But then she turns.
Even across the vast room, over the sea of masks and swirling gowns, I feel the shift.
The sudden stilling of time.
The pull of gravity reasserting itself around a single point.
Her.
Elara.
No veil this time. No illusion. Just her face, exactly as I remember it. Scarlet red hair coiled at her nape. Storm-grey eyes that could command the dead to kneel. That could remain devoid of emotion as she stepped forward, stake like a dagger in her slim hands.
Skin like pale fire, ageless, untouched by the centuries that carved me hollow.
She stands by the mirror-lined pillar at the edge of the dance floor, her reflection multiplying—one Elara, then ten, each more haunting than the last.
Dressed in a gown blacker than midnight, the candlelight licking across the bare curve of her shoulder merely sightless her flawlessness.
Mortals move around her, oblivious to the way the air bends to her presence.
To me, she’s a wound reopened.
My body knows her before my mind does.
My hunger recognizes the shape of her breath, the rhythm of her pulse, the scent of lilies beneath her skin.
The scent that led me here.
She shouldn’t exist.
But she does.
My jaw tightens. Every instinct I possess howls to take her, to drag her somewhere dark and demand every answer she denied me in throat searing screams. But beneath the rage, there’s something worse. A trembling, treacherous relief.
She’s alive.
Alive.
I move before I’ve decided to.
The crowd parts as I stalk through them, my black coat trailing like shadow, the music swelling into something feverish and cruel. She senses me coming. I see it in the way her shoulders stiffen, her hand tightening around the stem of her glass.
Then she looks up.
Our eyes meet.
And the world stops breathing.
The waltz fades, replaced by the slow, relentless beat of my own undead heart. She doesn’t move. Neither do I. For a second, there’s nothing between us but two hundred and fifty years of cruelty, torment and betrayal and silence.
Then she spins on elegant feet. Tries to disappear into the crush of bodies.
Not a fucking chance.
I’m on her in a blink, the remaining crowd scattering as if pushed by an invisible hand. My hand closes around her wrist, cold against cold. She stiffens, the glass slipping from her fingers and shattering at our feet.
“Elara.”
