LOGINThe hospital corridor smelled of antiseptic and fear, and Seraphina walked through it faster than her legs seemed capable of carrying her, Damon's presence a solid, silent weight just behind her shoulder the entire way.Her mother stood outside a set of double doors, mascara streaked down her face, hands pressed together so tightly her knuckles had gone white. She caught sight of Seraphina and rushed forward, pulling her into an embrace that shook with barely restrained sobs."They won't tell me anything," her mother said, voice breaking. "He collapsed in his study. One of the staff found him. They took him back there twenty minutes ago and no one will say a word."Seraphina held her mother tightly, her own heart hammering so hard it hurt, though a cold, clinical part of her mind, the part that had learned to survive by thinking instead of feeling, was already cataloguing details. Twenty minutes. The study. No warning, no prior illness, nothing that should have caused a healthy man in
For a long moment, neither of them spoke.Seraphina sat frozen, the folder still open on her lap, staring at a man who had just told her something that should have been impossible, something that mirrored her own impossible truth so closely that she couldn’t decide whether to feel relief or a deeper, colder kind of fear.“Explain,” she said finally. “All of it. Now.”Damon exhaled slowly, running a hand through his hair in a gesture so unlike the composed man she’d met two nights ago that it made her chest ache with something close to sympathy.“It isn’t the same as what you’re describing,” he said. “I don’t remember a full life the way you do. No years, no engagement, no death I can recite from memory like a story that already happened to me. What I have are fragments. Pieces that don’t belong anywhere, that surface without warning and never fully make sense.”“What kind of fragments?”“Dreams, mostly. Or what I assumed were dreams, until three years ago.” He nodded toward the photo
The Voss Tower rose above the financial district like something carved rather than built, glass and dark steel catching the afternoon light in sharp, deliberate angles. Seraphina had passed it a hundred times in her old life without ever once imagining she would walk through its doors as anything other than a curious bystander.The elevator ride to the top floor felt longer than it should have. A guard in a dark suit escorted her from the lobby without a word, pressed the button for the highest floor, and stood beside her in silence until the doors opened onto a private office suite that made the rest of the building look modest by comparison.Damon was standing at the window when she entered, his back to her, hands in his pockets, looking out over a city that belonged to him in ways most of its residents would never fully understand. He didn’t turn around immediately.“You’re early,” he said.“You said tomorrow. It’s tomorrow.”“I said tomorrow at three. It’s two forty.” He finally t
Seraphina read the message three times before she set the phone down on her father’s desk, her hands steady only because she forced them to be.Her father frowned, noticing the shift in her expression even though she tried to hide it. “Everything all right?”“Julian wants to see me tomorrow,” she said. “Nothing important.”She didn’t believe her own lie, and judging by the small crease that formed between her father’s brows, neither did he. But he didn’t press. He never had, not in this life or the last, and that gentle trust was exactly what had made him so easy to blindside three years from now.“Get some rest,” he said instead, returning his attention to the papers on his desk. “You look tired, Sera.”She kissed his cheek and left the study, climbing the stairs to her room with the phone burning in her hand like something radioactive. Once the door was closed behind her, she read the message again.I know where you had dinner tonight. We need to talk, Sera. Just the two of us. Come
Seraphina stepped out of Corvo's into a night that felt colder than it had an hour ago, Damon's words still echoing in her ears. Watch which car follows you.She stood beneath the awning for a moment, scanning the street. Delancy Street at this hour was mostly quiet, a scattering of parked cars, a couple walking a dog two blocks down, the distant hum of the city continuing on without any idea what had just been decided over a candlelit table. Nothing looked wrong. Nothing looked like a threat.Then she saw it. A dark sedan parked across the street, engine idling, headlights off. It hadn't been there when she arrived.Her heartbeat picked up. In her first life, she would have dismissed it, told herself she was imagining things, that not every idling car in the city was watching her. But she had died once already believing the people around her had her best interests at heart. She wasn't going to make that mistake twice, not even with something as small as a parked car.She walked towar
The silence on the line stretched so long that Seraphina began to wonder if Damon Voss had simply hung up without bothering to tell her."Say that again," he said finally."I want to marry you." She kept her voice level, though her pulse was hammering hard enough that she could feel it in her throat. "I'm not joking, and I'm not drunk, if that's what you're about to ask.""I wasn't going to ask that." A pause, and she could hear the faint click of a lighter, the small hiss of a flame catching. "I was going to ask why a Kade heiress, engaged to Julian Renner, is calling a man her family has spent a decade pretending doesn't exist.""Because I'm not marrying Julian.""That's not what the society pages say.""The society pages don't know everything." She closed her eyes, forcing her breathing to slow. This was the part she had rehearsed in her head a hundred times without ever actually preparing the words. "I need to speak with you in person. Not over the phone. Tonight, if you're willin







