." No one knew that I had already found the physical anchor to Lucas Sterling! The iPhone 7. And the red heels. Before I escaped the mental ward, I had scratched off the third line on that wall. My family had no idea those two items were mentioned. A few days later, I pretended to wake up from a violent nightmare. My parents rushed into my room, pale with worry. "I had a nightmare about Kyle," I wept, gripping the sheets. "Can Daniel take me back to New York one more time? I need to look him in the eye and tell him he doesn't own me anymore." I didn’t know how my family had erased all public records of Lucas. All I knew was that the old iPhone 7 held the truth of who I was before they broke me.