Chapter 5
Elowen
“If someone comes at ten, tell them I’m not here, and ask them to return at one p.m. if it’s convenient.” I tell Aron, the guard at the gate.
He nods. “Sure, miss.”
I roll up the window and settle back in my seat. I forgot about the meeting with the city architect when I told Logan that time last night. I wouldn’t have remembered if Luciana hadn’t called. We have a site visit today for a mall construction. She’s shortlisted a few locations.
After half an hour, the car stops in front of a burnt building. A team of ten people roams the area. It’s one of those places still not cleared or cleaned. Remi gets out and opens my door. I get out. My shoes sink into the cushion of wild grass beneath. I almost lose my balance; Remi steadies me.
I pick my way toward the woman in her early fifties, dressed in a beige suit, talking to her assistant.
She turns when she spots me, a bright smile on her red lips.
It’s Luciana’s everyday look, like a model on a runway.
She glides toward me with the elegance of someone walking a red carpet, not knee-high grass.
If she weren’t the genius architect she is, she’d definitely be a supermodel, or maybe a fashion designer.
She hugs me and kisses my cheek. “How are you, sweetie?”
“I’m great. How about you?”
She pulls back. “Not good until I find somewhere to get this thing out of my head.” She taps her forehead.
I smile. “Hopefully we’ll find it today, and then you can do everything you want with it.”
Luciana is the best living architect in the world right now.
It was difficult to hire her, but my father reassured her she’d have total creative freedom over the city’s design.
She works in strange ways, like any genius.
One night she’s mapping out residential layouts; the next morning, she’ll call me, bubbling with excitement, to say she has the perfect design for a restaurant cluster.
Just like that, she called me while I was in America and said she needed to start building a mall.
A design is haunting her. It’ll take her at least a decade to build this city.
And since she’s the sole architect—she simply can’t work with anyone else—it’s a monumental task.
But I’m sure she’ll transform this gray Naples into something beautiful.
She shows me around the burnt building, explaining how her vision will come together here. Her assistants, moving with us, rapidly list problems as Luciana speaks, along with solutions where they have them, and where they don’t, it’s noted as unresolved.
From the corner of my eye, I catch movement: someone in black clothes. I turn my head, and whoever was there is gone. A frown pulls between my brows. Who could it be? Or maybe I’m just overthinking. There are Luciana’s team members and my bodyguards all around. It could be any of them.
Once we finish one site, we move to the next.
After repeating the same process, we move to the third.
And by now, I’m sure someone is following me, someone not from Luciana’s team or my security.
I’ve spotted him nearly a dozen times, but he vanishes whenever I look his way.
Either I’m losing my mind, which wouldn’t be hard to believe, or someone is stalking me.
I look around the place we’re in now. It’s in the part of the city where new houses and shops have already gone up. Unlike the other two locations we visited, this place isn’t abandoned; there are people here.
“Excuse me. I’ll be right back,” I say to Luciana, who nods without fully paying attention. She’s lost in her head, and in the land before her.
I walk around the corner of the collapsed building. I move toward the area with shops and people walking about. I stop near a shop, and moments later, out of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of a figure dressed in black near a half-constructed shop. I turn my head, and he disappears inside.
I know I should either go back or call my bodyguards.
He could be an enemy who followed me here to hurt me.
But a tiny part of me—that’s desperate to breathe—wants to believe it’s him.
If Salvario ever decides to come, he surely won’t show up at my front door.
His last interaction with my family wasn’t good.
What’s happening right now is one of the scenarios I’ve imagined a thousand times for our reunion.
That’s why I’m also open to the possibility that I could be hallucinating, seeing my imagination in reality.
I step inside the shop. Whether it’s a hallucination or an enemy, I have to see, for the sake of that slim chance it’s Salvario.
Inside, a man in a black shirt and trousers stands with his back to me. Same height. Same build. My heart begins to batter against my chest, like a stone rattling inside an empty vessel caught in a storm. I walk toward him, slowly.
The closer I get, the more the fear that it’s a hallucination grows. Each step grows heavier. Sweat slicks my palms. I’m not breathing. Whatever sense I have left fades as I reach him and place a hand on his shoulder.
He’s real.
He turns. His nose and mouth are hidden behind a black mask, but I can see the upper half of the face I've seen in so many nightmares and daydreams.
The same gray eyes, holding a look my soul recognizes too well, as if he too had been buried in the hollow of his own ribs, breathing dust, until this one second dragged him back into life.
My throat locks. No sound comes out, just a suffocated sob. I throw my arms around him. The warmth I’ve been dying to feel engulfs me. He doesn’t smell like cedarwood, it’s tobacco and spicy citrus. I clutch the back of his black shirt, sobbing into his chest.
“You came.”
His arms crush me to his chest.
“You finally came.”
I keep sobbing against his chest.
“I knew you’d come.”
My fists ball his shirt. My legs give out.
He strokes my head. “Don’t cry.”
I cry harder at the sound of his voice and cling tighter. There’s no room to breathe, but I don’t care. I don’t care about anything, he’s finally here. He tries to pull me away; I refuse to let go. My chest burns from lack of air and sobbing, but how can I let go? What if he disappears again?
He pushes me away harder. I release the back of his shirt and grip his sides. His forehead is creased in a pained frown, his eyes red-rimmed. He cups my face and wipes my tears, but they won’t stop.
“Breathe,” he urges, his voice hoarse.
I nod jerkily, gasping through my mouth, not tearing my eyes from his face.
I release his shirt on one side and reach for his face. With trembling fingers, I pull the mask away. I need to see him.
Both my hands—one from his face, one from his shirt—fall away as the mask drops. My heart stops.
“What happened to your face?” My voice trembles.
His nose, his lips, his jaw… all different. His nose is sharper and different in shape. His lips are fuller, and unlike the round curve they once had, his upper lip now dips into a heart shape. His jaw is squarer.
He must have had surgery—yes, that’s it.
I refuse to think, even for a second, that he isn’t my Salvario. How can he not be, with those same eyes, that same voice?
“Nothing.”
My body steps back on its own. I lose my balance. But he doesn’t let me fall, he catches me by the waist, pulling me close.
“Sa—Sal—Salvario,” I whisper. Fear knots in my stomach, making me feel sick. It’s clear in my shaking voice.
His brows pull together, confusion filling his gray eyes. Coldness seeps into my body, and my burning chest turns to ice in a single, crushing beat.
He isn’t Salvario.
I pull away.
“Who are you?” My voice is now hollow. Neither fear nor hope remains. After burning fiercely for a few minutes in this stranger’s familiar warmth, the flickering candle is now dead.
Hunter
Her eyes turn lifeless, as if I’ve drained all the life from them. It feels like a knife has been driven into the center of my chest and twisted mercilessly.
“Hunter.” My own name sits like poison on my tongue. For the way it makes her eyes look more lifeless, I wish I could erase my own name.
She stays still, watching me with that pale face, punishing me for just existing.
I thought I’d kill whoever she loves, but now I wish I could bring him here, just to stop her looking so bereft.
I would trade my life for his if it meant bringing that light back to her golden eyes, the way it was there before she saw my face.
“You’re not Salvario?” she asks, in the same empty voice.
I want to say yes—I am Salvario. If I knew anything about that man, I would have definitely said that. But I know nothing.
“No,” I force out.
She looks down, her tears falling to the ground. My fists clench tighter. I’ve never felt this defeated in the life I remember.
“I’m sorry. I—I thought y—you were him.”
I can’t keep my hands down any longer. I reach for her, I need to pull her back into my arms. I don’t know if it will mend this broken state of hers, but I need it to make the pain in my chest go away.
But she pulls back. She looks up one last time, through the wall of her tears, into my eyes, then turns and walks away.
I stay rooted there—for how long, I don’t know—until my phone rings. I pull it out and answer Logan’s call.
“Where are you? Don’t you want to go to her house?”
“I met her.”
“Where?” he asks instantly. “Wait… don’t tell me you were following her like some creep.”
I followed her this morning, when I saw her leave.
I can’t help it, the need to be near her is more feral than the need to breathe.
And when there’s an opening, I take it. Logan went to her house this morning, but the guards told him to come back in the afternoon.
I knew that would happen, she was right in front of me at a burnt-out site then.
Someone destroyed this city a few years ago, and now she’s taken on the task of rebuilding it.
“Your silence is telling me you were. Now, man, tell me, have you lost whatever mind you had left? You know what’ll happen if her security spots you. For the sake of whatever god you believe in, get your stupid ass back here.”
“She thought I was someone else.” I ignore his rant and tell him what’s been eating at me since she left. “Salvario. Her lover, I think.”
He goes silent for a beat, then speaks. “And then?”
“She saw my face and realized I wasn’t him.”
The bastard laughs. “Karma’s a bitch, Hunter. Now you know how those girls felt. So sad, bro.”
“Find out who Salvario is, and where he is.”
“Do you think I’m a genie?”
“I don’t know that, but I know you can find him.”
Logan can find anyone with the smallest scrap of information.
“I’m flattered, your majesty,” he purrs.
I hang up.