“Step out of the car,” Rafael said.
His voice was dangerous in its restraint.
Cold enough to make obedience feel like instinct rather than choice.
The door opened on his side first.
I heard him step out.
I hesitated only a second longer before reaching for my own door. The air that met me when I stepped out was different immediately.
Dry and heavy in a way that had nothing to do with weather.
My shoes sank slightly into uneven ground, gravel shifting beneath my weight.
The hem of my wedding gown dragged along with me, collecting dust and grit, the fabric no longer something elegant but something burdened.
My breath slowed without permission.
My head tilted slightly as if sight might return through sheer will alone—an old, useless habit I never quite managed to abandon.
“Where are we?” I asked quietly.
I turned my face, searching without seeing.
My senses stretched outward—sound, scent, anything to anchor me. But there was nothing familiar.
Only dry earth beneath my feet and something faintly metallic and old in the air, like time itself had settled here and refused to move on.
“A cemetery,” Rafael answered.
The word didn’t register at first.
Then it did.
My stomach dropped so sharply I had to steady myself against nothing.
“A... cemetery?” I repeated, slower this time, as though the syllables might change if I gave them space.
He didn’t answer immediately.
Instead, I heard his footsteps move—right side of me, slow and deliberate, closing distance not in haste but in intention.
Then he spoke again.
“Right here,” he said, voice lower now, stripped of its earlier sharpness and replaced with something heavier, “is where I buried Zara.”
My breath caught.
Zara.
His late wife.
The silence around us seemed to deepen further, as if even the wind had paused to listen.
He continued anyway.
“My late wife,” he said quietly, almost to himself, as though acknowledging her existence required no audience. “The only woman I was ever meant to love... and the only one I ever did.”
