My running shoes scraped against the pavement in a frantic, uneven rhythm. A cab screeched to avoid me as I darted across a side street. The driver's angry shout dissolved into the night, unheard, unimportant. Nothing mattered except the pounding of my blood and the desperate, irrational need to put distance between myself and that riverbank.

  By the time I reached my apartment building, my lungs burned and my carefully styled hair had come loose, dark strands sticking to my damp forehead. I fumbled with the keys, dropped them, swore in a language that hadn't been spoken aloud in centuries, and finally got the lock to give way. I fell through the door more than walked, slamming it shut and turning the deadbolt with fingers that felt like they belonged to someone else.

  Then I just stood there, pressed against the wood, waiting for my heartbeat to stop trying to escape my chest.

  The silence of my apartment was deafening.

  I leaned against the door, pressing my palms flat against the cool wood, and forced myself to breathe. In. Out. The walls were still there. The furniture. The mundane evidence of my carefully constructed modern life. A stack of unread books on the coffee table. Normal. Safe.

  Safe.

  I let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob and slid down the door until I was sitting on the floor, my knees drawn up to my chest, my coat pooling around me like a shed skin.

  What had I done?

  For days, I had planned. I had mapped out The Crestmore Towers from every angle, using satellite images and architectural records. I had learned his routines—the way he emerged each evening at roughly the same time, the path he took through the park, the railing where he stopped to gaze at the water like a man searching for something he couldn't name. I had been so careful. So methodical. I had told myself I was ready.

  I was not ready.

  I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes until I saw stars. The image of him was burned into my mind—the slow turn of his body, the way his gaze had swept past my hiding place and then returned with unerring accuracy, the resignation in his voice when he spoke. Not surprise. Not anger. Resignation. As if he had been expecting me. As if he had always known I would come.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  "Are you going to stand there all night?"

  The question echoed in my skull, and I groaned aloud, dropping my hands to stare at the ceiling. Of all the responses I had rehearsed—the casual greeting, the feigned coincidence, the direct confrontation I had imagined a hundred times—fleeing like a startled deer had never been on the list.

  I was Giana. I had lived more lives than most civilizations. I had watched empires rise and fall from palace windows. I had loved and lost and loved again across centuries. I had faced wars, plagues, revolutions, and the slow, grinding heartbreak of watching everyone I love grow old and die while I remained.

  And I had just run from a man standing by a river.

  Stupid, I told myself. Utterly, completely, unforgivably stupid.

  But even as the self-recrimination washed over me, another voice rose to meet it—quieter, more honest. It wasn't fear of him that had sent me flying across the boulevard. It was fear of what his recognition might mean. Fear that this time, in this life, the pattern might finally break. Fear that he might remember.

  In all our encounters, I had always been the one who knew. I carried the weight of our history while he lived and died in blissful ignorance, drawn to me by something he could never name or understand. I was the keeper of the flame. I was the one who watched him approach, again and again, like a moth to that fire, never burning because he never truly understood what he was walking toward.

  But that voice—that quiet, resigned voice—had not sounded like ignorance. It had sounded like expectation.

  I pushed myself off the floor and walked to the window, parting the curtains just enough to see the street below. The same street. The same quiet. A couple walked hand in hand on the opposite sidewalk—different people, but the same easy intimacy. A taxi idled at the corner, its driver probably waiting for a fare that would never come.

  No one was watching. No one was waiting.

  But this time, the absence felt different. This time, I wasn't looking for threats or hidden observers. I was looking for... what? A sign? An explanation? A reason why the universe had suddenly decided to rewrite the rules of my existence?

  I let the curtain fall and pressed my forehead against the cool glass. The same gesture. The same window. But everything else had changed.

  What if he did remember? What if, after all these centuries, the cycle had finally shifted? What if he was out there right now, standing at that railing, waiting for me to come back?

  He won't wait forever, the quiet voice whispered. He'll go home. He'll return to his glass tower and his life of silent wealth and his nightly walks through curated nature. And tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, you'll have to decide whether you're brave enough to face him.

  I stayed at the window for a long time, watching the lights of the city flicker and shift. My breathing eventually steadied. My heart eventually slowed. But the turmoil in my mind refused to quiet.