Chapter One – The Collision
The storm was merciless. Rain hammered the pavement in silver sheets, thunder growled overhead, and the glow of the streetlights bled into blurred halos. Umbrellas bent and snapped in the wind, but Elara didn't notice. She wasn't running from the storm.
She was running from her life.
Her breath came ragged, curls of damp chestnut-brown hair clinging to her face. Her almond-shaped eyes—dark, luminous, filled with panic—searched the empty street as her heels slapped against the wet concrete. She wasn't fragile-looking; her figure was strong, graceful, every movement charged with a desperate energy, yet her trembling hands betrayed her fear. Inside her coat pocket, the folded letter seared against her skin like fire.
She turned a corner—
And slammed into him.
It was like colliding with a wall of heat in the middle of a freezing night. Elara stumbled back, gasping, about to snap at the stranger who dared block her escape.
Then she looked up.
He was taller than anyone had the right to be, broad-shouldered beneath a rain-soaked black coat that clung to a body carved with strength. Drops of water slid down sharp cheekbones, across a jaw dusted with the shadow of stubble. His eyes—cold steel-gray, stormy, unreadable—snapped onto hers, pinning her in place as if the world had suddenly narrowed to only them.
The man didn't flinch. His raven-black hair was plastered to his forehead, but somehow he looked unshaken, commanding, like he belonged in the rain, like the storm itself bowed around him.
"You're going the wrong way," he said, voice deep and steady, roughened with warning.
Elara's lips parted, her chest rising and falling as she searched for air. "Excuse me?"
His gaze dropped briefly to her trembling hands, then returned to her eyes, burning. His presence was overwhelming—dangerous, magnetic, impossible to ignore.
"You're about to walk off a cliff you don't even see," he murmured, words rumbling low, intimate, almost too close.
The rain battered harder, thunder cracked, and for the briefest second, everything else—every sound, every fear, every thought—fell silent.
Because in that moment, drenched and trembling, Elara saw something in the stranger's storm-gray eyes that froze her blood and heated her skin at once.
Not threat.
Not pity.
But recognition.
As though he had been waiting for her all along.
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