Chapter 5

By the end of the workday, I had almost learned how to live with the idea that, for some reason, I had been hidden as a child.

Almost. The moment things grew quiet, Martin’s words came back to me—not as a threat, not even as an explanation, but as a question that had never existed in my life before. I kept working, answered emails, ran a meeting, corrected two mistakes that were not mine, and still found time to argue with the director about deadlines. From the outside, the day looked so perfectly normal that the normality itself was beginning to irritate me.

I closed the last email and was reaching for my bag when someone knocked.

“Come in.”

One of the receptionists appeared in the doorway carrying a small dark box. “Alice, you had a delivery. The courier asked that it be given to you personally.”

Two days ago, an unexpected package would probably have inspired nothing more than curiosity. After my conversation with Martin, curiosity was no longer my first response.

“Did he say who sent it? Leave a card, any paperwork?”

“No. I asked, but all he had was your name.” She handed me the box, then smiled as she turned to leave. “And happy birthday.”

For several seconds, I simply stared at her.

“Sorry?”

“Happy birthday,” she repeated, now looking faintly puzzled. “It is today, isn’t it?”

I pulled out my phone and checked the date.

Thirty.

I had genuinely forgotten. Not confused the date, not decided to celebrate later—simply lived through nearly an entire day, met two men whose very existence required separate explanations, watched silver light appear where ordinary electric light should have been, and never once remembered that I had turned thirty.

“Wonderful,” I murmured.

She laughed. “Rough day?”

“Lately, they all seem to be.”

“Well, at least the present arrived on time.”

When the door closed behind her, I looked down at the box again. Only my name was written across the matte dark lid. There was no sender’s address, no logo, no note. A narrow silver ribbon was the only decoration, and the whole thing looked far too precise, far too deliberate for something that had appeared from nowhere.

I returned to my desk and studied it for a while. Apparently, caution was finally becoming a useful life skill.

“All right,” I muttered. “What else can possibly happen today?”

In sensible stories, that was probably the point at which people decided not to open mysterious packages.

I opened it.

A pendant rested on pale fabric: a delicate silver chain and a small crescent moon. There were no stones, no intricate ornamentation; the piece was almost simple, and yet my eyes went to it at once. The silver did not shine beneath the office lamp like ordinary metal. It seemed to hold light within itself, cool and soft and barely perceptible, more like moonlight than a reflection.

I reached toward it, then stopped before touching it. Over the past two days, objects had begun displaying far too much independence for my liking.

“Let’s assume you’re just jewelry.”

The pendant did nothing.

“A promising start.”

I touched the crescent with my fingertips.

The metal was warm. Not warmed by the room or by the fabric beneath it, but with the unmistakable heat of something only recently taken from human skin.

Frowning, I lifted it into my palm.

The response was immediate.

Warmth moved from my fingers to my wrist and farther up my arm, as though a narrow path had opened beneath my skin and something had finally been allowed to travel through it. There was no pain, only a strange sense of recognition—far too deep for an object I had never held before.

Silver light appeared on the inside of my wrist, gathering into a fine line that formed the sign of the Moon.

I did not even have time to be frightened.

The office did not disappear. Instead, for one brief instant, another memory seemed to settle over it. A woman’s hands. One palm smoothing my hair, the other adjusting something at my neck. The air smelled of fresh herbs with a faint bitterness to them, and the scent hurt somewhere inside me although I had no idea why. Then a woman’s voice sounded close by—quiet, intimate, impossibly familiar.

“Be strong.”

I drew in a sharp breath.

The room returned: the desk, the lamp, my closed laptop, the box in front of me. The pendant was still lying in my hand.

I remained motionless while the scent of herbs faded more slowly than everything else, as though the memory were reluctant to release it. I knew I had never consciously remembered that scene, yet my body had responded before my mind could—with familiar warmth in my chest and an almost physical sense of loss.

“Mom...?”

There was no answer. The silver mark on my wrist was already fading.

Slowly, I opened my hand and placed the pendant back in the box. The room seemed colder the moment I let it go, as though I had released more than the warmth of the metal.

It was becoming harder to deny what was happening. Dreams could still be blamed on the subconscious, flickering lights on electricity, strangers’ stares on my own heightened awareness. But there was no convenient explanation for a memory I had never possessed.

I closed the box.

My first impulse was to call Marinka. Almost immediately, I pictured her spending the next ten minutes opening twenty different websites about cursed jewelry, ancient cults, and men who sent women suspicious gifts.

Martin was the more logical option, except that calling him would mean admitting the list of strange events I had given him that morning had been nowhere near complete.

The man from the lake crossed my mind as well, and I dismissed the thought at once. A man whose name I still did not know did not automatically qualify as a trusted adviser simply because my body had developed an unfortunate habit of making questionable decisions around him before my brain had a chance to object.

I put the box in my bag and drove home.

The cat was waiting by the door. Apparently, this had become a tradition.

I locked the door behind me, took off my coat, and only then realized I had been staring at him for too long.

Something had changed.

He was bigger. Not enough that I could confidently claim I had been looking at a different animal yesterday, but his legs seemed longer, his chest broader, his back heavier. A month ago, he had been an ordinary black cat I could easily lift with one hand. Now there was something unexpectedly solid about him, almost predatory.

I set my bag down. “We definitely need to talk. Are you growing?”

The cat sat and looked at me with complete innocence. His eyes were still green.

I was almost prepared to conclude that exhaustion had finally destroyed my ability to judge the size of household animals when I took the box out of my bag.

The cat’s attention snapped to it.

Deep in his pupils, silver flashed.

Only for a moment, but it was enough.

I opened the box slowly and lifted the pendant. The cat watched it and nothing else.

“You know what this is, don’t you?”

He blinked, calm and almost condescending.

“Of course you do. Keep pretending you’re an entirely ordinary cat. You’re doing wonderfully.”

He rose, turned away, and walked into the room with perfect composure.

“And apparently your personality is growing in proportion,” I called after him.

The pendant did not react again. I ran a finger over the small silver crescent once more, then finally fastened the chain around my neck. The metal settled cool and quiet against my skin, as though only hours earlier it had not shown me a memory I should not have been able to remember.

By evening, exhaustion hit all at once. Apparently, my body had decided that one day was more than enough time for that many revelations. I went to bed earlier than usual and, just before closing my eyes, remembered that I was still wearing the pendant.

For some reason, I could not bring myself to take it off.

Sleep came almost immediately.

This time, there was no lake.

I found myself in an enormous hall, and the first thing I felt was the sheer scale of it. High stone vaults rose overhead and disappeared into darkness, as though the structure continued far beyond the reach of sight. Silver moonlight entered through narrow windows, stretching in long bands across the black stone floor and revealing faint crimson lines threaded through the walls. They looked almost like veins running through the rock, glowing so softly that at times they might have been no more than a trick of the light.

The air smelled of cold stone, smoke, and something unfamiliar—dry and bitter, as though the fire were burning wood from trees that did not exist in my world.

At the center of the hall stood a heavy dark throne, nearly bare of ornament.

The man from the lake was sitting on it.

And for the first time, I saw him in a place that did not belong to my dream.

Here, he belonged to his own world.

At the lake there had been only water, mist, and the strange pull between us, so I had noticed the man before anything else. Here, I saw something more: the way he held himself, the stillness of someone accustomed to making decisions, the hardness in his face that proximity had softened before, and the quiet authority that required no display.

He sat leaning slightly forward, listening to the woman standing before him. I remained at the edge of the hall, unnoticed by either of them.

The woman was tall, her dark hair pinned at the back of her head, her posture straight with the confidence of someone unafraid to argue even with a man seated on a throne.

“The time has come,” she said. “Waiting any longer is becoming dangerous.”

He studied her for several seconds before shaking his head. “No. It’s still too soon.”

“You can already feel her. If the connection is strong enough for that, what exactly are you waiting for?”

“That is precisely why I’m telling you it’s too soon.” His answer was calm, without the slightest attempt to end the argument through authority alone.

The woman frowned and crossed several paces of the hall. “If the others sense her before you have time to act, the situation will move beyond anyone’s control.”

“They will eventually, and yes, that concerns me. But being concerned is not the same as having the right to act before the time is right.”

“You hide your concern remarkably well.”

For an instant, weariness showed in his face, then disappeared. “The fact that I don’t display it does not mean it isn’t there.”

She stopped in front of him. “Then tell me what you are waiting for.”

His gaze shifted toward the window. Beyond the black stone hung an enormous moon, low and bright and almost impossible—the same moon I had seen from my balcony on the night I first felt as though something were calling me.

“Her decision.”

I went still.

The woman seemed equally surprised. “You don’t even know who she has become over all these years. You don’t know what she remembers, what she believes, or whether she will want anything to do with what is waiting for her here.”

He rose from the throne without haste, like a man whose decision had already been made and therefore required neither argument nor proof.

“That is exactly why I will not decide for her. Whatever waits for her here, whatever anyone expects from her, she has the right to decide what she wants for herself.”

There was no noble self-sacrifice in his voice, no effort to impress anyone. Only quiet conviction.

Until that moment, I had assumed everything was already settled in his mind: there was the Moon, there was him, some kind of connection existed between us, and all that remained was to wait for events to fall into whatever places had been prepared for them. Now, for the first time, I saw the boundary he had drawn for himself. He could wait, feel whatever it was he felt, be certain of things I did not yet understand—and still refuse to turn that certainty into a decision made on my behalf.

He walked toward the window, and silver light settled across his face and shoulders, catching in his dark hair.

The woman watched him for a moment. “And how long are you prepared to wait? What if she never comes?”

“As long as it takes. And if she never comes, then at least I’ll know that was her choice, not mine.”

She shook her head. “Sometimes I can’t decide which is stronger in you—patience or stubbornness.”

A faint smile touched his mouth. “I stopped separating the two a long time ago.”

She gave a quiet snort but did not argue again.

For several seconds he stood in silence, looking at the moon. Then, almost under his breath, he said, “I’ll wait for my Moon.”

The word my sounded unexpectedly gentle. Not like a claim, not like a promise of possession, but almost like a name for the strange bond he had felt long before he ever saw me.

Something inside me shifted.

At the same moment, the pendant against my chest grew warm.

At first, the change was so slight that it could have been no more than the heat of my own skin. Then the warmth deepened, and beneath my clothes the silver crescent seemed to come alive, answering something in the hall.

The man by the window went still.

The change in him was barely visible, but I noticed it immediately. He did not turn sharply or begin searching for the source of the sensation. He simply stopped listening to the woman, all of his attention shifting toward a place where, from his perspective, there should have been nothing.

She continued speaking for another moment before realizing he was no longer listening.

Slowly, he looked around the hall. His gaze moved over the columns, crossed the dark spaces between the windows, and passed over me. For a moment, I thought I had imagined it, that whatever connection existed between us was playing another trick on me.

Then he looked back.

Directly at where I stood.

My breath caught. I stepped back without thinking, although I knew perfectly well that if he could truly see me, a single step would make no difference.

He turned fully toward me.

The woman followed his gaze and fell silent, but the confusion on her face made it obvious that she saw only an empty part of the hall.

“What is it?”

He did not answer her.

All of his attention was fixed on me, and for the first time since I had seen him, genuine, unguarded surprise broke through the composure of his face.

“Alice?”

He said my name quietly, almost carefully, as though speaking too loudly might shatter whatever was happening between us.

I did not answer. Not because I did not want to, but because any word felt too crude for the moment.

He took a step toward me, then stopped, leaving the space between us intact.

“You’re really here.”

There was less surprise in his voice now than disbelief—the disbelief of a man who had finally been given proof of something that, for too long, had existed only as a feeling.

The pendant grew warmer against my skin, and at last I understood what I had been getting wrong from the beginning.

I had assumed this man was somehow entering my dreams. But the hall around him was real. The woman beside him was real; she saw him, spoke to him, argued with him. Beyond the windows, an enormous moon hung over a world that continued to exist whether I was asleep or awake.

This was not my dream.

Somehow, I had stepped into his reality.