My phone buzzed, shattering the heavy silence. I glanced at the screen—2:17 AM, the digital clock on my nightstand confirmed. Sleep was a mortal luxury I had long since forgotten the taste of on nights like this. Nights haunted by him.
It was Silas.
"Madam Giana. I trust you found the footage satisfactory?"
"Yes, Silas. Thank you." My voice was tighter than I intended, the words clipped and strained.
"There is... a further matter." His tone was carefully neutral, which from Silas meant something was profoundly wrong. "The proprietor—AKA my wife—was unusually reticent. It required a significant persuasion bonus to acquire the file. She mentioned something I thought you should know."
I smiled faintly despite myself. Eleanor Backston, Silas's wife of forty years, was a force of nature disguised as a cozy café owner. She ran her establishment with fierce maternal pride, treating every regular like family and guarding their privacy like a dragon hoarding gold. The woman had once physically thrown out a private investigator who'd dared to ask about a customer's habits, brandishing a broom like Excalibur and threatening to call the police, the newspaper, and "every busybody in the neighbourhood" if he didn't leave immediately. Silas had told me that story with a mixture of horror and profound admiration. Her café was a sanctuary, and sanctuaries required discretion.
But Mrs. Backston had always had a soft spot for me. Perhaps it was the way I came in alone, ordered the same tea, and sat in the corner with my books and my silence. Perhaps it was something older, something instinctive—a woman's intuition that sensed a kindred spirit carrying a weight she couldn't name. She never pried, never asked questions, but she always made sure my cup was full and that students who got too loud were gently redirected away from my corner.
I had never asked her for anything. Not once, in all the years I had been coming to her café. So, when Silas approached her, when he explained that I needed the footage—me, specifically—she had hesitated. For Eleanor to hand over security footage, even to her own husband, meant Silas had paid through the nose and probably promised a week of doing dishes besides. The fact that she'd relented at all spoke to either the size of his "persuasion bonus" or the genuine worry in his eyes when he'd asked. Probably both.
But there was more. Before he could continue, I heard the familiar rustle of papers on his end, the way Silas always organized his thoughts before delivering important news.
"Mrs. Backston," he said slowly, "asked if you were in trouble. I assured her you weren't. She asked if this had anything to do with the man who had been staring at you. I said nothing, which was answer enough."
He paused, and I could hear the weight of what came next.
"And then she sighed—a long, knowing exhale—and said, 'That girl has been waiting for him her whole life. Maybe it's time she found him.'"
She handed over the footage without another word.
The "persuasion bonus" had been accepted, but I suspected it was more for show than necessity. Mrs. Backston, with her sharp eyes and her womanly wisdom, had seen something in me from the very beginning.
I sat up straighter. "What else did she say?"
Silas continued. "She mentioned that a young man, matching the description of the one in your footage, had been in earlier this week. He asked about you from one of the baristas."
The world tilted. "What did he ask?"
"He asked the barista if she knew the name of the girl with the long, dark brown hair who often studied in the corner. The one with the..." Silas cleared his throat, a rare sign of discomfort. "...the ancient eyes."
A shiver, cold and electric, raced down my spine. Ancient eyes. No one in this life, in any of my carefully constructed identities, had ever said that. I made sure to be forgettable, pleasant, normal. Ancient was the one thing I could not hide, the one thing that leaked through no matter how carefully I constructed my mask. But no one ever commented on it. No one ever seemed to notice.
Except him.
"What did the barista tell him?"
"Nothing, apparently. She didn't know your name—only that you were a regular. But the fact that he asked..." Silas let the sentence hang. He was one of the few who knew the bare bones of my truth, not as a fairy tale, but as a historical peculiarity of the family he served. He didn't know the details—no one did, not anymore—but he knew enough to understand that this was significant. "This is an anomaly, is it not?"
"An anomaly," I repeated, the word tasting like ash and hope. "Yes, Silas. It is."
"I will continue to monitor the situation. Discreetly, of course."
"Discreetly is the only way." I affirmed before hanging up.
He had asked for my name. He had seen me before today. He had been watching me. The paradigm of my existence had not just cracked; it had been shattered. The King, in this incarnation, was not a blank slate. He was... aware. On some level, in some way I couldn't yet understand, he was aware.
I pushed back from my desk, the chair rolling across the hardwood floor as I stood and began to pace. The apartment was dark except for the glow of my laptop screen, casting long shadows that danced with my movements. My reflection passed over the window glass like a ghost—dark hair, pale skin, ancient eyes that had witnessed too much.
The hope and the dread twisted together inside me, a double-edged sword.
Hope: because if he recognized me—truly recognized me, on some level deeper than conscious thought—then the curse was cracking. The walls between us were weakening. After all this time, after all this pain, after all these centuries of watching him die and forget and be reborn, something was finally changing.
Dread: because change was unpredictable. Change could be salvation, yes—but it could also be destruction. What if the recognition broke him? What if the weight of a thousand lifetimes, crashing into a mind built for the modern world, shattered something fundamental? What if he ran from me not because I was a stranger, but because I was a truth he couldn't bear to face? What if this was a new, more intricate layer of the punishment—to give me a shred of hope before dashing it more completely than ever before?
I stopped pacing and stared at his frozen image on my screen. His profile. The sharp jawline. The unruly wave of his dark hair. The set of his shoulders, captured mid-flight, running from me even as something in him clearly wanted to stay.
For the first time in centuries, the cycle had cracked. And I had no idea if it was a beginning, or a new, more cruel kind of ending.