The apartment held its breath as we entered.

  Valen stepped inside like he didn't need permission, and yet gave it to the space itself—each movement deliberate, each shift of his body measured, as if the room had been designed around him centuries before it ever existed. The air changed in his wake. With gravity. With stillness.

  The contrast was immediate. My loft was a study in tension: concrete floors, unfinished walls, a mess of canvases and city coats and old coffee mugs half full of paint water. A lived-in chaos, curated for solitude, what elegance there was in the art and the furnishings and clothing Eliza and Cat had chosen for me. He didn't belong in it, and yet he didn't falter. His presence cast everything into sharp relief—the crookedness of a picture frame, the scuff along the doorway, the burn mark on the desk I never bothered to fix.

  He shed his coat and set it carefully on the back of a chair, his movements stripped of excess. The way he occupied space had always been like this. Quiet. Unyielding. As though the world bent to make room for him and not the other way around.

  He stood near the window then, sharp against the washed-out city beyond. The rain had slowed. Streetlights cut long reflections through the slick pavement. In that silver-blue light, he looked even more otherworldly—tall, wide-shouldered, sharply elegant even now. The geometry of him had always been the same. Whatever shape he wore, the body obeyed a precise internal logic: lean muscle, long limbs, shoulders cut from old stone. This one carried pale skin and hair a silver so bright it looked like starlight.

  He looked like someone born from light. And like someone who had once burned in it.

  He turned to face me, and the weight of his attention pinned me as surely as his hands once had.

  "Sit," he said simply.

  I did.

  Not because he commanded. Because I trusted him.

  Valen brought the kit over without speaking, quiet and focused as he always was when I'd gotten hurt.

  When Valen knelt to examine the wrist, his fingers brushed the bruised skin with the same reverence he'd once shown to relics buried beneath cathedral ruins. My breath caught. Not from pain—from memory. From how familiar this felt.

  Resonance unfurled between us.

  I hadn't expected it to thread so easily into mine. Daeva and Ashura were not meant to heal each other—not unless their resonance was in accord. Not unless they were bound.

  But there it was—quiet and undeniable. His resonance slid through mine like silk into water, filling the spaces I didn't know were waiting.

  Valen felt it too.

  I saw it in the lift of his eyes, the smallest catch in his breath. The illusion of distance he always carried faltered.

  He didn't speak as he splinted my wrist, but when he tied the last knot, his hand stilled over mine.

  And stayed.

  I didn't pull away.

  He looked at me with a kind of hunger I hadn't seen in him in lifetimes. The ache of something remembered, and hoped for, and long denied.

  His thumb traced once, lightly, over the back of my hand.

  Then he looked away.

  "You've changed," he said.

  I didn't answer.

  Because I didn't know what to do with the way he said it—the ache of recognition.

  And in the moment that followed, I wasn't sure which one of us it frightened more.

  He stood slowly, the way one rises from memory, and crossed to the far side of the loft where a thin wash of light spilled through the high windows. He didn't ask permission. Just turned slightly, so the edge of his shoulder caught in the shadow.

  "You were never meant to carry it alone," he said.

  The words struck somewhere low. Neither accusation nor tenderness. Just truth.

  I closed my eyes for a moment, then opened them.

  "Why are you really here, Valen?"

  He didn't answer right away. His gaze remained fixed beyond the glass, on some distance that held no shape.

  When he did speak, his voice was quieter than I remembered. "The resonance here is thinning. Warping. It isn't just shift. It's pressure."

  I didn't move to speak. The sound of rain returning—a soft percussion on the windows—offered cover for the silence we both held.

  Then I said, quietly, "You're not here for the city."

  Valen didn't turn from the glass. "No."

  His reflection caught the light in fractured planes—silver eyes, long limbs drawn in perfect balance. A figure carved by starlight and gravity. I had seen him kill with that same stillness.

  "And yet here you are," I said.

  His voice was measured, almost absent. "I'm not the only one who felt the shift."

  I studied him, the angle of his jaw, the line of his throat. There was a precision to him I had forgotten, and now remembered all at once.

  "You think I came for the same reason."

  "I know you did."

  The air stretched between us.

  "You're certain?" I asked.

  Valen's gaze moved then, not to me—but to my hand. Still bandaged. Still marked by his resonance. "Certain of you? Always."

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  I didn't know how to answer that.

  He let it rest. "You want to reach him before they do."

  I looked away. "You're assuming I want to reach him at all."

  "No," he said. "If you didn't, you wouldn't be here."

  Something tightened low in my chest. Familiar. Reluctant.

  He didn't press. "They won't wait. Once they're certain, they'll move."

  I didn't speak.

  Because he was right.

  He didn't linger.

  The shift was subtle, deliberate, like a current turning beneath still water. He picked up his coat and drew it on, practiced ease layered over ritual distance. The fabric settled against him as if it belonged.

  "We shouldn't stay," he said quietly. "Not when others are beginning to notice the fault lines."

  The light caught the sharp planes of his profile. Silvery hair fell across his brow like something celestial undone. His posture held too straight, shoulders drawn tight as tempered steel.

  And beneath it all, a current of something else.

  Desire held back so long it had folded into discipline.

  When he turned to the door, the light struck his face—and for an instant, the mask slipped.

  Something older. Sharper.

  He gave it no voice.

  But across the loft, through the low morning dark, the weight of his gaze settled over me like a suspended promise.

  "I'll return," he said. "When the next shift comes."

  He opened the door. The glow from the hallway limned the curve of his shoulder, the pale gleam of his hair, the long fall of shadow.

  Then he was gone.

  The apartment expanded into the space he left behind. Not emptier. Quieter.

  I stood in it, letting the silence settle around me like dust through the bones.

  I pulled out my phone. The screen blinked back at me, notifications stacked like a silent accusation. I had three missed emails, two calls, and a string of red badges flashing from the agency Slack.

  I stared at it a moment longer, then pressed my palm lightly to the back of the phone and whispered a single syllable in the old tongue. The device shimmered briefly—secured.

  With a sigh, I hit FaceTime.

  Cat picked up immediately. Her face was too close to the camera, eyes puffy from lack of sleep and some late-night Netflix spiral.

  "Oh my god," she said before I could speak. "You're alive."

  "Barely."

  "You missed two calls from your producer, and one very panicked email from Gabrielle. I think she thinks you're in a cult."

  "Tell her it's a family emergency."

  "You don't have family."

  "She doesn't know that."

  Cat narrowed her eyes. "Wait. Is this an actual emergency or one of your ex drama things?"

  "Does it matter?"

  She blinked. "No. I love lying to rich people. Done."

  "Thank you."

  I hesitated, thumb lingering near the edge of the call. Her expression softened.

  "You look tired," she said.

  "I'm fine."

  "Uh-huh."

  "I'll check in when I can."

  "You better. If you meet somebody beautiful I at least want the details."

  "Done."

  I ended the call before the screen could betray anything more.

  The silence rushed back in.

  I set the phone down on the edge of the counter and stood there a moment longer, staring past the muted reflection in the darkened screen.

  The room still held him.

  No trace remained. No scent. No displaced air. Yet the space felt altered. Not by magic or resonance. By memory rendered proximate.

  He had walked through my apartment like it was familiar. Like it had always been part of the route. As if he had been expected.

  I moved slowly back to the chair where I had sat while he worked, my wrist still wrapped in the neat bandage he left behind. I flexed my fingers—testing pain, range, resistance. What lingered was not pain, but the imprint of his hand.

  Not the pressure. The precision.

  Valen had always touched the world as if rearranging it.

  In the years we fought together, he wore many guises—soldier, scholar, judge—but the same architecture lived beneath each: a mind like a blade, a body like a metronome, the impossible stillness he summoned when everything else collapsed into chaos.

  It had been decades since I had seen him like this. Not in passing. Not on a battlefield. Here, with no audience. No mission. Just the proximity of time and space.

  And still, he had not changed.

  The shape of him was as I remembered—tall, severe, burnished at the edges—but something deeper unsettled me. A gravity I had forgotten how to resist.

  He had felt the change in me. I had seen it move through him. For a moment, something ancient had surfaced between us.

  I did not know what to do with it.

  Not yet.

  I leaned back in the chair, tilted my head toward the ceiling, and closed my eyes.

  The wrist throbbed. The silence held.

  And outside, the city continued. Unaware of what stirred beneath its skin.

  Eventually, I rose. The floor was cool beneath my feet as I moved through the narrow hallway, fingers trailing lightly along the wall more out of habit than need. The apartment was dim, lit only by the gray cast of night pressing against the windows. Everything felt hushed, as if the walls themselves were listening.

  I peeled off the coat, then the shirt beneath—every movement slower than usual. My skin still remembered his touch. My wrist still remembered his hands.

  The bathroom light was soft, gold-tinged, and familiar. I stepped into it, watched myself in the mirror for a heartbeat too long. The marks of the fight hadn't fully faded—bruises blooming faintly along my jaw, a smear of blood dried at the temple where the Daeva's elbow had glanced me. My wrist ached.

  I undressed the rest of the way and turned the taps.

  Steam rose in coils from the porcelain. I sank into the heat slowly, knees folding, spine curving, breath leaking out in a long, steady exhale as the warmth bled into me.

  He had felt it. Of course he had. The shift in resonance not just around me—but beneath the city itself.

  He hadn't named it.

  Neither did I.

  But it was there. Moving. Changing. A presence that had once been buried so deep it could only be traced in myth and aftermath—and yet now pulsed close enough to distort the air.

  He had known before I told him. Probably before I even stepped foot back in New York.

  That was why he was here.

  That was why I had come.

  The bathwater lapped gently at the edges of the tub. I folded my arms along the rim and rested my chin there, letting my thoughts go quiet.

  We both knew what it meant, if that being was beginning to wake.

  And neither of us had said it aloud. Not yet.

  Because some names were too old to speak without consequence.