Damián's cigar smoke coiled through the air like a specter trying to imprison the room. Each curl was a reminder of his power: silent, absolute, immovable. The men remained motionless, almost reverent, while John and Michelle faced each other with their gazes, measuring each breath.
"Come on," Damián said in a deep voice, laden with paternal authority. "Introduce yourselves properly."
Michelle stepped forward. John followed. Their hands brushed as they shook, and though they only spoke their names, an ocean of memories burned behind their eyes. They feigned indifference, as if they were two strangers in a formal introduction. But their bodies spoke another language.
Then an explosion shattered the room. The main door flew into splinters and a group of armed men burst in with guns drawn and shouts that sliced through the air. Tension turned to chaos.
John reacted instinctively. He moved with a predator's precision. His gray slide Beretta with black grip fired and six enemies fell before they could even aim. Each movement was a stroke of lethal silence: steps, turns, shots. The room filled with smoke, metallic echoes, and the acrid smell of gunpowder.
Michelle blinked, surprised, but not for long. Her eyes hardened and her breathing became precise, calculated. She moved ahead of John, a Glock 17 in each hand, sweeping the room with surgical precision, eliminating the three remaining enemies.
John stood still, watching. That vision pierced him like lightning: the pistols were the echo of two swords crossing through England's mist. In an instant, Michelle vanished and before him appeared Elena de Trastámara, dancing among flames and blood, two swords hanging from her waist like extensions of her body.
Damián's men didn't know whether to watch the action or the ghosts that seemed to emerge from John's memory. Some murmured among themselves, fearful, unable to resist the magnetism of the woman who moved as if she owned both death and grace.
"This is what I wanted," Damián said, breaking the silence with slow applause. "Excellent. With you two, no one will stop me."
But John was no longer present. His mind plunged into another time: England, gunpowder smoke mixed with Ashwick's mud, the roar of horses, the metallic gleam of swords, and Elena's face, as real as Michelle before him. Each shot that echoed in the room was an echo of that clash of steel.
Michelle, sensing his disconnection, observed him with sharp eyes. Her intuition told her this man harbored ancient secrets, memories that pierced him silent and lethal.
Suddenly, the vision became complete: there was no longer Glock, nor Beretta, nor cigar smoke. Only Elena, in a burgundy brocade suit, fitted armor that accentuated her figure and two swords ready at the right side of her waist. Each movement was measured, each look a silent challenge.
She turned toward her father, with the calm of one who knows diplomacy is only a mask.
"I'll go as an emissary of truce," she declared, with the mixture of sweetness and resolve that characterized a queen at war.
Her father nodded, trusting the words of an obedient daughter. But Elena knew the truth was otherwise: she only wanted to meet the peasant who had turned war into myth, the man her memory called Jon Malverne.
In Damián's room, the echoes of the present began to mix with those of the past: the acrid smell of gunpowder, the dry crack of gunfire, the metallic sound of hooves thundering in his memory. John blinked and returned to the real world, still holding his Beretta. Michelle looked at him with silent understanding: he had traveled, if only for an instant, to a time where war and love had woven their threads with blood and steel.
Both knew something had changed forever. That the past was not merely memory. That returning souls find ways to impose themselves across time and distance.
And in that instant, though enemies and Damián still surrounded them, only the two of them existed: John Becker and Michelle Corvelli, a pair forged by the fire of two lives, destined to find each other again and again.