Chapter Three: Selena

I didn't sleep well.

Every time I closed my eyes I saw gray ones looking back.

Cold and furious.

Aimed at me like I was something that had arrived uninvited and hadn't yet been dealt with.

Which, I suppose, was accurate.

I gave up at six.

Went downstairs.

---

The woman in the breakfast room wasn't the innkeeper.

Younger.

Late twenties.

Dark hair.

The same fluid economy of movement I'd noticed in everyone here.

She set a coffee in front of me.

Sat down across the table without being invited.

Which told me everything about how this conversation was going to go.

"You're Marcus Holt's sister," she said.

Not a question.

"You knew him."

"He came through about a month ago."

"Asked a lot of questions."

A pause.

Carefully weighted.

"He left after a few days."

"I don't know where he went."

A lie.

More sophisticated than the innkeeper's.

Warmer.

Which made it more insulting.

"He sent me a message saying something was wrong here."

"People get strange feelings in unfamiliar places."

Her smile didn't waver.

"Ms. Holt, we're a private community."

"I think you'd be more comfortable somewhere else."

*Make sure she understands she won't find what she's looking for here.*

I thought of the man in the diner.

The phone call that had followed within the hour.

"Thank you for the coffee," I said.

"It's very good."

Her smile held one beat too long.

Then she left me to my notebook.

---

The town had a library.

One room.

The kind that smelled like the 1970s.

The woman at the desk was eighty if she was a day.

And unlike everyone else in Ashveil, the curiosity in her eyes was real.

"New face," she said.

"Local history — do you have anything on the founding families?"

She had quite a lot.

I sat for two hours with documents I photographed on my phone.

The Blackwood family had been in Ashveil since 1887.

Every record of leadership and land ownership for a hundred and thirty years ran through the same name.

The photographs were wrong.

Generation after generation, the faces barely changed.

Same bone structure.

Same dark hair.

The man identified as Elias Blackwood in a 1924 photograph could have been the man in the diner last night.

Allowing for the sepia and the different clothes.

I was still staring at it when the librarian appeared at my elbow.

"I think that's enough for today," she said quietly.

Her voice had changed.

The warmth gone.

Replaced by something that looked almost like fear.

Not of me.

*For* me.

"You should go, dear."

Someone had called her too.

I packed up my notes.

Walked out into the October cold.

---

He was waiting on the steps.

Kael Blackwood.

Dark jacket.

Hands in his pockets.

The same compressed stillness that made the air around him feel denser.

Like weather about to break.

The smell hit me before I reached the bottom step.

Pine and lightning and something that made the back of my throat ache in a way I couldn't name.

My pulse did something it had no business doing.

I stopped two steps above him.

Eye level.

I was grateful for that.

"Mr. Blackwood."

Something moved across his face.

Surprise.

Quickly buried.

He hadn't expected me to know his name.

"Your family has very thorough records."

"You should leave Ashveil."

"I'm looking for my brother."

"Your brother isn't here."

"Then you won't mind if I keep looking."

I held his gaze.

Gray eyes.

Cold.

Precise.

Furious.

But underneath the fury, something that looked like strain.

Like standing this close was costing him something he hadn't budgeted for.

"Will you?"

Silence.

---

I noticed his hands then.

At his sides.

Fingers curling closed.

Tight.

Then releasing.

Then tight again.

Rhythmic.

Controlled.

The motion of someone pressing hard against a door they cannot let open.

"Before you find something you're not ready for," he said.

And then he didn't move.

We stood on the library steps.

Two feet apart.

And that door in my chest was open again.

The one I didn't know I had until last night.

I could feel him in it.

Fury and something older.

Something that had no name in any language I knew.

Reaching across the distance he was pretending was enough.

Then he blinked.

The door slammed shut.

He walked down the steps at a pace that was measured and even and absolutely nothing like running.

---

I watched him go.

Pressed my hand to my sternum.

Felt my own pulse against my palm.

Too fast.

Wrong rhythm.

Like it was trying to sync to something outside my body.

My hand was shaking.

---

Back at the inn, I opened my notebook.

*Blackwood.*

*Photographs don't age.*

*Eyes.*

*Hands.*

I stared at the page.

Then I noticed the corner of the last sheet.

Lifted slightly.

The way paper lifts when fingers have moved beneath it.

My notebook.

My locked room.

Someone had been here.

I turned to the final page.

My own handwriting filled it.

The notes I'd made last night.

But at the bottom, in a script I didn't recognize.

Precise.

Unhurried.

The handwriting of someone who had never once needed to rush:

*Stop asking.*

A space.

Then:

*For his sake.*

I stared at that for a long time.

Then I picked up my pen and wrote the only question I had left.

*What am I.*

And underneath it, before I could stop myself:

*What is he.*