String lights swaying in the dark. Storm-gray eyes finding mine across a crowded square. A broad hand steadying my waist as music swelled. Silver eyes watching from the edge, patient and intent. Hazel bright with mischief, spinning me until laughter spilled from my throat, wild and unguarded.
Four people tangled together in the glow.
The images felt real. The warmth in my chest, the echo of that laughter, the way my body remembered the weight of those hands.
I wanted to stay there. In that warmth, that inexplicably, irrationally, infuriatingly safe feeling.
A version of my life where I wasn’t running from anything.
Surely tomorrow I will be back to ashes. So for tonight, just once, I was keeping this.
2
— • —
Lucian
I stood in the shadow of the building across from the inn and watched her window. Pathetic, lovesick, and utterly foolish, yet I didn’t move.
Five hundred years. Centuries of royal training, of suppressing every instinct that didn’t serve the crown. I’d survived political feuds, outlasted enemies, maintained perfect composure through hundreds of tedious diplomatic functions.
And here I was.
Standing in the dark at three in the morning, staring at a window in a cheap inn, because a human woman was sleeping twenty feet away and I physically could not make myself leave.
My wolf paced beneath my skin, restless and hungry. He wanted to be closer. Wanted to press his nose to her neck and breathe her in until her scent lived in his lungs.
I wanted that too. More than I should.
Even from here, I could almost taste her. That maddening sweetness underneath the smoke damage. The memory of how she’d looked at me during the storm, rain streaking the window behind her, her pulse jumping beneath my thumb as I tilted her chin up. The way her breath had caught right before I kissed her.
My body tightened at the memory. I’d spent hundreds of years polishing my control, and one human woman had me half-hard in a dark alley because I couldn’t stop replaying the way she’d melted into me.
And now she looked at me with no recognition at all, and my heart kept fucking breaking at the thought of her not remembering us.Why?Why the fuck had we been erased from her memories? And fuckinghow?
“You’re staring.”
Percival materialized at my shoulder, his voice pitched low enough not to carry. His hair was loose tonight, waves catching the dim streetlight, but shadows darkened the skin beneath his hazel eyes. None of us had slept.
I doubted any of us would sleep well until she was safe, which was going to be a problem given that I was a king who needed to function and I was currently operating on zero rest and an unhealthy amount of obsessive fixation.
“That’s creepy, Your Majesty.”
“Your irrelevant input is noted.”
He leaned against the wall beside me, arms crossed, and studied her window with an expression that held none of his usual lightness. Percy’s default setting was chaos and charm. Seeing him quiet felt wrong.
“She flinched,” Percy said. “When Solomon reached for her face to check her pupils. Did you see?”
“I caught the end of it.”
“It’s that piece of shit who did that to her. Conditioned her to expect a hit every time a man reaches for her face.”
“Yes.”
He was quiet for a moment. His jaw worked, hazel eyes going gold at the edges before he blinked it back. “I want to find him, Lucian.”
“You’ll have your chance.”
