I slide off the mattress, the cotton sheet pulling away from my legs with a hush. My feet touch the stone floor, but it doesn’t bite. It feels… aware.
I reach the basin in the far corner and splash water on my face, but the reflection that meets me isn’t mine. Not fully. My features are the same, but the edges have changed—my pupils are wider, the whites of my eyes laced with gold. My hair crackles softly at the ends like it’s caught in a silent wind, even though the window is closed.
I whisper to myself. “Okay. Okay, we’re not panicking.”
Because I know what panic feels like. This isn’t it. This is deeper. This is calm standing in fire and not flinching.
The glow shifts when I move my hands—trails of light chasing each movement, curling like smoke, like memory. I flex my fingers and watch the gold flash across my knuckles and then draw back like the tide.
I want to call for Rafe. But something inside me says wait.
The silence in the villa is not empty tonight. It’s full. The kind of full that comes right before thunder, when the sky holds its breath.
I sit cross-legged on the floor and place my palms flat against the stone. The minute I do, the heat travels from my hands to my spine, and the vision returns—not in front of me this time, but inside. I see her again. The ancestor. She isn’t smiling. She isn’t angry. She’s watching.
"You are the touchstone. The keeper of flame. The beast remembers you."
I whisper, voice catching. “Who are you?”
But no answer comes. Only the deep thrum of something locked breaking open.
Then I hear his footsteps.
Heavy. Measured. Familiar in the way the sun is familiar—you don’t always look directly, but you know when it’s there. He stops in the doorway, and I lift my head to meet him.
Rafe’s eyes widen the second he sees me. His mouth parts like he wants to speak, but nothing comes out. His shirt’s halfway unbuttoned, hair sticking up like he’s been up pacing, and his eyes are still lined with the exhaustion that never leaves. But now they’re also full of something else.
Wonder. Fear. Reverence.
He says my name, soft like a bruise. “Kaleigh.”
And I say his back, just as gently. “I’m okay.”
“You look like…” He trails off again, shakes his head like the thought makes his throat itch. “You don’t look human.”
I smile because somehow that doesn’t feel like an insult. “I don’t feel human. Not right now.”
He crouches beside me, not touching, not reaching, just watching.
“Did you shift?” he asks, barely above a whisper. “Are you?—?”
“No,” I cut in. “Not like that. I think…” I close my eyes for a second, feel the warmth settle behind my ribs again, steady and alive. “I think I saw her. An ancestor. A witch. She told me the beast is balance. That touching you… would reveal the truth.”
Rafe doesn’t breathe for a second.
Then he does, slow and heavy, like every inhale costs something.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he says. “Not even with Darius. Not with Jennifer. Not with any of them.”
“I don’t think it’s about seeing,” I say. “I think it’s about feeling.”
His brow furrows.
“You’ve been trying to hold the beast back,” I say. “For years. Maybe lifetimes. You think it’s the part of you that breaks things.Hurts things. But maybe it’s the part of you that knows the truth first. The part that was never supposed to be chained.”
He shifts slightly, knees cracking as he stands and paces once in a tight circle before turning back to me. “Kaleigh, you don’t know what you’re saying. That thing inside me, it doesn’t care about truth. It cares about blood.”
“No,” I say, standing to face him, my bare feet solid on the stone. “That’s what they trained you to believe. What Mateo turned you into. But the visions—whatever this power is—it doesn’t come when I’m scared. It doesn’t come when I’m angry. It comes when I’m with you.”
