“Come on, Eve, you’ve been sulking all day,” Serena said, looping her arm through Eve’s as they walked down the marble steps. The evening air was soft, golden with sunset, the smell of grilled meat already drifting through the courtyard. “You need to breathe a little. It’s just a barbecue, not a funeral.”Eve forced a small smile. “I didn’t say no, did I?”Serena glanced at her sideways, her red lips curving into something between a smirk and concern. “You didn’t have to. Your face says everything.”“I guess I’m just… tired,” Eve replied, her voice distant. Her mind was still replaying what she had remembered earlier — that face, his voice, the way her heart had recognized him before her mind caught up. She had always known him. The realization had hit her like a wave, powerful enough to leave her breathless. All this while she had thought she didn’t know him. But now… she did.Serena chuckled lightly, brushing invisible dust from her dress. “Well, you’ll feel better after some wine a
For weeks, I had told myself he was a stranger. An anomaly. A force of power who simply existed in my present because the universe had twisted cruelly enough to place him here.But I had been wrong.I had known him. Somewhere in the fog of my other life, he had existed. I had carried the faint ache of his death without understanding why, like a note struck once and left to echo long after the music ended.And now the truth pressed down on me like a weight I couldn’t shake: I wasn’t meeting him for the first time. I was remembering.My breath came shallow. My chest felt caged. Every thought splintered into two, then fractured into more—questions without answers, theories tangled with fear.Why me?Why had he asked me to be his girlfriend, of all things? He could have chosen anyone—beautiful, polished, powerful women who would have lined up for the privilege of being by his side. I had seen them whisper about him in corridors, glance toward him with hunger in their eyes. He had access t
It began with a name.words, tucked away on a faded digital archive page: Soren Bellandi. There was no photograph attached, no neat biography, only a brief mention in Parsons Global’s “Visionaries of the Modern Era.”I had been scrolling through decades of history for a textile project, names of legends flashing past me—Laurent, Voss, Kimura. And then his appeared.Not bold.Not highlighted.Just there.And yet the moment my eyes touched it, something in me shifted. My breath caught, not out of admiration or recognition, but from something far stranger—memory.The problem was, it wasn’t mine.Because I had never seen Soren Bellandi before. I had never met him. I had never even heard his name until he walked into this branch months ago, silent and commanding in a way that made the air around him bend.He should have been a stranger.But my body reacted differently. My pulse climbed, heat prickled across my skin, and somewhere behind the locked wall of time, I knew him.Not in this life
I had always believed betrayal carried its own scent. Not perfume, not cologne—something sharper, something rotten at the edges of sweetness. By now, I could smell it the way sailors smelled storms.Serena.She thought she was clever. Thought her careful smiles and painted concern could disguise what she had done. But the world had already revealed her secrets to me—not through her words, but through the camera lens.Weeks ago, while she fluttered around Julian with her silk dresses and honeyed laughter, I had been busy planting eyes in the shadows. A camera in the empty conference room no one used. Another in the quiet lounge where they often lingered too long after meetings. A third in the parking garage, angled toward the sleek lines of Julian’s car, where stolen kisses left fog on the windows.The footage told the truth she would never confess: Serena was the second knife in my back. My sister in name, my rival in truth.I watched the recordings late at night, when the world was q
The first bouquet arrived on Monday morning. A cascade of white roses, each stem wrapped in velvet ribbon, each petal fresh with dew as though plucked from a garden only moments before. The florist carried them in with two hands, the weight of the vase nearly tipping.Attached was a card. His handwriting, sharp and deliberate, leapt from the surface.“I’m sorry, Evelyn. I should have protected you. Please forgive me. — Julian.”I left the flowers in the hallway, their fragrance filling the air long after I had turned my back.By Tuesday, the gifts had multiplied. A courier delivered three boxes tied with silver bows. Inside: a silk scarf, a diamond pendant, and a bottle of perfume I once mentioned in passing at a dinner, nearly a year ago. He remembered. The precision was unnerving.Another note was tucked inside the scarf’s folds:“I didn’t know what came over my mother. She was upset. It wasn’t her, it was the moment. I should have defended you. Give me the chance to make it right.”
The door slammed so hard the chandelier above the staircase quivered, scattering prisms across the marble floor.Julian stood frozen in the foyer, one hand still pressed to his cheek where Evelyn’s slap had burned its mark. His jaw ached from clenching, his chest heaved with ragged breaths, but what unsettled him most was the silence that followed her departure.She hadn’t looked back.Not once.For a moment he stared at the door, as though sheer willpower might pull her back through it. But the street beyond had already swallowed her, and he was left with nothing but the echo of his own humiliation.His humiliation — and his mother’s faint, brittle sigh.“Julian,” Mrs. Vale murmured from the shadows of the sitting room, her silhouette etched against the firelight. She was composed as always, shoulders square, pearls glimmering like frost at her throat. But her eyes — sharp and restless — betrayed what her voice would never admit.“You shouldn’t have chased her like that. Not outside.