[untitled]
Sleep had abandoned her weeks ago.
It circled just beyond reach, waiting until exhaustion dragged her under for an hour or two before another dream—or the absence of one—wrenched her awake.
Tonight was no different.
So Elain wandered.
Barefoot, wrapped in a thin robe against the cool night air, she slipped downstairs in search of tea. Silence. Anything that belonged only to her for a little while longer.
The entrance hall lay in darkness, moonlight spilling through the tall windows onto polished marble.
She was halfway across it when the front door opened.
A rush of cool air drifted inside.
Someone stepped over the threshold.
Broad shoulders.
Black leather.
A travel pack lowered to the floor.
Her heart lurched.
No…
Not again.
She closed her eyes.
For years, she’d caught glimpses of him everywhere.
A male with dark hair disappearing into a crowd.
Shadows stretching across a rooftop at dusk.
A familiar laugh carried on the wind before she remembered his laugh had always been too quiet to travel that far.
Her mind had become cruel in the years he’d been gone.
She counted a single breath.
Then another.
When she looked again…
He hadn’t vanished.
His shadows drifted over the marble floor.
Real.
Every impossible inch of him.
Her breath snagged somewhere beneath her ribs.
He stilled.
As though he’d heard it.
And looked up.
Time had not softened him.
It had made him dangerous.
Harder around the mouth. Broader through the shoulders. Dark stubble shadowed the face she’d spent years forcing herself not to remember. New scars traced skin she’d once imagined tracing herself.
Her pulse stumbled.
She should have felt anger.
Resentment.
Anything but this.
Instead, something long buried stirred painfully back to life.
Five years.
Five years of teaching herself not to look for him whenever a room fell quiet.
Five years of trading away tiny pieces of herself until she’d almost forgotten who she’d been before he left.
And one look was all it took for her to realise she’d only been pretending.
“Az?”
His expression didn’t change. But something dark flickered behind his hazel eyes.
His gaze drifted over her face as though committing it to memory.
Then lower.
To the diamond glinting against her left hand.
He looked at it for only a heartbeat.
When his eyes returned to hers, whatever she’d glimpsed had disappeared behind the same unreadable mask he’d always worn.
“I hear congratulations are in order.”
