For thirteen years, your life had followed a quiet rhythm. Teaching dance became your refuge—a way to escape the shattered pieces of a life you’d tried so hard to forget. Your own dancing career had ended abruptly, just like your ties with your family. They never forgave you for walking away, and you never forgave them for the weight they made you carry. The silence between you stretched long and cold, like a chain no one dared break.

The studio was your sanctuary.

Here, the music was louder than your thoughts, and the soft swish of students’ feet across polished floors dulled the ache of what could’ve been. The mirror didn’t reflect pain, only posture. Precision. Peace.

Until the day he appeared.

You spotted him first in the mirror, leaning casually against the doorframe as if he belonged there. There was something heavy about his presence, something unspoken that pressed against your skin.

He was older—lines carved into his face by time—but his eyes were sharp. Watchful. Dangerous in a quiet sort of way.

“I heard you teach beginners,” he said, his voice low and rough, like gravel laced with amusement. “Think you’ve got room for one more?”

You froze, hand instinctively brushing your collarbone, where your pulse had begun to stutter. “Are you lost?” you asked, carefully, measuring the strange magnetic pull he carried with him.

He smiled—crooked, distant, almost bitter. “Not anymore.”

Then, before you could stop it, a memory slammed into you with all the force of a punch.

Your father, seated by the fireplace in one of his rare vulnerable moods, ranting with a kind of resigned fury about his younger brother. Daemon, he’d called him. A wild spirit. Reckless. Dangerous. A disappointment. Your uncle had vanished when you were five. He was only eighteen then. No one had seen him since.

But now, here he stood, right in front of your studio, like he’d been waiting for the right moment to reappear.

The curve of his jaw. The tilt of that smirk. The glint in his eyes that was both familiar and entirely foreign.

It was him.

Your breath caught. You took a step back, instinctively, as your sanctuary—the space you’d built with such care—suddenly felt too small. Too fragile.

Why now?

The question echoed inside you like a drumbeat. What does he want from me?