The rain had stopped an hour ago, but the ground hadn't gotten the message. Elena's heels sank into the wet grass with every step, and she hated that she noticed something so small at a funeral. She hated that her mind kept reaching for details that didn't matter, the shine on the casket, the black umbrella someone had left open beside a headstone three rows over, instead of the one detail that did. Daniel was dead. Seven days after he kissed her. She stood near the back, arms crossed over her coat, close enough to hear the priest and far enough that no one would ask her to come stand with the family. She didn't deserve to stand with the family. She was the reason there was a family to stand at all, hollowed out and quiet in the front row, the kind of grief that made even strangers lower their voices. "You didn't have to come," Mara whispered beside her. "Nobody would've blamed you." "I would have." Mara didn't argue. She just laced her fingers through Elena's and held on, the way she'd been holding on for three years now, through David, through Marcus, through the string of names Elena had stopped saying out loud because saying them made it real in a way that thinking them didn't. Four names. Four funerals. Four men who had been alive and laughing and reaching for her, and then, exactly seven days later, weren't. Elena had stopped believing in coincidence somewhere around the second one. By the fourth, she had stopped believing she was allowed to want anyone at all. That was when she felt it. The look. Not from the family. Not from the priest. From somewhere behind her, off to the left, where the cemetery's old oaks threw shadows long enough to swallow a person whole. She turned. He was already looking at her. He stood alone, apart from the mourners, wearing black that fit him too well to be anything off a rack. He wasn't young. He wasn't old either. He had the kind of face that made age feel like the wrong question to ask, and something in the way he held himself, still and unhurried, made him look like he belonged to a different century than everyone else in the cemetery. Dark hair, sharp cheekbones, and eyes that were watching her the way you'd watch something you'd been waiting a long time to see. Elena had been stared at before, pity stares, curious stares, the careful sideways looks of people who'd heard the rumors about the girl whose men kept dying. This wasn't that. This man wasn't looking at her like she was cursed. He was looking at her like he already knew, and like the knowing didn't frighten him at all. "Who is that?" she murmured. Mara followed her gaze and frowned. "No idea. I don't think he's with the Whitmores. He's staring at you." "I noticed." The service ended. People began to move, that slow shuffle of black coats toward black cars, and Elena lost him in the crowd for one panicked second before he reappeared, closer now, though she hadn't seen him cross the grass. "Elena Voss." Not a question. She stiffened. "Do I know you?" "Not yet." His voice was low, unhurried, the kind of calm that didn't belong at a funeral. "Adrian Vale." The name landed somewhere in the back of her memory, familiar in the way a headline is familiar. Vale International Security. Billionaire. The kind of man whose face showed up in business magazines she never read, attached to numbers she couldn't picture. "I don't know why a security billionaire would be at Daniel Whitmore's funeral," she said, "but I'd like you to leave me alone." "I'm not here for Daniel." His eyes didn't move off her face. "I'm here for you." Something cold moved through her, and it wasn't the wind. "Excuse me?" "Four men, Elena. Seven days apart, always. David. Marcus. The one before that, Ethan. Now Daniel." He said the names like he'd memorized them a long time ago, not like he'd read them off an obituary that morning. "You think you're cursed." "Who told you that?" Her voice cracked on the last word, and she hated it. "Did Mara..." "No one told me. I've been looking for you for a long time." "That's insane. I don't know you." "You will." He said it simply, without arrogance, like a fact rather than a promise. "What's happening to you isn't a curse. Not the way you think it is." Elena's pulse was loud in her own ears. Behind her, Mara's voice was calling her name, distant, like it was coming from underwater. "Then what is it?" Adrian's gaze flicked, just briefly, past her shoulder, toward the tree line, where the shadows under the old oaks had gone a shade too dark for four in the afternoon. Something in his expression sharpened. "We don't have time for that right now." "For what..." "Don't turn around." She turned around. The shadow beneath the trees wasn't a shadow. It moved the way smoke moves in wind that isn't there, folding in on itself, and for one impossible second Elena thought she saw the shape of a woman inside it, tall, still, watching her the exact way Adrian had been watching her, except there was nothing patient in it at all. The air around it seemed to bend, the grass beneath it browning as though something had drained the life straight out of the ground. Then it was gone, and the ordinary gray afternoon closed back over the cemetery like nothing had happened. Elena's breath came fast. "What was that?" Adrian's hand closed around her arm, not rough, but absolute, the grip of a man who had decided something and would not be argued out of it. "Something followed you here. It isn't the first time, and it won't be the last." "Followed me from where?" He looked at her the way you'd look at someone standing at the edge of a cliff they didn't know they were on. "From three hundred years ago," he said, "though you don't remember that yet." He let go of her arm before she could answer, before she could do anything but stand there with her heart slamming against her ribs, and by the time Mara reached her, calling her name for the third time, Adrian Vale was already walking away through the wet grass, unhurried, certain, like a man who knew, without any doubt at all, that she would come find him. She didn't sleep that night. She kept hearing it. Three hundred years ago. And somewhere past midnight, staring at her bedroom ceiling, Elena realized the real reason she couldn't shake it wasn't fear. It was that some part of her, buried and impossible, believed him.

The parking lot lights buzzed overhead, one of them flickering in a rhythm that made the shadows pulse. Elena's car was at the far end, and she was regretting every step of the walk before she'd taken ten of them. "You're being paranoid," she said out loud, mostly to hear a human voice. Mara had left twenty minutes earlier, peeling off toward her own car with a promise to call, and Elena had stayed behind longer than she meant to, standing at Daniel's grave until the groundskeeper started giving her looks that suggested it was time to leave. The cemetery gates were locked behind her. There was no reason to feel watched. She thought about Adrian's face the entire walk to her car, the certainty in it, the way he'd said three hundred years ago like it was a fact rather than a delusion. She'd spent three years being told, gently, by well meaning people, that grief made you see patterns that weren't there. Nobody had ever suggested the patterns might be real. She felt watched. The temperature dropped first. Not gradually, all at once, like a door opening onto winter. Her breath fogged in front of her, and the streetlamp nearest her car guttered and died. She ran. She didn't get far. Something closed around her ankle, not a hand, nothing with fingers, more like rope made of cold smoke, and it pulled. Elena hit the pavement hard enough to scrape her palms raw, and when she twisted to look behind her, the shape from the cemetery was there again, closer now, tall and featureless except for two points of light where a face should have been. She screamed. It didn't seem to matter. No one came. Then Adrian was there. She hadn't heard a car. She hadn't heard footsteps. One second the lot was empty except for her and the thing dragging her toward the dark, and the next Adrian Vale was between them, and the smoke shape recoiled like it had touched fire. What happened next didn't make sense in any order Elena could hold onto. Adrian moved faster than a person should move. His hand closed around something in the air that had no business having substance, and when he threw it, the shadow shattered apart with a sound like glass breaking underwater, and then it was gone, and the streetlamp flickered back on, and the night was an ordinary night again, as though nothing at all had happened in it. Adrian crouched in front of her. "Are you hurt?" "What are you?" Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. "Right now, the person getting you off this ground." He offered his hand. She didn't take it. "That's not an answer." "No," he agreed. "It isn't." She got up on her own, ignoring the sting in her palms, and backed away from him until she hit the side of her car. "You just, that thing was going to, and you just threw it like it weighed nothing." "It doesn't weigh anything. Not the way you mean." "Adrian." "I own a security company," he said, like that explained the impossible thing she'd just watched. "Vale International. We handle threats other people can't. I've spent a long time learning how to fight things most people don't believe exist." "That doesn't tell me what you are." "It tells you what I do." His eyes held hers, steady, unbothered by her fear in a way that should have frightened her more than it did. "You want the rest of it, and you're going to get it. Not tonight. Tonight you're bleeding and in shock and you need somewhere safe." "I'm not going anywhere with you." "Then you'll go somewhere alone, and it will find you again, and next time I might not be close enough." Elena's hands were shaking. She hated that he could see it. "How did you know to be here?" Adrian was quiet for a moment, long enough that she understood the silence was a choice, not a hesitation. "Because I've been keeping you alive without your knowledge for longer than you'd believe if I told you." "That's not possible. I've never met you before today." "You have," he said. "You just don't remember it." "Stop talking in riddles. Every time I ask a real question you give me half an answer wrapped in something that sounds like a threat." "It's not a threat. It's the truth arriving faster than either of us is ready for it." He crouched again, closer this time, his eyes searching her face for something she couldn't name. "I know how insane this sounds. I've had three hundred years to get used to how insane it sounds, and it still catches me off guard every time I have to say it out loud." The words sat between them, too large for the parking lot, too large for the night. Somewhere behind his calm, Elena thought she saw something that looked almost like grief, a flicker gone before she could be sure of it. "I'm calling a car for you," he said, before she could ask anything else. "Not mine. One of my company's. My driver will take you home and someone will be posted outside until morning." "I didn't agree to that." "You don't have to agree. You just have to be alive tomorrow to argue with me about it." He was already texting someone, thumb moving fast over the screen, the billionaire businessman replacing the man who'd shattered a shadow like it was made of glass, and Elena stood there in the ruined quiet of the parking lot, cold all the way through, watching him move between two versions of himself as easily as breathing. "Who else knows about this," she asked. "About whatever that thing was." "Fewer people than you'd think. Fewer than I'd like." He glanced up from the phone. "That's part of the problem." The car arrived within minutes, sleek and black and driven by a man who didn't ask a single question about why his passenger had grass stains on her coat and blood drying on her palms. Adrian didn't get in with her. He stood at the curb instead, watching until the car pulled away, and Elena twisted in her seat to look back at him through the rear window, half expecting him to already be gone. He wasn't. He stood exactly where she'd left him, hands in his pockets, watching her leave like it cost him something. Elena faced forward again and pressed her scraped palms flat against her knees, trying to steady her breathing. Whatever was happening to her had stopped being a curse sometime in the last hour. It had become a war. Her phone buzzed against her leg. One new message, no contact name, only a number she didn't recognize. Ask him what happened to the last woman who wore your face.

The building took up an entire block of downtown, forty floors of black glass that reflected the sky so perfectly it looked less like architecture and more like a held breath. Elena stood across the street from it for a full minute before she made herself cross, watching the doors swallow a steady stream of people in expensive suits, none of them glancing twice at the building the way she had, like they'd long since stopped noticing how strange it was to work somewhere that looked like it belonged in a different decade of the future. The card in her pocket felt heavier than a piece of paper had any right to feel. She told herself she was there for answers, not because Adrian Vale's driver had left his card tucked into her coat pocket with an address and a floor number, and not because she'd spent the entire previous night replaying the sound the shadow had made when it broke. The lobby alone made her feel underdressed. Marble floor, a security desk staffed by three people who all looked like they could end a fight before it started, and a wall of glass etched with the company's name in silver, tasteful and enormous at the same time. "I'm here to see Adrian Vale," she said, and felt ridiculous saying it, like she was a delivery instead of a person he'd told to come. The woman at the desk didn't ask who she was. "Mr. Vale is expecting you. Forty second floor." The elevator was silent and fast enough that her ears popped. When the doors opened, she stepped into a different world, glass walled offices, people moving with the clipped urgency of a company that didn't waste time, and at the far end, through an open door, Adrian. He was not the man from the parking lot. He stood at the head of a conference table, sleeves rolled to the forearm, addressing six people who were listening to him the way soldiers listen to someone who has kept them alive before. His voice carried without being raised. Whatever he was saying made two of the people at the table go pale, and none of them so much as glanced away from him while he spoke. Elena hadn't meant to walk in. She'd meant to wait, but the door was open and her feet had a mind of their own, and by the time she realized her mistake, every head in the room had turned toward her. Adrian's expression didn't change, but something in the room did. "We're finished," he said, to the table, not to her, and the six people filed out past her without a word, none of them meeting her eyes, as though looking at her might be a mistake too. "I didn't mean to interrupt." "You did," he said. "It's fine." "They looked terrified of you." "They should be. I hold their mistakes to a higher standard than most employers." He walked toward her, and she was suddenly, uncomfortably aware of how the room's size didn't matter, how he still managed to take up all the space in it. "You came." "I almost didn't. Twice on the walk over I told myself this was insane, that I should turn around and go home and pretend yesterday hadn't happened." "What stopped you?" "You did. Or the version of you that threw something invisible across a parking lot like it weighed nothing. I couldn't unsee that even if I wanted to." Something almost like amusement crossed his face, there and gone. "What were you telling them?" she asked. "Before I walked in." "That two of them nearly lost a client's protection detail to a threat they should have flagged three days earlier." His tone was even, but there was steel underneath it. "In my line of work, mistakes like that get people killed. I don't have the patience to pretend otherwise for the sake of morale." "Is that how you talk to everyone who works for you?" "Only the ones I expect better from." "You said you'd give me answers." "I said you'd get them. I didn't say today would be painless." "I don't care about painless. I care about..." She stopped. Something on her collarbone had begun to burn, a slow spreading heat under her skin, and when she looked down, a mark was rising there, thin dark lines curling like the beginning of a symbol she didn't recognize and had never seen on her own body before. "Elena." Adrian's voice had changed entirely, every trace of the boardroom gone out of it. "What is that?" Her hands were shaking again. He crossed the last of the distance between them and reached for her, two fingers under her jaw, tilting her head to see the mark better. His touch was warm, careful, and completely at odds with the sharp focus in his eyes. Around them, the office kept moving, phones ringing, someone laughing two doors down, entirely unaware of what was happening in the room they'd all just left. "Don't move," he said quietly. "You're scaring me." "Good. You should be scared." His thumb traced the edge of the mark without touching it directly, and Elena felt something under her skin respond to the nearness of his hand, a pull she had no name for, warm and strange and entirely unwelcome given everything else happening around her. "This shouldn't be here yet," he murmured, more to himself than to her. "Yet? What does that mean?" Adrian's jaw tightened. Whatever he saw in the symbol, he wasn't going to say it standing in an office with the door open, that much was clear in the sudden, deliberate way he stepped back from her, putting careful distance between them like he needed it more than she did. "I know this mark," he said finally. "I haven't seen it in three hundred years." "Then tell me what it means." "Not here." He glanced past her, toward the hallway, toward the people still moving through the office like the world hadn't just tilted sideways. "My office. Now." Elena followed him past the glass walls and the ringing phones, aware of every eye that tracked their movement, aware of the mark still burning faintly under her collar. She didn't tell him about the text message yet. She wanted to see if he'd bring up the last woman who wore her face before she had to ask.