As if sensing the weight of my gaze, he stirred.

  He didn't turn quickly. It was a slow, deliberate movement, as if he had known I was there all along. He straightened and pivoted on his heel, his eyes scanning the path behind him with the focused attention of a predator sensing prey.

  There was no one else around.

  His gaze swept past my hiding place once, then returned. He didn't look startled. He looked... resigned.

  "Are you going to stand there all night?" His voice cut through the quiet, deeper than I remembered, laced with a modern cadence. But the timbre was the same. It was the voice that had spoken to me on a mountain centuries ago. The voice that had called me by name when I was nothing but a scraped-kneed child with too much courage. The voice that had whispered promises against my skin in the darkness, in a language that had died and been reborn a thousand times since.

  My breath hitched. He was talking to me. There was no doubt.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Every instinct screamed at me to run.

  And I ran.

  Not away from him—I realized that with sickening clarity halfway across the boulevard—but away from the possibility that he might know me. That somewhere beneath that modern cadence and tailored coat, the King was still there. Still waiting. Still remembering.

  I was seven years old again, scrambling down a mountain with my heart in my throat, terrified of what I had seen in those impossible eyes. I had run then, too. Run from the weight of his gaze, from the otherworldly light in his stare, from the certainty that I had glimpsed something no mortal was meant to see.

  And now, centuries later, I was still running.

  The same fear. The same flight. The same desperate need to put distance between myself and a truth I wasn't ready to face.

  My heels pounded against the pavement. My breath came in ragged gasps. And behind me, growing fainter with every step, I could still feel the echo of his voice—that voice that had once whispered my name like a prayer, now reduced to a stranger's question in a city park.

  Are you going to stand there all night?

  No. I was going to run. Just like I always did. Just like I had done when I was seven years old and too young to understand what I was running from.

  But somewhere beneath the fear, buried deep where I couldn't reach it, a small voice whispered: You can't run forever, Giana. Eventually, you have to stop. Eventually, you have to turn around.

  Eventually, you have to see him.

  Just not tonight.

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