Fate doesn't knock politely.
It kicks the door down with a child's small, glowing hand.
Rhea learned that seven years ago, when the silence after Ling left became louder than any scream. She learned it again every time Rhin's eyes flickered not with ordinary childish wonder, but with something older, hungrier, something that carried Ling's bloodline curse like a birthright.
Tonight the apartment is too quiet.
The kind of quiet that presses against the eardrums until you realize it's waiting.
Rhea sits on the floor beside the low bed, back against the wall, knees drawn up. Rhin is asleep or was. Now the boy's small fingers twitch in his sleep, tracing invisible patterns in the air. Tiny sparks of violet light dance between them, faint enough to dismiss as imagination if Rhea hadn't spent years memorizing every shade of unnatural glow her son could produce.
She reaches out to still those fingers.
The moment skin meets skin, Rhin's eyes snap open black pupils swallowing the iris, then bleeding back to normal in a single heartbeat.
"Mumma," Rhin whispers, voice too clear for six in the morning. "She's coming."
Rhea's stomach drops like a stone through glass.
"Who, baby?" she asks, even though the words taste like ash. She already knows.
"The one who smells like fire and steel." Rhin's small hand curls around Rhea's wrist, grip surprisingly strong. "The one who gave me to you."
Rhea's breath catches sharp, painful, the way it always does when Ling's name almost forms in her throat. She forces a smile, the practiced one that used to fool boardrooms and family elders alike.
"That's just a dream, sweetheart. Go back to sleep."
But Rhin doesn't blink.
Instead he sits up slowly, sheets pooling around him like spilled ink, and points toward the window. Outside, the city is ordinary sodium-orange darkness. Nothing moves.
Except the streetlamp across the road flickers once twice then dies completely.
A second later the one beside it follows. Then the next. A wave of black rolling toward them block by block.
Rhea's heart slams against her ribs.
She knows that rhythm. She's felt it in her nightmares for years: the Kwong bloodline reaching out, tasting the air, hunting what belongs to it.
Rhin tilts his head, listening to something Rhea can't hear.
"She's angry," the boy says matter-of-factly. "She's sad. She's… starving."
"Stop." Rhea's voice cracks. She pulls Rhin against her chest, rocking him the way she did when fevers came with visions instead of sweat. "Don't say any more."
But the child's small body is already humming low, resonant, like a tuning fork struck against bone. The air in the room thickens. Rhea feels it in her lungs first: pressure, then ache, then the faint metallic taste of ozone and old blood.
The lamp on the nightstand flares bright, then explodes in a shower of sparks.
Darkness swallows the room.
In the sudden black, Rhin's eyes glow again soft violet, steady, unblinking.
"She's very close now," Rhin whispers into Rhea's neck. "She can feel me. She can feel you."
Rhea's arms tighten until it hurts them both.
She wants to forget. Wants to move on, disappear into some nowhere where no ancient curse can find them. She's planned it a hundred times.
But every time she tries, she sees the same thing: Ling's face the morning she left cold, shuttered, lying through perfect teeth and the way her own treacherous body still remembers the shape of Ling's hands, the weight of her body, the way she used to murmur 'mine' like a prayer and a threat in the same breath.
And now there is Rhin.
Rhin who dreams in Ling's memories.
Rhin whose power answers Ling's like iron to a magnet.
Rhin who is already reaching back across the miles, calling without meaning to.
Rhea presses her lips to the top of her son's head.
A tear slips free hot, furious, useless.
Fate isn't cruel because it separates people.
Fate is cruel because it remembers.
Because it keeps the thread alive even when both ends are bleeding.
Because one day maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow the thread will snap taut.
And when it does, two broken women and one luminous child will be dragged together into the ruin they both spent seven years running from.
Rhea closes her eyes against the dark.
She can already feel the pull.
Deep in her chest.
In her blood.
In the hollow place where Ling used to live.
It isn't love anymore.
It's gravity.
And gravity doesn't forgive.
Somewhere far away, in a fortress of stone and shadow, Ling Kwong jerks awake with a gasp, hand flying to the chain still scarred around her palm.
Her eyes black snap to the window.
She doesn't know why her pulse is suddenly roaring.
She doesn't know why the air tastes like Rhea's perfume and baby powder and fear.
But she knows one thing with bone-deep certainty:
Whatever just woke up inside her is already moving.
And it is coming for them.