19: Losing Control

KILLIAN

I still remember the first time she danced in the rain. She had been wearing a hoodie three sizes too big, her bare feet slapping the marble of my mother's garden courtyard, spinning as though the storm was hers to command.

I was standing at the window, my phone pressed to my ear, giving an order to have a man buried so deep no one would even remember his name.

And then... I saw her.

Laughing and spinning with her arms wide. Her head was tilted back, her face turned towards the sky.

Thunder cracked overhead, but she didn't flinch.

She never flinched.

That was the thing about Seraphina back then. The real one. The one before this fog of memory loss and bloody history between us. She wasn't afraid of lightning. Or me. Or the ruin she was inevitably walking into when she let me pull her closer.

I'd stepped outside, still on the call, when she caught me watching.

"Don't act like you don't want to join me," she'd said, grinning at me like the devil herself.

"You'll catch a col