Die For Me Again

Nadia's POV

The knife goes in on the left side.

I know this because I've felt it before — that specific wrongness, the body's refusal to accept what's happening to it, the way sound goes distant like someone turned the volume down on the whole world. The ballroom is still lit. The chandeliers are still burning. Somewhere behind me a woman is still laughing at something that stopped being funny the moment he turned around.

His face is the last thing I see clearly.

He's not angry. That's the part that never stops being the worst part — he's not angry, not panicked, not even sorry. He's just watching me go down with those cold, dark eyes like he's done this before and he'll do it again and somewhere underneath all that stillness he already knows it.

I hit the marble floor.

My cheek against the cold stone. My green silk dress pooling around me. I can hear my own breathing getting slower and I think — with the strange calm that only comes when there's nothing left to do — this is the ninth time.

Nine times and I still didn't run fast enough.

His shoes stop in front of my face. Black. Polished. Not a drop of blood on them.

I want to say something. I want to look up at him and say something that will finally make this make sense — some word, some question, something that will crack that stillness and make him see me — but my mouth isn't working anymore and the chandeliers are getting further away and his face is the last thing in focus before everything...

I wake up screaming.

No — not screaming. I wake up with my mouth open and no sound coming out, which is worse, sitting straight up in my bed in my apartment on the fourteenth floor with my hand pressed flat against my left side where the knife went in.

Nothing there.

Just my t-shirt. Just skin underneath. Just my heart trying to exit my chest through my ribcage.

I sit there for a full minute. Hand on my side. Breathing. Counting down from ten the way I learned to do at nineteen when the memories first started and I didn't know yet that screaming didn't help and calling people didn't help and crying into the phone at 3am absolutely did not help.

Ten. Nine. Eight.

The city outside my window doesn't care. It just keeps going — headlights and distant sirens and the particular nighttime hum of a place that never fully sleeps.

Seven. Six.

My name is Nadia Reyes. I am twenty-seven years old. I live in this apartment. I am not on a ballroom floor in Vienna. I am not dying.

Five. Four. Three.

The hand on my side slowly stops shaking.

I reach for my phone.

2:47 AM. The screen lights up and I sit there in the dark with the glow of it on my face and I open the folder I'm not supposed to open at 2:47 AM because nothing good happens when I open it at 2:47 AM. My therapist said that. My sister said that. Every sensible part of my brain that still functions on normal-person logic said that.

I open it anyway...

His face loads first.

Dorian Ashvale. Thirty-one. The photo is from a profile piece three years ago — he's in a grey suit, standing in front of his building, looking at the camera like the camera should consider itself lucky. Dark hair. Sharp jaw. Those eyes that don't give anything away.

The same eyes that just watched me die.

I've been looking at this photo for eight months. I know every line of this face the way I know the layouts of cities I've visited in other lifetimes, the way I know phrases in languages I never studied, the way I know — with a certainty that has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with something older and deeper than logic — that this man has ended my life twelve times across six hundred years.

Twelve times!!

Vienna was the ninth.

I close the folder. Get up. I don't bother with lights — I know my apartment in the dark, every corner and edge, because there were months when the memories came every night and I learned this place by feel. I go to the kitchen. Fill a glass of water. Stand at the window and drink it looking out at the city and let myself do the thing I only let myself do at 3 AM when nobody's watching.

I let myself be tired.

Not scared. I burned through scared somewhere around the fourth lifetime — I remember that one too, a courtyard in Lagos, the smell of rain on hot stone, his hands. After the fourth time something in me stopped being surprised. After the eighth something stopped being afraid. After the twelfth something just became...

Decided.

I set the glass down.

Go back to the bedroom. Sit on the edge of the bed. Open the folder again, not his photo this time — the other file. The one with the timeline, the bloodline cross-references, the archived portraits, the eight months of research that my colleagues think is a client case and my sister thinks is going to get me killed and I know is the only thing that has ever made any sense across thirteen lifetimes.

Tomorrow morning I have a nine AM meeting.

His assistant called three weeks ago. The Ashvale estate has an inheritance complication — the kind that needs a forensic genealogist, the kind that I made sure would need a forensic genealogist, the kind that took me four months to engineer from the right angle so that when the call came it would look like coincidence.

Nothing about tomorrow is coincidence.

I've been dying at this man's hands since 1423. I've run. I've hidden. I've tried to warn people who couldn't hear me and fight back with hands that weren't strong enough and pray to things that weren't listening.

Twelve times.

This time I found him first.

This time I built the door and I bought the dress and I know exactly what kind of woman makes Dorian Ashvale forget to be careful.

I close the folder.

Lie back down.

Stare at the ceiling until the sky outside starts going grey.

Kill me once more, I think, looking at the dark. See what happens this time.