Chapter 18
Chapter
Eighteen
IRINA
I didn’t remember falling asleep.
Only the way his body curled around mine after. The way his breath stroked over the back of my neck like an old vow. The warmth that spread from skin to skin, bone to bone—too much to hold, too much to name.
And then—nothing.
Not sleep. Not rest.
A descent.
I was dreaming. At least, I thought I was. Maybe I was remembering.
It could be both.
But the dream wasn’t just one. It was many, layered like sediment and veined like a ruined cathedral window.
The world blurred around the edges.
In one breath, I was on a marble terrace beneath a bruised Italian sky.
My hands were stained with ink, my gown cinched too tight.
I was Siena-born, a scholar’s daughter, young, brilliant, bold.
Everyone said so. They call me Livia . There’s a letter burning in my pocket—one I’ll never send.
It began, My lord of silence, I remember you again.
In the next breath, the ink was blood. The terrace was a battlefield, a Roman one, or older. My name was Kleonike . I wore armor, and my brother was at my back, dying. I don’t weep. I can’t. I sing instead, an old lullaby our mother taught us. The mother who begged me not to go.
Another turn.
I was élise .
Paris. 1795.
Rain.
Running.
Always running.
The blood at my side was real this time. I clutched a book; no, it was a mirror. A face flickered in its surface, not mine, not quite. It was someone older. Someone brighter. Someone who didn’t belong in my century.
I ducked into a doorway, but the door never opened. I know it won’t. It never did. Behind me, the footsteps approach. No, they weren’t footsteps or at least not just footsteps. Something else. Something that shouldn’t be here.
Turning to flee, I didn’t even make it a step before I halted. He was there.
Not Graven.
Not Ares.
Not anyone I knew.
He didn’t speak, not a single word. But he watched. Stared.
The air warped around him like light falling into a black star.
I tumbled sideways, time slipping away to a concert hall in Berlin. It was 1889.
My name was Louisa . I was a pianist, prodigy, and adored. Tonight, however, my fingers shook. As I looked over the crowd, I saw a shape at the back. A silhouette, still in the most unnatural of ways.
When my hands struck the wrong chord, the whole world shivered. Children in the audience began to cry. No one there knew why. I did, but I couldn’t tell them. They would never understand. Abandoning the bench, I ran. Not from fear, but recognition. I didn’t know his name.
I don’t think I’d ever known it. But I had seen him before. So many times had I seen him. Every life. Every time. His arrival meant…
The world slid sideways to Delphi. I was Selene, a healer. The people came to me for herbs, for prophecy. I served daily in the temple; it was my whole life.
My mother, or at least this life’s version of my mother, was cruel.
In public, she was gentle and dignified, honored by all who knew her.
In private, however, when it was just us she was full of iron and her will was immutable.
Despite knowing what I had seen and that I walked too often under moonlight and even spoke in my dreams, she was unforgiving.
“You don’t know what you’re giving up,” she says. Her voice cut through lifetimes, a dagger in warm fruit.
“I do,” I answered her and even as I spoke, I could hear myself. I was both there and not.
“You think you love him,” my mother hissed. “But you don’t even know what he is.”
“I know what I am,” I said, tired in my bones and in my blood. We’d had this argument before. So many times. I’d seen him. I knew where I was supposed to be. Yet, we had to argue again . In so many lives, different bodies. “You’ve never liked that, have you?”
Mother raised her hand?—
A flicker, the blink of an eye and I was somewhere else, someone else before it fell. I stood in the snow with tall pines swaying around me. A cabin smokes in the distance and my name in this time comes to me slowly.
Magda.
Russia or maybe it’s Finland? Either way, the landscape is unforgiving.
The war was over, but not for me. I’d buried three men.
One of them had been far too young. Now, I lived alone.
A wolf visits in the evenings. Sometimes, I thought it was also lonely.
Maybe it lost everyone it loved too. Did it want release? Did I?
While I had no real answers, the wolf had human eyes. They were unmistakable. It spoke to me only once though, probably just as well. I was already mad, after all.
“You are not what they buried,” it told me. The voice was low and familiar. I reached for it—for him—but everything faded before I could.
Time sundered, ripping through.
A thousand lives crashed into me at once, they raced through me. Flickers of light on a movie reel or the flap of pages blinking past.
A slave in Giza.
A cartographer in Mali.
A thief in Lisbon.
A nun in Kraków.
A child left in the Temple of Fire.
A woman who walked into the sea and came back with pearls in her mouth.
Each version of whispered fragments. Warnings? Memories? Both?
“Don’t let him speak your name.”
“The flowers are always red when he’s near.”
“He never stops looking.”
“You promised us a different end.”
“Remember.”
Then, I was nowhere and I was nothing. It was the void. The place between dreams. A dark field. A depthless still. I wasn’t alone.
I couldn’t see him, not at first. But the pressure of him was there, surrounding me, closing in. When I turned, he was there—the one with no name.
He wasn’t frightening, not precisely. Yet, he didn’t blink. He spoke as if he’d rehearsed each line carved into stone as ageless as the world.
“You’re further along than you should be.”
The voice came from everywhere, all at once. I wanted to retreat. “This isn’t real.”
A dream, I told myself. I was still in a dream.
"Nothing is real. That doesn’t make it untrue.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Nothing. I already have what I want.”
“Then why follow me?”
“Because you haven’t chosen yet.”
“I’m not choosing anything,” I snapped.
The figure tilted his head.
“You always say that. And yet… you always do.”
His voice was like a book being closed over and over. Familiar. Final.
“I don’t know you.”
“You did. Once.”
“Before?”
“Before you began running from death. Before you were given a name. Before you were hers.”
“Hers?”
He stepped closer. A shadow given shape and movement. It didn’t change what I could see. His face remained a mystery, yet I knew him.
“You keep waking up thinking you belong to him.”
“Graven?” I exhaled his name.
"Is that what he’s calling himself this time?"
Something in my heart twisted. It wasn’t pain or joy, but something far more ancient.
“You’re lying.”
"No. But I am patient."
His fingers twitched as though he might reach out for me or maybe he was already touching me. That thought unsettled me even more. There was nowhere to go to escape him.
"You always bloom. You always love him. And you always die."
I shook my head. “Not this time.”
A soft, dry chuckle. “That’s what élise said. That’s what Selene said. That’s what the girl in Delphi promised when she poured salt into the river to change her fate.”
“You can’t have me!”
“I don’t want to have you.”
Shock ripped through me. That wasn’t the answer I expected.
“I want to remind you.”
“Of what?”
His voice is low.
“That before you belonged to the dark… you were it.”
A gasp caught in my throat as I wrenched from the dark to the light. The sheets were cold and Graven was gone. The curtains were wide open to the slumbering city beyond where the lights glittered against the darkness. Jewels in the cityscape.
I’d dreamed, but about what and who, it didn’t seem tangible. The gossamer strands flew apart before I could fully touch them. Yet, the emotion of the dreams remained a constant.
A choice.
An echo.
A warning.
Rolling onto my side, I ran my hands over the sheets where Graven had been and stared into the dark.
I wanted to know where he was, but I was almost afraid to search.
What if I made him up? What if that life was the dream?
My heart trembled at the thought. Somewhere, beneath my skin, the dream’s unease burrowed deeper.
Or maybe it was clawing its way up. Something ancient and indefinable had begun to stir. I knew, in a way that I couldn’t pretend was just my imagination or fear, that nothing could stop it.
Not now.
Maybe not ever.
Lying back against the pillows, I pulled the silken softness of the sheets to me. The dream still echoed in my bones. Other lives. Fractured selves. They brushed against my skin. Whispered in languages from so long ago I shouldn’t be able to understand their pleas or warnings.
A part of me pitied them, even as their images and feelings slipped through my fingers. Another part? That part hated them. Hated their helplessness. Hated how the tides of time drowned them over and over again.
I wasn’t helpless here or now.
I refused to be. Maybe I didn’t understand it all or believe any of it, but I had no regrets. Not a single damn one.
Graven’s scent still lingered on the sheets. My skin still hummed from where he’d touched me. His every caress touched me like I was sacred, treasured, and his. Each kiss carved something ancient into the hollows of me.
No shame or fear or hesitation invaded my languor. No, I felt triumph. If this cycle truly existed, this cursed wheel of blooming, burning, and being reborn over and over—then let it spin.
Let it tear apart this empire. Let it swallow those gods.
Because this life? This version of me? I wasn’t hiding in the dark or weeping as I ran.
I smiled and rolled onto my back to stare up at the ceiling. My body ached, but it was the good kind. The ache of living, the pain of something tangible. Something hot, golden and wild. Not a dream. Not a memory.
Him.
Graven.