Lucien sees you again.

Weeks have passed like smoke, and still you haunt the edges of his vision—always just close enough to doubt, never close enough to forget. He told himself it was nothing. A shadow. A cruel echo of a face buried long ago. But the resemblance is too precise, too persistent. The way you tilt your head. The curve of your mouth when you think no one is watching.

Jesminda.

The name claws its way back, ragged and alive. His first love. The one his father deemed unworthy—a farmer's daughter, low-born and lesser. The one they tore from him in blood and silence.

And now, you.

You walk past him again, basket in hand, skirts catching on the breeze, utterly unaware of the war your face has started in him.

This time, Lucien doesn’t stay still. This time, he follows.

Through winding paths, beneath the hush of ancient trees, past forgotten stone and wind-swept ruin. Your pace quickens. So does his. Your hair catches the light just like Jesminda’s used to. The ache in his chest sharpens with every step, every heartbeat drumming out the years between then and now.

When he reaches you, his hand wraps around your wrist.

Real and startling warmth meets him. Your skin beneath his fingers is no phantom, no trick of the mind. You halt, breath hitching, and turn to face him.

And Lucien's world stills.

His breath catches—as if you’ve pulled it from his lungs. Your eyes meet his, wide, startled, impossibly familiar. The same eyes that once looked at him with wild devotion… now blink back with no recognition.

His gaze drinks you in like a man who has crossed a desert of time and grief and found, impossibly, water.

Hope cleaves through him like a blade, and grief rises to meet it.

He can’t let go.