"Yes," I say again, slower this time.
Her breath hitches, just barely. She doesn't step back. Doesn't blink.
"Then tell me."
The rain sharpens against the awning. The streetlights hum like they're listening.
I turn toward her, study the shadows in her face.
"Do you believe in past lives?" I ask.
"I don't know."
"Do you believe the soul keeps memories?"
She frowns, searching. "Sometimes I think… maybe it does. Not like photographs. More like... bruises. Places where something happened before, even if we don't remember how."
I nod. "Then you're already halfway to the truth."
She waits. Silent. Grounded.
"You're not broken," I say. "You're waking up."
She opens her mouth, closes it. Then: "Waking up to what?"
"To whom you were. To what you've carried."
A gust of wind rakes through the half-collapsed opera arch above us. Stone shifts. A loose tile clatters to the sidewalk beside her.
She doesn't flinch.
The word hangs between us, fragile and irreversible.
Her breath catches. "Then it's real," she whispers. "All of it."
I nod once, but the motion feels too small for the weight behind it. I've fought wars with less certainty. Buried truths deeper than this. And yet, here, now, I offer it to her like an open wound.
She doesn't speak again, not right away. I see the questions flaring behind her eyes, how much do I know? How long have I known? Why didn't I tell her sooner?
And what scares me is that I don't know how to answer.
Because I don't just see Evelyn standing here beneath the crumbling stone and rain-slick sky.
I see all the versions of her. All the lifetimes. All the deaths.
The girl with silver-threaded hair in a forest full of fireflies. The scholar in blue robes who defied a king. The dying queen on a battlefield, her crown shattered at her feet.
And the one I couldn't save.
Each of them bore her soulprint. Each of them looked at me with this same quiet defiance, like they were daring fate to take them before they were ready. Like they believed I was strong enough to hold the tide back.
I wasn't.
"I didn't want this," I say quietly. "Not again."
She doesn't move.
"I thought if I stayed away… if I didn't say anything… it would be different this time. That maybe fate would pass you by."
A bitter laugh escapes me. "But that's not how this works. We don't get to choose the storm."
"Then what do we choose?" Evelyn asks. Her voice is steady, but something trembles beneath it.
I look at her, really look, and I realize I never stopped choosing her. Even in silence. Even in hiding. Even when I said I wouldn't.
"You," I say. "I choose you."
It's not a promise. It's a confession.
The kind that unearths everything I've buried: the memories I've dulled with time, the weight of centuries where I tried to forget, the ache of losing her over and over again.
There are nights I can't remember my mother's face. Days when I forget the color of the sky before the Hollow split open. But I never forget her. I never forget this pull between us, the tether that death and time and war couldn't sever.
And that terrifies me.
Because I don't know if this time will end any differently. If choosing her means breaking the cycle, or damning us both to repeat it.
But for once, I'm not walking away.
I step closer, just enough to drop my voice.
"You've felt it, haven't you? The way places remember you. The way certain words feel like echoes. Like someone whispered them to you before you had a mouth to speak with."
She nods.
"And the dreams," I say. "They're not dreams."
She swallows. "They feel... older."
"They are older."
I take a breath.
"You're tethered to something ancient. A thread that runs through your soul. And it's waking now because something else is waking too."
"Kaelthas," she says, the name sudden on her lips.
I go still.
"Where did you hear that?"
Her voice shakes. "I didn't. I, dreamt it. Last night. The name was carved in fire. Over a door made of bone."
Gods.
It's happening faster this time.
I should leave her. Walk away before this pulls her deeper.
But the part of me that remembers her , truly remembers her , won't let me.
"I've seen that door," I say. "A long time ago."
She stares at me like I'm the key to every locked thought in her head.
"I need to know who I was," she whispers.
I hesitate.
And then: "You were powerful. Not in the way people think of power. Not with fangs or spells. You were... important. Not just to me. To him."
"Kaelthas?"
I nod. "You were his anchor once. His balance. The one thing he couldn't control."
She laughs, bitter and small. "And I ended up in a bookstore with a dead-end life."
"Souls don't forget," I say. "But the body needs time to catch up."
She looks down at her hands like they might start glowing.
"What happens now?" she asks.
"I don't know."
It's the truth.
And the truth earns me something, a flicker of trust in her gaze.
Then,
The ground beneath us shudders.
Just once. Like a breath held too long, finally exhaled.
She gasps. I steady her.
"It's him, isn't it?" she whispers.
"No." I glance east, toward the river. "It's something else."
We walk quickly. I don't take her home. I take her to mine.
She doesn't ask questions when I lead her through the alley or when I key open the reinforced door.
Inside, my apartment is cold. The candle's already lit.
She pauses at the threshold, eyes scanning the books, the old maps, the weapons mounted behind glass.
"Jesus," she mutters. "You weren't kidding."
"No," I say. "I never do."
She steps in, and I feel the room shift around her. Like the walls remember. Like something wakes.
I lock the door behind us.
Then I pull the wooden box from under the floor.
"This is what I kept," I say. "The only things that mattered."
She kneels beside me, quiet.
The dagger. The ring. The letter in the dead language. She doesn't touch anything , but her gaze lingers on the ring.
"I know this," she says softly.
She reaches for it, hesitates, then picks it up.
The metal doesn't burn her.
It sings.
She gasps as a flicker of gold light crawls up her palm.
"What is it?" she asks.
"It was yours," I whisper.
I don't know how long we sit there, the candle flickering between us like a heartbeat made flame.
Evelyn turns the ring in her fingers over and over, brow furrowed in thought.
"I feel like I'm standing on the edge of a memory," she says, "but I can't see it. Like it's just out of reach."
"It'll come," I say. "It always does. The soul is patient. But the body fights it."
She looks up at me. "And you? What were you to me?"
I meet her gaze. "Everything."
It's not romantic. Not yet.
It's a statement of fact.
She looks like she wants to cry. Or scream. Or laugh.
Instead, she presses the ring into her palm and curls her fingers around it like it might hold her together.
Then the candle flickers again.
And this time,
It whispers.
Not with wind.
With voice.
Not from the room.
From below.
Something stirs in the veins of the earth beneath us.
Evelyn stiffens.
I rise instantly, placing myself between her and the source.
"Get behind me," I say.
She obeys.
The trapdoor under the floor doesn't open.
But it breathes.
And I hear it again.
A voice.
Ragged. Ancient.
Speaking a name I haven't heard in centuries.
Not August.
The other.
The first.
The one I buried.
"Alaric."
The name strikes like a bell in a cathedral buried deep underground.
It hangs in the air, quiet as thunder. And it's not Evelyn who says it.
The voice rises through the floor like vapor, like smoke through old stone. It's not a growl, not a whisper.
It's a memory, still bleeding.
Evelyn steps closer to me without realizing it, her breath caught halfway between fear and recognition.
"Alaric," she repeats, almost inaudible. "That was… yours?"
I don't answer. I can't.
Not yet.
My mind is fractured. I see her face, not Evelyn's, hers, from another time, standing in firelight, blood on her skin. The night I burned the city to keep her safe. The night I lost her anyway.
I close my eyes and press two fingers to the floor.
It's silent again.
But the name still lingers.
Alaric.
That was who I was before August. Before I ran. Before I tried to let the world forget me.
And now it remembers.
Now she remembers.
Evelyn watches me. Her hand still clenched around the ring like it's the last stable thing in her world.
"It's waking up, isn't it?" she asks. "Whatever you tried to bury. Whatever you ran from."
I look at her. Really look. And in her face I see her, the soul I failed once before.
"Yes," I say.
She nods slowly. Then: "Tell me about him. About Kaelthas."
A silence hangs between us before I break it.
"He was never supposed to be a king," I begin. "He was a weapon given shape. A creature of shadow, born from a ritual so old even the elders feared to speak its name."
I move toward the fireless hearth and kneel, tracing the faint symbols etched into the stone.
"He didn't drink blood like a vampire. He consumed essence. Memory. Magic. Souls. He could unmake a person simply by naming them. That's what you saw in the dream, the door with bones. That was his gate. His throne."
She steps closer, whispering, "And I was part of it."
"You were the only thing he couldn't take," I say. "You knew him before he changed. When he was still a man."
She looks stunned. "I loved him?"
"No," I say, voice tightening. "He loved you. You tolerated him. Until he took too much."
Evelyn sways slightly, like the weight of it is pressing into her spine.
"And you," she says. "What were you?"
"I was the one sent to kill him."
Her eyes widen.
I look away.
"But I didn't. Not when it mattered. Not when I should have."
"Why?"
I say nothing.
Because the answer is standing right in front of me.
I didn't kill Kaelthas because she begged me not to.
And I obeyed her.
Every time.
And it cost everything