The rain had not stopped for three nights. It clung to the stone walls of the castle like a vow that refused to be forgotten. I found him again in the courtyard, where the roses never bloomed and the air smelled faintly of smoke.

He stood beneath the twisted archway, his cloak heavy with water, his eyes the color of storms. I should have turned away. I had promised myself that much. But the moment his gaze found mine, every promise I’d made unraveled like silk under fire.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I whispered.

He smiled—a slow, broken thing. “And yet you waited.”

The words struck something deep inside me, something older than my own heartbeat. He had always known how to turn my defiance into surrender. I wanted to hate him for it, but hate was never what burned between us. It was something darker, something that could not be named without consequence.

He stepped closer, and the air thickened with the scent of rain and iron. His hand brushed mine, cold as the wind that haunted the towers. The contact was brief, but it set the world alight.

“You still carry it,” he said softly, glancing at the silver band around my wrist. It shimmered faintly in the half-light—a relic of the night he’d marked me as his.

“It doesn’t come off,” I said.

“I never meant for it to.”

I wanted to tell him how cruel that sounded, how the memory of him had become both my comfort and my curse. But when I looked into his eyes, all my anger dissolved. There was ruin in them, yes—but also devotion, the kind that outlives reason.

He reached for me then, his fingers trembling as if afraid I might fade like mist. When he touched my face, the mark on my wrist pulsed with heat. The world blurred around us—castle, rain, roses—all swallowed by the same breathless quiet.

“Every life I’ve lived,” he murmured, “I find you. And every time, you leave before I can ask you to stay.”

The words sank into me like a blade wrapped in silk. I wanted to deny him, to say this was madness. But the truth trembled in my chest—I remembered, too. The faces changed, the centuries shifted, yet the ache remained the same.

“Then don’t ask,” I said. “Just find me again.”

The thunder rolled above us, low and distant. He leaned forward, and for a heartbeat, I saw the flame beneath his human guise—a shadow with wings, a creature born of longing and loss. His lips brushed mine, gentle as the start of a storm.

And then he was gone—vanished into the rain, leaving only the faint scent of smoke and the promise that somewhere, in another life, our ruin would begin again.