The anger surfaced harder a week later, on a night when a hard, freezing rain lashed against my apartment windows and the city outside was reduced to a blur of water and light. I had been sitting in the dark for hours, not thinking, not feeling, just existing in the grey space between numbness and despair.
And then something shifted.
It crept through my veins like waking fire, warming places that had been cold for far too long. It started as a flicker—a small, defiant spark in the hollow of my chest—and grew steadily, feeding on the fuel of centuries.
Who was he, this polished, modern shell of a man, to tell me to stay away?
I, who had held his hand in a Roman villa after he won a debate against the empire's finest scholars, his face flushed with victory and wine.
I, who had fought off bandits along the Silk Road to protect a version of him who was a gentle merchant, more comfortable with silks and spices than swords.
I, who had memorized every iteration of his soul—every laugh line, every scar, every flicker of passion in his star-lit eyes across a dozen different faces.
This Kaelen Vance, with his penthouse and his tailored coats and his cold dismissal, was a mere footnote in the epic of us. A single chapter in a story that spanned millennia. He had no right to dismiss me. He had no right to tell me to stay away from a love that had outlasted empires.
The anger was a catalyst. It burned away the self-pity and left behind something harder, something cleaner. Not hope—I wasn't ready for hope yet. But purpose. Cold, clear, focused purpose.
He did not want me to follow him? Too bad.
I was not following him. I was investigating a phenomenon. A breach in the divine order. His recognition in the coffee shop, the way he had looked at me like he was seeing a ghost, the question he had asked in the park—"Who are you?"—these were not the actions of a man living his first, blank life. Something was wrong. Or, perhaps for the first time in all these centuries, something was right.
I needed to understand the architecture of this new anomaly. And that meant I needed to understand Kaelen Vance, the man. Not the king. Not the myth. Not the echo of past lives. The twenty-first-century entity he had become, with all his corporate success and carefully constructed solitude.