Prologue
Thelightsweremerciless.They poured down in blinding heat, catching against my eyes, turning the crowd beyond into a blur of indistinct faces. A hundred, maybe more, all watching, all waiting for me to deliver words polished until they gleamed. Words I had practiced so many times they lived in my bones. My posture was perfect, my smile measured, my voice calm as it carried across the hall.
To anyone else, I must have seemed unbothered, every detail of my body language choreographed to convince them I was fine.
Yet inside, something was beginning to unravel.
It began faintly, no more than a ripple of unease along my spine. It might have passed for nerves, though I had long since learned how to master them. This felt different, colder, the sensation of being watched, of shadows pressing too close, of breath trapped beneath my ribs without reason.
I pushed through it. Every syllable fell with precision, every pause carefully measured. And when the final sentence left mymouth, when the applause rose like a wave crashing against the stage, I bowed my head and let the faint, polite smile appear upon my lips.
I had done it once again.
Yet the chill remained.
Backstage was dimmer and quieter. The muffled roar of the audience faded behind the curtain. My heels clicked softly against the floor, echoing in the narrow corridor, the rhythm unbroken even as my pulse faltered. I pressed the papers tight in my hands, grounding myself in their weight, but even there, in the hush of the wings and the solitude I should have welcomed, the unease only sharpened.
I couldn’t name it, nor could I explain it.
It was simply there.
I had learned to distrust feelings like this, the uninvited chills. The sense of being pursued by a memory I thought I had buried, the shadows that sometimes breathed when they should have been still. For years, I had walked away from such sensations, ignored them, refused to turn my head.
This time, I stopped.
And I turned.
Then I heard it. A voice wrapped in darkness, curling through the silence in slow, smoky tendrils.
“Miss me, my Little Flare?”
The sound tore through me.
The papers slipped from my hands, scattering across the floor in a soft rain of white.
They no longer mattered, not when the pulse in my veins erupted, wild and frantic. My body refused to move even as my heart surged violently, betraying me with the rush of recognition that followed.
That voice returned, sharp enough to slice through years of silence.
I had buried it, run from it, silenced it in the dead of night when it haunted my dreams. I had built walls and whole lives to keep it away from me. And still, the moment it slid back into the air, it undid everything I had built.
I turned fully then, and the world I had constructed for myself, the polished success, the hard-won distance, the fragile sense of safety, fractured before my eyes.
Because he was there. The past I had fled, the obsession I had tried to sever, the man I had sworn to forget.
Hayden stood before me, and in that instant, the air left my lungs. I understood that the past had never truly ended. It had been waiting, silent and patient, watching from the dark until it could return.
And now it had found me.
Chapter One
Edwina
Five Years Ago
Therewereveryfewthings in this life that managed to anchor me when the world began to slip through my fingers.
Coffee was one of them.
