I sat up straighter. "What else did she say?"
Silas continued. "She mentioned that a young man, matching the description of the one in your footage, had been in earlier this week. He asked about you from one of the baristas."
The world tilted. "What did he ask?"
"He asked the barista if she knew the name of the girl with the long, dark brown hair who often studied in the corner. The one with the..." Silas cleared his throat, a rare sign of discomfort. "...the ancient eyes."
A shiver, cold and electric, raced down my spine. Ancient eyes. No one in this life, in any of my carefully constructed identities, had ever said that. I made sure to be forgettable, pleasant, normal. Ancient was the one thing I could not hide, the one thing that leaked through no matter how carefully I constructed my mask. But no one ever commented on it. No one ever seemed to notice.
Except him.
"What did the barista tell him?"
"Nothing, apparently. She didn't know your name—only that you were a regular. But the fact that he asked..." Silas let the sentence hang. He was one of the few who knew the bare bones of my truth, not as a fairy tale, but as a historical peculiarity of the family he served. He didn't know the details—no one did, not anymore—but he knew enough to understand that this was significant. "This is an anomaly, is it not?"
"An anomaly," I repeated, the word tasting like ash and hope. "Yes, Silas. It is."
"I will continue to monitor the situation. Discreetly, of course."
"Discreetly is the only way." I affirmed before hanging up.
He had asked for my name. He had seen me before today. He had been watching me. The paradigm of my existence had not just cracked; it had been shattered. The King, in this incarnation, was not a blank slate. He was... aware. On some level, in some way I couldn't yet understand, he was aware.
I pushed back from my desk, the chair rolling across the hardwood floor as I stood and began to pace. The apartment was dark except for the glow of my laptop screen, casting long shadows that danced with my movements. My reflection passed over the window glass like a ghost—dark hair, pale skin, ancient eyes that had witnessed too much.
The hope and the dread twisted together inside me, a double-edged sword.
Hope: because if he recognized me—truly recognized me, on some level deeper than conscious thought—then the curse was cracking. The walls between us were weakening. After all this time, after all this pain, after all these centuries of watching him die and forget and be reborn, something was finally changing.
Dread: because change was unpredictable. Change could be salvation, yes—but it could also be destruction. What if the recognition broke him? What if the weight of a thousand lifetimes, crashing into a mind built for the modern world, shattered something fundamental? What if he ran from me not because I was a stranger, but because I was a truth he couldn't bear to face? What if this was a new, more intricate layer of the punishment—to give me a shred of hope before dashing it more completely than ever before?
I stopped pacing and stared at his frozen image on my screen. His profile. The sharp jawline. The unruly wave of his dark hair. The set of his shoulders, captured mid-flight, running from me even as something in him clearly wanted to stay.
For the first time in centuries, the cycle had cracked. And I had no idea if it was a beginning, or a new, more cruel kind of ending.
The silence in my apartment was no longer empty; it was now filled with his hurried exit, playing on a loop behind my eyes. But beneath that silence, something else was growing—a fierce, stubborn hope that refused to die no matter how many centuries tried to kill it.
He recognized me.
Now I just had to figure out why. And what to do about it.