The mansion breathed in silence.
Raina sat in the east-tower window, knees drawn to her chest, a blanket tightly wrapped around her shoulders. Beyond the cracked glass, dawn hovered, a pale slice of light between night's bruise and morning's promise. The moon was gone, yet the ache of eclipse clung to the stones, to her skin, to Lucien's every restrained breath.
Flashes kept surfacing.
A silver-haired child laughing beneath constellations.
Screams over snow and iron.
Lucien chained, bloodied, eyes bright with devotion and despair.
Too many lives pressed against one heartbeat.
A floorboard sighed.
"You're walking too quietly again," she murmured.
Lucien eased beside her, shoulder to shoulder under the blanket's edge. "Didn't want to wake you."
"I haven't slept."
"We survived," he said.
"For now."
They watched the wounded sky together.
"I keep seeing her," Raina whispered. "Aeris before the betrayal. She was my sister once."
Lucien's silence was answer enough.
"And I killed her," she breathed. "In another life."
"You were both at war."
"I was powerful… and cruel."
"You were alone," he corrected softly. "Power without mercy always is."
She turned to him, eyes shimmering gold. "Will I become her again?"
"Only if you forget who you are now."
The mark on her wrist pulsed history, prophecy, warning. She shivered.
"I'm scared," she admitted.
"Good." He slipped an arm around her. "Means you're still human, whatever else you are."
At noon, Maeva led her beneath the mansion, past walls older than language, into a round chamber open to the sky. Runes crawled across stone; in the center, a mirror-still pool reflected clouds and ghosts.
"This was built by the first bonded pair," Maeva said. "Step in, and the water shows the truth you fear."
"Will it hurt?"
"Yes."
Raina waded without hesitation.
Cold closed over her skin like glass.
And the world fell away.
Beasts and men littered the mud. She armored, unyielding, stood over a dying creature. Lucien, younger, knelt in chains at her feet.
"I should kill you," past-Raina said.
"Then do it," past-Lucien answered.
She raised the blade… but dropped it, fell to her knees, pulled him into a kiss fierce enough to crack fate.
Shadow-lit wedding vows.
A circle of flame. Bleeding marks split in two.
Aeris, screaming betrayal.
Then everything shattered.
Raina surfaced with a howl.
"It's only begun," she gasped.
Night Wanderings
The house no longer whispered; it spoke. Portrait eyes followed. Stones remembered.
In the library, Lucien found her tracing spines she once loved.
"You saw everything?" he asked.
"I understand now," she said, voice raw. "And I… forgive us."
"Even Aeris?"
Her answer was a long, trembling breath. "I don't know."
They kissed gently, uncertain, newborn.
Days blurred. Under Maeva's merciless drills, Raina bled, healed, grew stronger. She fought now to reclaim, not merely survive.
Each night she returned to Lucien's arms. Love deepened; the mark spread.
One dawn she woke screaming, blood on sheets, sparks at her fingertips.
"I saw fire," she sobbed. "You were dying."
"I've died before," Lucien whispered, holding her tight. "I won't again."
"Not without me," she swore.
A week later, Elias arrived with a blood-stained parchment.
Maeva read aloud:
"The Coven calls the Huntress.
Come alone, or we claim what is ours."
The mark blazed hot; her eyes flooded gold.
"We leave at dawn," Lucien said.
"No," Raina answered. "I leave at dawn. Alone."
"You'll die."
"Then I die."
He opened his mouth then shut it, accepting the truth carved in her gaze. She was no longer a girl becoming.
She was the storm returned.