annis

You tell yourself that silence is just another kind of music.

The Rose Main Reading Room hums beneath its painted heavens, the fluorescents purring while the steady rustle of paper makes a weather of its own. Long tables shine with the soft fatigue of evening. You sit inside your lamp’s small island of gold, surrounded by acid-free boxes and foam cradles, and the old leather smell that books exhale after centuries of careful touch. Crusader-era manuscripts lay around you: a psalter whose spine looks like a healed wound, a fragment that keeps losing the same corner to time. Your pencil ticks against the edge of a catalogue card, a metronome for the work of naming what remains.

“Still here?” a passing guard murmurs, half-amused.

“Two more folios,” you whisper back, because quiet is a courtesy and a creed here.

You are cataloguing foliation and hand, measuring stitching, noting small miracles—a bird’s footnote scrawled by a monk, a thumbprint trapped in varnish, the way a word breaks mid-syllable as if the scribe was called to prayer and never quite returned to the same sentence. The work makes your shoulders ache in a way you welcome. There is comfort in the task of placing each thing in its lineage, of admitting it into a record that will outlive you.

When you look up, you are not alone.

A man stands two shelves away, where the shadows make a narrow valley. He is not pretending to browse. His eyes are on you—not rude, not hungry, not even curious, exactly; intent, as if measuring something only he can see. Dark coat, quiet hands, the posture of someone who has learned how not to take up space. He does not look like a researcher. He does not have a phone out. He watches you as if he has been waiting for you to lift your head.

You tell yourself it is harmless. People stare at readers all the time here—tourists hushed by the cathedral feel of the room, donors trying to fall in love with the idea of preservation, the occasional poet searching for a face to belong to a line. You lower your eyes and keep working. You do not notice your breath has shortened by a line or two.

You finish a note and rise to return a box to the cart for the vault. The room’s silence shifts around your movement. As you pass, something small strikes the parquet with a sound like a coin surrendering: a locket, iron-dark and oval, has slipped from the stranger’s pocket. It falls so near your foot that the briefest breeze of it brushes your ankle.

It springs open.

Inside lies a white lily, pressed flat, petals unfrayed, veins like the finest watermark. You expect dust; there is none. You expect the papery smell of old herbarium, and instead, a whisper of green and sweetness rises, distinct as if a florist had just broken a stem in the next aisle. Your chest tightens with a sudden, inexplicable ache. A thought crosses—ridiculous, out of nowhere—that you have seen this flower before, not as an object, but as an event. You steady your hand on the cart’s handle and do not move.

He is already bending, but you are quicker. You reach down and, without quite knowing why, pinch the locket shut before your fingers meet the petals. Cool metal meets your skin. The ache eases and then returns in the same second, like stepping in and out of sunlight.

“You dropped this,” you say, the line between habit and kindness thin in places like this.

His eyes lift to yours. Up close, they look dark the way wells look dark, because what they are holding is too deep to see. He takes the locket from your palm carefully. His fingers do not brush yours, yet somehow you feel the nearness of them like a small, retained heat.

“Thank you,” he says, voice soft enough not to disturb the quiet.

“It’s beautiful,” you hear yourself add, surprised by your own honesty. “Old?”

He studies the oval in his hand, as if confirming that it still exists. “Older than I am,” he answers, and a ghost of a smile almost happens before it isn’t allowed to.

You nod, already turning back to work, because there is safety in the lit rectangle of your table, and because something in his face presses against the part of you that does not wish to be seen. You slide the manuscript box back into its cradle. When you look up again—to be polite, to offer a small smile that says no harm done—he has stepped back.

“Forgive me,” he whispers.

It is not addressed to the room. It is not, exactly, addressed to you, either. It is the kind of sentence that knows it will have to be repeated one day and says it anyway.

“For what?” you ask before you can stop yourself.

He shakes his head once, an apology in the shape of refusal. “For being here,” he says, as if his presence itself were an offence—and then he is retreating toward the aisles, vanishing from your sight.

“Wait—” you begin, a reflex more than a choice, but the word falls empty in the air. He is gone by the time the syllable finds him.

You stand still a moment, the afterimage of him a smudge in your sight. The locket’s outline has been printed, briefly, into your skin. You rub it away and feel foolish for the superstition. The scent of lily is gone. You tell yourself you imagined it, that the room smells as it always does—paper, dust, the faint soap of janitor’s product, old wood. Your heart, however, is behaving as if you have run somewhere and cannot remember where.

A porter in a grey sweater pauses near your table, eyes flicking from your face to the boxes. “Need anything before we close?”

“No, thanks,” you say. “I’m just finishing notes.”

The lamps hum. The catalogue form waits. You sit. You try to find your place in the notes—binding threads, undecorated, later repair; rubrication inconsistent; marginal hand suggests—what? You pause. Your pen hovers over the inventory line for inscriptions, and you realise your hand has been writing without permission: All hours end—

You stop. You scratch it out. You do not know where the phrase came from. It feels as if you have overheard two people speaking and caught only the turn of a sentence as it slipped through a door. You look toward the shelves where the stranger had stood.

You tell yourself you should ask circulation whether he signed in, purely for the log, purely for the comfort of knowing the man was not a dream. You do not.

The psalter waits in its sling. You loosen the straps like a nurse unbinding a bandage. Your hands know the ritual, and your focus returns to its narrow rhythm: title, date, origin, hand, illuminations, marginalia. The work steadies you. You are good at this. You did not come here to be unsettled by strangers with antique lockets.

But the body is not a thing that agrees to be argued with. It holds onto what it noticed. As you move through the pages, you keep expecting to find lilies hidden in the creases, to see a petal stranded in the hairline crack of a gilded initial. When you do find a flower—a crude ink sketch, nothing like a lily—you almost laugh, except the ache rises again, brief and precise. You sit back and press your palm to your sternum until the muscle remembers the ordinary algorithm of beating.

Closing announcements float in. You begin to repack, placing foam where it belongs, easing the book back into its box so the spine won’t develop bad habits. You fill out the vault request and sign your name in block letters because they are legible, and because legibility is an ethic. You turn off your lamp, and the world dims around you. The ceiling seems farther away.

On your way down the aisle, you see a thin line of shadow on the floor where the locket fell. It is only a trick of light. You step over it.

In the lobby, the marble keeps its own cold silence. You show your badge; the guard stamps the time; the doors open on Fifth Avenue’s noise. Taxis weave their yellow lines through the dark streets. Winter has stripped the night down to its bare bones, and each breath leaves your mouth in a pale cloud, drifting ahead as if to lead you home. At the library steps you pause, glancing back through the glass.

The stranger is not there.

You tell yourself a story to keep the night in order. A man looked at you too long. A locket fell. You returned it. He left. People carry the strangest things in this city; you once found a pressed four-leaf clover in a mystery from 1968, a lipstick kiss in a law book, a ticket stub folded into a poem. A lily is only a flower. A locket is only metal. Forgive me is only a phrase.

You walk away, the ache in your chest softening at last. Buses sigh. A couple argues softly and laughs in the same breath. Someone’s radio survives on a balcony, trembling out an old song you don’t recognise. You slip your hands into your coat pockets and find the leftover heat of the reading room still clinging to your fingers.

At the corner, the light turns, and you cross. For a second, you think you see him reflected in a storefront window, coat a dark cutout against the crowd, but when you turn, it’s only the city being the city—faces that look like other faces, lives that pass near yours and keep on walking.

When you get home, your apartment smells faintly of paper, soap, and something green you cannot name. You set your tote on the table and pull out your notebook to make one last note for yourself to find in the morning: Check fol. 73 for marginal hand; gilding test; confirm watermarks. The pencil hesitates; you add, without meaning to: Ask about the man in the dark coat. You stare at the sentence until it blushes you into crossing it out.

You shower. You stand by the window with wet hair, the city letting down its own. You think of the locket. You think of his voice saying thank you, like the start of a longer sentence he never let himself finish. You think of lilies, though you have never been a lily person. You couldn’t even say what they smelled like, except that from tonight on, you would know them anywhere.

Sleep comes late. When it finally does, it brings you a corridor of stone and the sound of wind where a roof should be. Someone kneels where an altar isn’t. Someone is holding a white flower as if it were the last proof that something had lived. You reach for the stem.

You wake with your hand open on your sheets, palm empty, your chest sore from the pounding of your heart.

In the morning, you will tell yourself that silence is just another kind of music. Tonight, you listen to it and cannot quite decide what it’s trying to play.

Wonwoo has taught himself how to live with windows.

The penthouse is all clean angles and restraint—white walls, a long grey sofa that has never learned his shape, a table of black stone with no memory of meals. From this height, the city looks obedient: streets scrolling, lights ciphering meaning to anyone patient enough to read them. Wonwoo sits with his coat still on, because removing it would suggest rest, and rest is a language his body refuses to relearn.

He thinks of you in the lamp’s circle, the way your brow furrowed when a glyph misbehaved, the birthmark a crescent on your wrist. He has memorised these details before. He had promised himself that if he ever saw them again he would walk in the opposite direction. Mercy, he told himself, is distance.

“Leave,” he says into the glass, because sometimes words have to be spoken into existence to take.

The word does not move him.

He sets the locket on the table and does not open it. The iron oval lies there with quiet gravity, an object that survived not because it is strong but because it is stubborn. He turns away, palms the edge of the counter until his fingers ache, then wanders the perimeter of the room as if it might grow an exit he has not yet found.

Traffic rises and falls below him. Somewhere, a siren sounds thin and frantic through the dark. A helicopter scratches itself across the sky. In the kitchen, he fills a glass. He drinks, and the cold liquid does what it can to convince him he is only a man who happens to be tired.

He closes his eyes and the library returns in uncanny fidelity: plaster skies, green lamp shades, your hand steadying a page. Your voice was different this time—cultured, steadier, with the slight roughness that people who love quiet acquire as their own. You said, “You dropped this.” He had taken the locket back because that is what the scene required. He had said, “Thank you.” He had said, “Forgive me.” A liturgy of leaving. He did not leave.

The coat remains. The room keeps the shape of his not-leaving.

A memory opens without warning.

Heat pressed over the whole day. Leather tack slick with brine sweat. Camp smoke knitting itself into the wind off the water. A prayer bell somewhere, stubborn in its schedule, ringing a good hour into a bad one. Wonwoo stands with his helmet in his hands because his head is too loud to put it back on. Across the yard, a woman bends over a row of bodies. Bandages soak through before she ties the knots. She moves as if she is trying to teach the sand mercy.

You look up at him and shake your head once: no blood, not yours, not his. The look is not unkind; it just refuses to be fooled. You say, “You’re not wounded.” He says nothing because he has not been taught how to confess the kind of hurt that does not bleed. You gesture to his hands, raw where the reins cut, and add, “Sit. Let me at least wash this.”

Water is more miracle than metal ever was. He watches the red leech into the bowl as if colour is a sin that can be coaxed out with patience. You hum something under your breath that is not a psalm and not not a psalm. When he flinches at the sting of vinegar, you say, “I know.” The words are small, but they are a bridge, and he stands on them without remembering how his feet moved.

The din of the yard will not be argued with. He looks where you look and sees a boy—no beard, no story yet—trying to understand why his breath won’t stay. You touch the boy’s cheek and lie to him the way good people are allowed to lie. Afterwards, you stand very still and bow your head, and when you lift it, your face has put on its mask again. He thinks that if God is not paying attention to this, then God is inattentive.

He does not notice you have stepped away until you return. You place something in his hand, and he mistakes it for a piece of cloth until his fingers relearn petals: a white lily, fresh from somewhere that still believes in freedom. You say, “For the smell on your hands.” He brings it near because one learns obedience to simple instructions young. For a second, the air is only green and sweet and clean. He has the thought, reckless and exact: if he lives, it will be because of this.

Wonwoo opens his eyes to the present, and the locket is the only thing in the room that looks like it understands. He reaches for it and stops himself. The old discipline holds: do not invite the past closer than it already stands.

“Leave,” he repeats, softer, to no avail.

He goes to the bedroom and takes a suitcase from the closet. He lays shirts in rows, as if they were prayer beads. He chooses a passport. He does not choose a destination. He is a man who has learned to make departures look like decisions.

He sits on the edge of the bed and tries to learn the trick of imagining you safe without him. He pictures you in the library, frowning at a colophon, squinting at a watermark as if it owes you its genealogy. He pictures you on a city bus at noon, exactly the kind of person fate would never think to look for. The pictures do not hold. They dissolve into other scenes he does not want: the dull algebra of accident, the ugly lottery of crowds, the simple, indifferent math of illness. He presses his fingers into his eyes until sparks dance in his vision. He loosens his hands, and the room returns intact.

On the nightstand, a book he is not reading waits with patient disinterest. He flips it open and pretends the words are a river that might take him elsewhere. They are not. He sets the book down spine-open, hating himself for the small violence, and closes it again, apology mindless, automatic.

The suitcase remains open.

He goes back to the window because windows have, over time, been kinder to him than mirrors. The city stares back without blinking. He tracks the build of clouds over the river until he remembers to breathe in time with them. He counts seconds between siren dopplers. He speaks aloud because silence has begun to taste like hunger.

“I will not see you again,” he says to the glass, to the skyline, to the version of himself that once believed practice could make truth.

The sentence falls flat and fails to take root.

Another memory shifts.

Clay dust in his mouth. The glitter of grit when the sun loses patience. The way you held the lily by its throat so the stem wouldn’t bruise. You said, “All hours end, but love does not,” and he did not know if you were telling him a story or a diagnosis. He tucked the flower into the inside of his breastplate and later into a book and later into this oval of iron, and it never learned how to crumble. He did not either.

He picks up the locket and weighs it, pressing a thumb to its hinge. He does not open it. He will not open it. He presses it flat to the stone tabletop, the metal clicking quietly.

He imagines you sleeping. He imagines you waking. He imagines you stepping into the cold morning with your tote bag and your careful hands and the part of your mind that makes lists. He imagines the ache you must have felt—that brief press under the breastbone when the scent rose—because his own chest has not unclenched since.

He closes the suitcase and stands there with his hand on the handle until his arm shakes. He leaves it by the door like a promise, the kind he knows he cannot keep.

He turns off the lights, and the window becomes the whole wall. In the reflection, he looks like what he is: a man lonelier than furniture, a man practised at not reaching out. He thinks of every departure that did not save you and of every staying that did not either. He knows the math and does not believe in it.

“Mercy,” he says to no one, the word unfamiliar in his mouth but not unwelcome.

Wonwoo goes back to the table, takes the locket and slips it into his pocket. He shrugs out of the coat and finally lets the room meet him in shirtsleeves. He lines the suitcase against the wall as if squaring up a picture frame. He sits again, elbows on his knees, head bowed as if prayer is a posture that might still remember him.

Across the city, a bell rings. He counts its strikes and stops before the end, because endings have a way of calling themselves back when named. He closes his eyes, and the library lifts its green lamps like a field of patient stars, and you look up, and he is again the man who told himself he would walk in the opposite direction.

He does not.

You tell yourself that coincidence is just pattern wearing a disguise.

The archives settle around you —cooler than the reading room, the lights dimmed to gentleness so the vellum won’t remember the harsh sun. You badge in, sign the log and tug on cotton gloves. Tonight’s cart is a sober parade: folios in blue clamshells, a fragment pressed between mylar sheets, a chronicle whose spine sounds like crackling fire when it moves.

You take the top box and carry it to your station, a little world bordered by foam wedges, a snake weight, a pencil stub sharpened to a scholar’s impatience. The lid lifts with a quiet ceremony you never rush. Inside lies an illuminated manuscript; gold leaf glints only where the scribe needed heaven to make a point. You write the call number; you check the binding; you note the repaired cords and the honest stitches of someone respectful who came before you.

Leaf by leaf, you make a map of its small marvels: a capital that looks like a vine, a rubric whose red has faded into the gentlest rust, a fly wing fossilised in varnish like a tiny window into a different era. Minutes loosen. Your shoulders promise you they’ll complain later. You love them for it.

Halfway through, near the seam where a new hand begins, you find him.

At first, it is only the suggestion of a face, sketched in the margin like the pictures apprentices draw when sermons run long. Then the lines resolve: a brow, the set of a mouth, the improbable calm of eyes that have watched too long. A Crusader’s coif caps his head; a sword hovers beside him with the no-nonsense pride of a tool that has been told it is sacred. The style is quick and practised, the way a person draws what they know by heart.

You lean closer until the cotton of your glove brushes the edge of the drawing. The likeness is not perfect—that would be absurd—but it is too near to be coincidence. Your throat tightens and then, as if corrected by a librarian in your head, clears for sense.

Beneath the sketch, in a neat, unhurried Latin, a line runs parallel to the page’s edge, so faint you nearly miss it: Omnes horae finiunt, amor autem non. You mouth it softly. All hours end, but love does not.

You sit back and laugh under your breath. The sound skitters across the table. “Okay,” you whisper to no one, to the book, to the version of yourself that occasionally indulges in melodrama, “that’s a bit on the nose.” The joke doesn’t land anywhere. The face keeps being his.

“Everything alright?” a colleague asks from the next station, voice pitched.

“Found a marginal sketch,” you say, because that is all you can afford out loud. “Crusader. Very… committed chin.”

A soft chuckle, the community of people who have loved too many sketches to count. “Photograph it for the file,” she murmurs, and goes back to her pages.

You lift the snake weight from the box and take the institutional camera from its drawer. The red dot wakes. You angle the lens, shield the page with your other hand to avoid shadow, and capture the face and the line in two, three frames. You log the image, note the folio, add a line to your worksheet: f. 47r: marginal drawing of miles Christi; Latin aphorism beneath (ink, faint). You do not write: He looks back at me.

The rest of the manuscript behaves. It offers you saints with credible haloes, chalices that catch the light, and a map whose idea of the world is a lesson in humility. You finish your notes, return the pages to their foam, and tie the cloth tape into a bow.

You wheel the cart back through the aisles. On the way, you pass the small mirror the conservators use to check the angle of light. Your face looks like a person who has had too much coffee and too many hours, which is to say, like a person doing her best at the thing she is almost certain she was built to do. You add the box to the outgoing shelf, sign the ledger, and remove your gloves. Your fingers look more naked than they should.

At your locker, you pause. The archive hums evenly; the air stays the same temperature it was ten minutes ago; no new holiness announces itself. You close the locker gently, as if noise could hurt a page in your absence, and make your way up into the brighter world.

Night is a scroll you could read blind. The sidewalk is busy enough to be a lullaby. You stop at a deli for something careless and salty, you climb your stairs, you eat standing at the sink because the day has already used up your good chairs. You mean to watch something dumb and kind to your brain. Instead, you pull the camera file up on your laptop and enlarge the margin until the pixels argue with the ink.

He looks back at you. He keeps doing it.

You close the lid.

Sleep is a negotiation. You let the room darken one lamp at a time until the city is the only light left, a stripe on your wall. You lie down on top of the covers and listen to the radiator. Your body empties of the archive’s carefulness. Your mind does not.

When the dream arrives, it is not announced. You are simply elsewhere, as efficiently as a page flipped by a practised hand. Stone cools the air. A roof is missing where a roof ought to be. The sky is a dark river no one has bothered to name. He stands in armour the way a tree stands in bark—not adorned, only itself. A sword hangs at his side, less a threat than a vow.

He is not the exact man from the reading room, and he is also exactly him. His face is a ledger of distances. His eyes find yours, and something in your chest answers like a bell rung from inside. There is mud at the hem of his cloak. There is a scent of smoke and something green underneath it that your body calls lily before your mind has permission to.

“All hours end, but love does not,” someone says—not him, not you, not anyone you can locate—and the words line the air with a certainty you resent for how right it feels.

You reach toward him as if the gesture is older than you are, and he opens his mouth to say something that will change what your life is called. The dream does not give him time. It closes, the way a book sometimes refuses to be read past grief it did not earn.

You wake with your hand pressed over your heart, pulse kicking the inside of your palm. The room arranges itself around you: radiator, stripe of light, the faint city noise. You sit up slowly.

“Get a grip,” you whisper to the version of yourself that requires instructions.

Water helps. You drink from the tap and taste metal, Manhattan, and the ghost of mint from the glass. In the mirror above the sink, your face looks exactly like yours—which is to say unreliable as evidence. You go back to bed and pick up your notebook, meaning to write ‘buy detergent’ or ‘email mom about Saturday’ or anything that pins life to its sensible board. Your hand writes instead: ‘Omnes horae finiunt, amor autem non’.

You tuck the notebook under the pillow because some parts of you still behave like childhood and believe in proximity. You switch off the lamp and let the dark be the dark. Before sleep comes again, softer this time, you see the margin in your mind and the face in its sketch, and you tell yourself that tomorrow you will be rational, methodical, a scientist of paper.

Coincidence, you promise yourself, is only pattern wearing a disguise. And yet your hand, unconsulted, stays over your heart until you sleep.

Wonwoo walks the alleys the way a man relearns a prayer.

Smoke unspools from the quarter where oil pots were tipped, and the wind carries a brine that recollects better centuries. Mail bites his shoulders with its patient teeth. Every sound is too close to the ear—clatter of corrugated shields, horses stamping, a boy laughing like he has not yet been told what a trumpet means at night. He moves with his helmet under his arm to quiet the noise inside his head. In the crook of a shattered wall, a shadow shifts and becomes you.

You reach for his hands. Your veil pulls back enough to show the half-moon scar you keep hidden from strangers, the one he kissed last week behind the granaries when no one was watching. Your fingers smell of vinegar and clean cloth and the insistence of life. You do not waste his name on the open street; you touch his wrists where the leather rubs skin raw and say with your eyes what cannot be said aloud.

“Sit,” you command softly, as if rank does not exist here, as if the alley is a small republic for two. He obeys because he has learned obedience to what is merciful. You tip water into a basin, and the dust turns it the colour of blood; you do not flinch. You wash the burns where the sun rehearsed cruelty on him and bind the lashes the reins carved. Above you both, a muezzin’s call threads the sky, and farther off, a bell insists on Christ’s hour. Between them, your hum finds a third line—neither, both—and he steadies.

“Eat,” you say, pressing a fig into his palm as if sweetness can be smuggled into war. He almost smiles. Almost. Your gaze scans his face with the competence of a healer and the recklessness of a lover. Reckless because he is what he is—cross on his tunic, Latin in his mouth when the captains listen—and you are what you are—daughter of a man whose house gives water freely to the thirsty on both sides. Reckless because the ways you have touched each other would earn the kind of punishment that likes to call itself righteous.

He watches the way your throat moves when you swallow a breath. You have a way of standing that makes stillness look like a plan. He wants to tell you something simple—stay behind the thickest wall you can find; when the trumpet calls, make yourself as small as a prayer and twice as stubborn—but he has already learned you are not a thing that stays when pain is required to be shared.

He closes his eyes and presses his brow to your temple as if the air could be divided fairly that way. The street is briefly only the two of you and the small citizenship of light the moon grants the disobedient.

“Tonight will be bad,” he says, and his voice is steady because he has borrowed your steadiness.

“We have lived through bad,” you answer, not as a boast but as a measurement. Your hand lingers at his jaw as if memorising the map of a man that will be redrawn by morning.

He turns his face into your palm and would stay there if time were a thing he could argue with. But time is a governor who answers to no one, and the horn cuts your time in half. You tuck your veil, gather your satchel, and he almost grabs your wrist to keep you still. He does not, because he will not insult your courage with his fear.

The city tilts toward its pain. Torches leap into the dark. The air thickens with instructions shouted in three languages, each convinced it was first. He moves with his unit, and you disappear into the low doorway where the wounded already begin to be counted. He looks back once and catches the briefest glance you allow him, the one that says: I am here, and I will be until I cannot.

Hours are elastic when they are burning. The first rush is a mouth with too many teeth; the second is a tide that does not learn. He loses count of the men who call for mothers they made angry and for saints they have not spoken to since they were twelve. He does not lose count of where the doorway is that swallows you and returns you again and again with your sleeves red to the elbow.

Then the sky fills with arrows. They rise in a black, whispering cloud, obedient to a thousand thoughtless hands, and come down like rain. He has time to think this volley sounds wrong—the angle, the pace, the discipline of it is theirs, not yours—and in that same breath, he sees you break from the shelter with a strip of linen clenched between your teeth, running toward a boy whose chest is bleeding.

The arrow finds you with indifference. It enters at the side beneath your ribs, as if the space there had been kept clean for precisely this guest. For a second, you keep running because the body is dutiful; then your knees understand the new story and begin to tell it to the ground.

He is moving. He is faster than he has ever been when speed could have won him honour. He reaches you. Your mouth is trying to form a reassurance for him; blood interrupts your speech. He catches you before the street can claim you entirely and knows by the shaft, by the cut of the fletching, by the cheap glue, that the bow that sent this was strung by hands that share his bread.

“No,” he says. He looks toward the line of his comrades and does not see faces, only the general shape of betrayal wearing helmets.

“Help… him,” you manage, eyes sliding toward the boy you were running to save.

“You,” he answers, because grammar has no patience left for charity.

He breaks the shaft because he has done this for others, and your breath rasps hatefully at his competence. He lifts you, and the world shrinks to your weight and the careful task of not jarring you. He avoids your father’s doorway; he cannot bear for the last room to be the place where you have mended so much. He takes you to the ruined chapel on the edge of the quarter where children dare each other to pray and run laughing when they answer.

Roof gone. Altar split. Icons scraped until the wood confessed it was only wood. Moonlight through smoke draws streaks of light through the air. He lays you where an altar should be, careful as a scribe laying down gold leaf. Your veil slides, and he smooths it, because if he can fix this one small thing, then perhaps the larger thing will take the hint.

Your lips are pale. Your breath measures wrong. He looks for something to press against the wound and finds only his own cloth. He presses. The warmth of you runs over his fingers, honest as truth and twice as costly.

“It’s not deep,” you lie, because good people are allowed liars’ privileges when fear would otherwise win the fight.

“I will carry you out of this city,” he promises, and it sounds believable because he has not yet met the version of himself that knows what it is to be too late.

He looks around for anything worthy enough to be near you at this hour and sees a patch where small things have dared to grow in the cracks. He finds a lily among the stubborn blades—white, whole—and brings it to the altar ruins. He places it on your chest above the place where the arrow entered, and his hands shake with a fury that has run out of places to hide itself.

“Do you remember,” you whisper, and the whisper is so soft he thinks perhaps it is only something his mind imagined, “the cistern where the swifts drink at dusk? Take me there, in your mind.”

“I am there,” he says, because he can be two places at once if you ask in that voice, “the water is black and kind, and your hand is on my sleeve.”

Your eyes try to smile. He presses his forehead to your knuckles and feels the cool of your skin. Words pile up behind his teeth and refuse to go through the door. The ones that do cross are blunt.

“Why not me,” he begs to no one he has ever seen, “why not me?”

He looks up into the roofless dark and does what he has never done in this posture: he shouts at the God he serves.

“Is this Your mercy?” he demands, voice scraping, “Is this Your holy arithmetic? You preach love and then count like this?”

The chapel takes his blasphemy the way a sponge takes water—without argument, only absorption. He feels the exact instant when the warmth that used to rise under his breastbone at the name of Christ goes out, like a hand taking its heat away from his back. The absence is total and exquisitely precise. He does not care. He would burn any cathedral if a single stone would change its mind and become a body you could live in again.

Footsteps enter the ruin with the callous courtesy of soft leather. A figure stands in the crumbled doorway. Robe dark, hands clean, a tonsure that shines in moonlight.

“Son,” the priest says, “do not waste the little time grief gives you. There are accounts beyond this city. There are lives beyond this hour.”

Wonwoo turns in disdain.

“If you have come to make God legible to me, leave,” he says, “His book is closed.”

The figure steps closer, the moon stitching silver along his sleeve.

“Not to explain,” he answers, “to offer. You love her. Your face is the face of a man who has finally met what he was made to worship and has been told to let it go. I can let you keep it.”

The words fall oddly in the chapel, as if the walls remember other bargains and are bracing themselves.

“Keep what?” he asks, and the question is not an invitation so much as a dare.

“Time,” the priest says gently, “yours. Enough of it to see her again. Enough to be there when the world is kinder to the love taken from you too soon.”

Wonwoo lifts your hand and presses it to his mouth as if you can be convinced to stay by being told how necessary you are to the air he breathes. Your pulse brushes his lip.

“At what price?” He asks because even in blasphemy, he has learned to haggle.

“The coin you do not value now,” the priest answers, and the kindness in the tone is a precise cruelty, “your soul. It is already halfway out of your body. Let it go the rest of the way with my permission, and I will not count it as theft. I will count it as an exchange.”

He looks down at you, and his surroundings fade. He sees, with a clarity that will never leave him, the way your lashes have caught a grain of sand, the way your mouth shapes his name, the way the lily lifts and settles with the small, stubborn remainder of your breathing. He understands that there is no arithmetic that returns you to him in this hour.

He is a man carved to decide quickly under pressure; the habit keeps him alive longer than men with better stories. He sets his jaw.

“Say it,” the priest prompts, “agree, and what remains of this night will balance differently. There will be a path for you in the years. There will be—her, when the wheel comes round.”

He does not believe in wheels. He believes in the weight of you, and the smell of smoke, and the exactness of grief that has no patience left for theology.

“Yes,” he says, and the word is ugly and beautiful at once, “whatever I am, take it. Give me time to see her again.”

Something—not a wind, not a light—moves through the ruin, and the walls lean in as if to witness the change.

“Done,” the priest says, “and done again.”

Wonwoo looks back at you to memorise what he will spend the rest of his forever searching. Your eyes are on him. They are the clearest thing in the ruin. He leans until his brow meets yours again and says into your skin what the chapel does not deserve to hear and the city cannot punish because the hour is too far gone.

“All hours end,” he breathes, “but love does not.”

Your mouth moves, and he almost hears the answer he is waiting for. Then the lily stops moving. Outside, arrows learn another sky. He gathers you and the flower and the wreckage of his faith and steps into the remainder of the night as if it were a door he has only now learned how to open.

Rush hour makes a river of bodies, and you have long learned how to float.

The train bursts into the station with its usual rattle, doors gasping open to swallow the sea of people. Perfume, cold iron, and old brake dust braid the air. You step in sideways, shoulder-first, and find a sliver of space by the pole, knuckles whitening as the car lurches back into the tunnel.

He is three bodies down, the only one not negotiating for inches. The crowd eddies around him as if he has learned a private geometry of stillness. He doesn’t reach for the rail. He doesn’t brace his knees. The car lurches; your knuckles whiten; his balance holds as if the train is merely passing through him. When the lights strobe across his face, he looks up at the exact moment you do, and your eyes catch across the hiccuping fluorescent.

Your breath hitches.

You glance at the overhead map, at the ads—lawyers with too-perfect smiles, a new streaming show you won’t watch—at anything that might distract you. The train bumps through its stations, each name blinking past like a fact you will remember later. You pull your scarf higher.

The car is a choir of small lives. A woman taps a recipe into her notes app. A teenager falls asleep on a friend’s shoulder the second the doors close. Someone laughs into a phone and then apologises for the noise, like it’s unwelcome. You hold the pole and try to pretend you haven’t learned to listen.

When you look again, the stranger hasn’t looked away. A tunnel light slashes across his face; for a second you see him as a photograph—clean lines, more shadow than expression—and the ache you’ve been ignoring presses under your ribs again.

Two stops later, the crowd loosens. A seat opens between a man in paint-splattered pants and a woman corralling a stroller with one foot. You move without thinking. Your thigh finds the seat’s plasticky chill; your bag topples, and you fumble it back into order. When you look up, he is there, sliding into the space opposite yours with the same infuriating stillness, as if motion were a courtesy he extends only to others.

For a beat too long, neither of you remembers what people usually do with their eyes. You choose the train window and get only your own reflection. He chooses the floor and gets your shoes and the shadow your knees make. The train slows, throws a little fit, and then coasts.

You are not going to speak. It is New York; the social contract is mostly made of looking elsewhere. But your mouth, treacherous with curiosity, opens before your sense can close it.

“We keep running into each other.”

He studies the braid of your scarf for a heartbeat, then meets your gaze. His reply lands like a gentle truth.

“I’ve tried not to.”

A full train doesn’t deserve that line. It belongs somewhere with better acoustics—an empty church, maybe, or a stairwell that knows your name. You look down at your hands, and you notice, with a flare of embarrassment, that you’ve been pressing your thumb against your inner wrist, right where the small crescent of your birthmark lives. The skin there is warm, not burning, just the sensible heat of a body.

A busker boards two cars down and works his way forward. He sings about a city that both loves and forgets its people, and about someone who didn’t stay, and someone who did. The cup fills with coins and folded bills. He doesn’t reach your row; the doors open at the next stop, and the singer leaves.

You feel the pull of your stop before the announcement—your weight leaning minutely toward the doors, fingers checking the strap of your tote. A thought creeps in: touch his sleeve when you pass. Ridiculous. Intimate. You do not.

The chime first, the slide of doors after. You step out onto the tile of the underground.

You don’t look back. That, in itself, is a kind of looking. Your feet know the drill: up the stairs, through the turnstile, and the particular left that leads to the exit.

Blocks later, your front door comes into view. Inside, home is lights you forgot to turn off and the leftover warmth of your morning mug. You leave your coat open because the apartment’s heat is slow; you kick your boots into some semblance of order; you drink water and savour the day. You try to start a show and stare through it until even the recap would be embarrassed for you. The urge to call someone hums and fades; you do not want a conversation about strangers on trains. You want proof.

Your laptop makes its way onto your lap. You draft a message to a colleague—Maya would know which finding aids might hide a similar hand—but your fingers pause over the keyboard. This is not a question you are ready to ask out loud. You delete the draft and tell yourself you’ll walk it back tomorrow, when the day is bright and coffee makes your mind a stricter librarian. Eventually, the bed persuades you.

Sleep takes you in pieces.

Heather, springy, brushing your calves. The sky is stretched thin and blue. Wind shoulders the clouds from one hill to another. Your skirt is muddied to the knee. Your hands are stained with something that will wash if there is washing left to do.

The glen holds its light as if hoarding it for a longer winter. A dun horse at the edge, ears angled. A man swings down, and the ground welcomes him. Plaid slants across his chest, not decoration but statement. The steel at his hip is not silvered pride; it has the look of use. His eyes find you.

A whistle—two notes—human, not bird. You could hum it if someone woke you and asked. You do, but only in your head.

A low stone bridge, water bubbling under, white foam in the current. Your palm meets his wrist, then doesn’t, and then does again. He says something you don’t catch, and then you do; your name. Elspeth. It arrives in an accent you haven’t encountered, and it fits you better than anything you’ve been called all week.

Smoke, peat-sweet and stubborn. Laughter cut by the clap of hooves and the smell that arrives before men with bad intentions. A word you shouldn’t know—reiver—lands in your stomach. The hillside stiffens; the air goes tight as a bowstring.

He could run. He does not.

Beloved, the wind says—or maybe it is him, or the hill, or the piece of you that has always known the exact weight of that word.

You jolt awake. The radiator ticks. A siren makes a quick geometry across your ceiling. You sit up and press your palm against your inner wrist again, where the crescent lives.

You breathe slowly, like a person learning how again. The dream peels away, leaving only wet edges. You make yourself catalogue one detail at a time—bridge, plaid, the whistle, the river trying to win its argument with rock. You are not afraid of forgetting; you are wary of believing.

You reach for your notebook on the nightstand and write: Two notes—whistle? Bridge with three stones missing on the west side. “Reiver.” Ask archive about 16th-century Border skirmishes; oral histories? On the next line, a betrayal of sense slips out: Subway—man again. You close the notebook on the treason and slide it under your pillow, just as you did the night before.

The apartment’s temperature has changed by a degree while you weren’t looking. You pull the blanket higher and let the second sleep try its hand. The hills do not come back immediately.

Rain now, thin and mean, needling through wool. The horse’s flank is hot under your palm; his hide shivers. He stamps and tells you what he thinks of thunder. You can smell peat and wet iron and the small, sour breath of fear. Not yours. Not his.

His mouth finds a line you will always follow. Your forehead touches his, and the wind settles for one beat. It is not a kiss, but it has the decency to be more than not.

Voices on the ridge. Metal clanging against metal. He pulls back, and in that instant, you understand the exact size of a glen—large when you want to hide, small when danger wants to find you. You grip his sleeve. The plaid is rough and familiar. He says nothing; his eyes say everything.

You wake again, gentler this time. The clock tells a compassionate lie—there is still enough night left if you can convince your body to settle down. You lie on your side and you count your breaths. You count from your stop to his in reverse. You practice what you will say if you see him again in a context with more dignity than a subway car, and then you practice saying nothing at all. You practice having a spine. You let your hand rest on your wrist on the small crescent. The dark keeps your secret and calls it sleep.

Wonwoo walks along the long edge of Central Park, letting distance do what rest could not.

Pigeons argue about nothing with the commitment of politicians. A dog forgets its owner and remembers them again. He thinks, for a block or two, of breakfast. Somewhere up ahead, near the stone bridge, the sound finds him: a bagpipe lifting a thin, defiant ribbon of music into the crisp air, the tune stitching the present to a seam he has not touched in centuries.

He stops without choosing to. The note holds and turns, and the air goes green in his mind. The bridge becomes another bridge. The thin winter sun thickens. He remembers hills. The path drops its asphalt and becomes wet turf. The city’s edges fold.

Smoke from the hearth turns the rafters soft, and the room is warm with the kind of welcome that has learned to live through war. Your father claps Wonwoo’s shoulder, then nods—judgment rendered, sentence: bread. A platter lands on the table. Children orbit the benches; a dog claims the fire’s edge. You move through it all like the answering thought to a question a house has been asking for years. You set a bowl before him, gaze steady, mouth undecided between challenge and smile. Your father says, “You’ll take meat with us, rider.” Wonwoo inclines his head, grateful for simple orders. A woman presses a heel of bread into his palm. You sit opposite, your plaid a diagonal of loyalty across your chest, your dirk wearing its purpose openly. When Wonwoo reaches for the bowl, his sleeve rides back; your eyes find the iron oval at his wrist. He feels the locket’s weight confess itself to your gaze. He leaves it hidden; the hour is not yet ready for miracles.

The talk is practical—fences, weather, and the price of oats. The old man—chieftain not by crown but by the way the room adjusts itself to his breathing—asks where Wonwoo has ridden from and where he intends to ride next. Wonwoo answers with roads as if naming them is enough to prove he belongs to them. Later, by the door, your father leans close enough and says, “You keep your hands where my daughter can see them, aye?” It is not a threat. It is a contract written in the pen of affection. Wonwoo bows and meets your glance over the old man’s shoulder. Your eyebrows sign a private treaty neither patriarch will ever read.

—

You walk the ridge line as you name plants with lazy precision—bog myrtle, tormentil, whin—and tell him what each can heal and what each will ruin if you mistake one for the other. He does not pretend to know these things. At the burn, you squat, dip a hand, flick water at him just to see who he is when surprised. He takes it and does not retaliate. This earns him the reward of your laugh, small and not yet loaned to anyone else today.

You sit on a flat stone near the bank. You unsling your bow to tighten the sinew, and when the string sings, you hum the same two notes—habit or charm. Wonwoo could name nothing more dangerous than tenderness in a valley with too many places to hide danger. Still, he takes the locket from his cuff where he keeps it like a pulse and opens it into the air between you. The lily holds its impossible colour, the ghost of green rising patiently.

Your face alters without warning or apology. The planes of it remember other light. Your mouth loses its ready barbs and finds a shape he has not allowed himself to picture for years. You reach, but stop your hand an inch short, breath catching on the old edge of a name.

“Anna,” you say—no, you exhale—and then blink at yourself as if betrayed by your own certainty. Your eyes lift to his, cataloguing the exactness of his brow, the steadiness that is not calm but training, the mouth that has learned too many vows.

“Elspeth,” he replies.

You touch the locket then, and when he places it in your palm, the change is swift, undeniable, not subject to debate. Your throat works. Your lips brush the oval—an instinct so old it no longer asks permission from the mind—and the words you give him are not a test, not an experiment, but a verdict handed down by a court older than law: “My beloved.”

—

The shed is a square of stone pretending to be a room. Straw means well. A blanket tries its small, faithful best. Wonwoo unknots the ties of your plaid with the care of a man defusing a present. Your fingers, quick and sure, undo his buttons, the pads of them measuring the old ridges of work and war.

There is a moment of forehead to forehead, breath tangled, where both imagine they can bend the arithmetic of fate by the simple discipline of wanting. He kisses the small scar under your jaw—horse, fifteen, a dare—and the corner of your mouth where courage sometimes masquerades as insolence. You laugh once, surprised at yourself. When you draw him in, the shed becomes a liturgy the valley can hear but will not report. Straw scratches ankles; the blanket apologises; for a beautified span of minutes, their bodies outvote their times. He places his hand over the steady drum at your breastbone. Later, you lie on your sides, knees crooked, and the locket settles on your skin as if it has come home.

“Stay,” you breathe, voice roughened by joy and the knowledge of its scarcity, “let them take the hills and call them by the wrong names. We’ll keep what’s ours.”

“I will,” he answers, meaning it as fully as a man is permitted to mean anything.

—

The ridge smells different before Wonwoo knows why. He runs the ditch-side path, the gorse snagging at his coat. Hoof prints cut the mud into indentations. The first bodies are not yours. Mercy pauses to be counted and is found insufficient.

At the wall, men try to be taller than what they’ve witnessed. Some succeed only in being older. Your father places a hand on Wonwoo’s arm to anchor him and then removes it because anchors break ships as often as they save them. The old man’s mouth tries your name; the air denies him the right to finish it.

You lie beyond the lean of stones. The wound is unambiguous, the kind favoured by cowards. The plaid is a spill of pattern doing its best to keep the shape it was woven for. Your eyes are turned toward the burn. He kneels so fast the ground lowers to meet him.

“Beloved,” he whispers.

There is still heat in the skin at the hinge of your jaw. There is not enough anywhere else. The locket slips from your chest against his fingers and clocks the moment into his bones. He wants a hundred enemies; the hill gives him only the silent competence of harm already done.

“All hours end, but love does not,” he tells the air because the air at least has the decency to stay and listen.

He knows, kneeling there with the burn talking past you both, that whatever the hour asks, he will answer with your name.

The piper drags his last note through the cold and lets it go. A span of silence follows, and Wonwoo’s breath returns to him. The bridge ahead is stone again, not quarried out of some older memory.

He puts a hand briefly to his chest, where a flower once learned the inside of armour. His fingers find only cloth. He lowers his hand and keeps walking because walking is the one thing the present still allows.

You decide that the cure for dreams is daylight and data.

The archives receive you with their familiar hush as you badge in, sign the log, tug on your gloves, and roll a new cart to your station. Today, you have a plan: find what is real, so the unreal will quiet down.

The psalter from Scotland waits in a blue clamshell. The leather is a soft, weathered brown; the stitching is the competent work of someone who loved honest repairs. You loosen the straps and lock the book into its cradle.

Leaf by leaf, you take the measure of the hand. Initials that begin as threads and become branches. Margins spangled with minor wildlife—fish with human faces, snails winning races. The scribe’s black sits inside the page as if it were always meant to be part of the story.

Midway through the psalter, the margin begins to take itself more seriously. A slim line of text hides near the seam, ink faded to grey. You angle the page, lift one edge with a snake weight, and bring your face nearer than protocol prefers.

Omnes horae finiunt, amor autem non.

You translate without needing to: All hours end, but love does not. The handwriting is not the same as the Crusader sketch—this script is later, more practised, less impulsive—but the sentence lands like a stone in the same pond, rings spreading inward and out.

You do not breathe for a count of five. Then you do, because oxygen is necessary.

You photograph the line. You log the folio number. You write a sober note you can live with: Ps. Scot., f. 82v: marginal Latin maxim (same phrase as Crusader ms., different hand).

Maya drifts past in her sweater, tea in a dented thermos that has never met a dishwasher. She knows something is different about your silence.

“What did you catch?” she asks.

“A phrase,” you reply. “Seen it before.”

Maya leans in. Her eyebrows make a small, respectful arch. “Poetic scribe. We hate that.”

“Different hand,” you add, too quickly. “Different century.”

“So it travelled,” she murmurs. “You know how maxims migrate. Want me to run a quick search through the proverb collections?”

You should say no. You should keep your private superstition folded in your pocket like a receipt you mean to throw out later. You nod instead.

“Thanks,” you say. “And—Gaelic sources? Sixteenth century? I need to check something about Border sayings.”

Maya tilts her head with the fond suspicion of a cat. “Weird dream to footnote?”

“Something like that,” you admit, and the confession is lighter than you expect.

The day becomes a disciplined hunt. You pull the books you need—proverb anthologies, studies of marginalia, a slim monograph on how aphorisms travel in the edges of devotional texts.

Your notebook becomes a nervous system for wonder. On the left-hand pages you record the facts: call numbers, folios, dates, hands, and provenance. On the right, you gather the curiosities: quick sketches of familiar-looking faces, stray initials that ring like bells, the same line that keeps showing up. You paste in printouts carefully, and you draw arrows, trying to coax a map into existence.

Maya returns, depositing a small pile of books to the ever-growing pile on your workbench. “Latin proverb is not in the usual suspects,” she says. “Closest I can find is Augustine-adjacent formulations, but this exact wording is elusive. Might be a scribe’s home-cooked wisdom that got fashionable. Gaelic—there are a few love lines that rhyme hours with something like fate. Nothing this clean.” She sips her tea, eyes amused. “Who are we chasing?”

You could say nobody. You could say a stranger on a train. You say the part that is allowed.

“A margin,” you answer. “And a sketch. And now this.”

Maya’s kindness never clucks. “Okay. There’s a Scottish psalter fragment in microfilm with notoriously cranky margins. Want me to pull it?”

“Yes,” you say, so quickly you drop a pencil. It rolls to the floor and under the neighbouring table. You crouch to retrieve it and encounter, briefly, the world upside down: steel chair legs, the hem of Maya’s skirt, your own boots, the book’s cover. When you right yourself, the room looks new and somehow exactly the same.

Microfilm makes you submit to it. You thread the cranky spool, coax the machine into magnanimity, and scroll through the grainy spaces of the past. You tell your eyes to be patient. They obey for longer than you expect. Columns blur, resolve, blur again. You find a margin that looks like it was meant to hold something, but then changed its mind. The writing is too faded to be legible. You copy what you can, promise yourself you’ll request the reel again if sleep refuses you later.

On your next break, you check the database of image permissions and request a higher-resolution capture of the Crusader sketch. You hover over the form for a second and add, need to compare marginal phrases across holdings under the guise of professionalism.

You eat a sandwich at your station while flipping between tabs. Your inbox pings with two automated confirmations, a politely delayed response from Digitisation, and a one-line note from Maya: Border ballads—try Child #191; not our exact phrase, but kin to it.

Hours lengthen, then end, as they promise. The archivist’s closing call ripples through the room. You log folios, tie bows and put each book to bed.

Maya shrugs on her coat. “Text me if you find the Holy Grail,” she says, half-joking.

“It’ll be a footnote,” you answer. “But I’ll text.”

“Good. And… hey?” Her voice softens. “Don’t let it spook you. Patterns love parlour tricks.”

“I know,” you say, and you mean it. Still, your hand is on your wrist again when you answer, thumb circling your birthmark inexplicably.

Home is a topography of simple tasks. You hang your coat, set the kettle, and line up the mug. While the water boils, you type in a search on your laptop:  Iconography of Crusader knights, marginal portraits, typologies. What you get is a flood of serious men with serious swords and very little in the way of your certainty. You feel both chastened and emboldened. You will need better terms. You will need time.

Steam fogs the kitchen window. You drink tea and give your hands something warm to hold while your mind performs triage. You think of the train car and the balance of a body that did not negotiate. You think of the dream’s low bridge and the word you had no business knowing. You think of the locket opening.

You sit at your desk and begin an email to yourself so tomorrow-you will be greeted by the discipline of tonight-you: To do—Compare hand of Latin in Scot. psalter with fourteenth c. miscellany (NYPL Ms.). Check microfilm notes (reel 232A). Ask Maya to pull Child Ballads commentary. Look into medieval lily symbolism in border regions (funeral? courtship? joke?). You add: Silver locket?

The cursor blinks, patient. You delete the last line and retype it. You let it stand.

When sleep approaches, it does so with its own set of findings.

You close your eyes and try to say the Latin in your head without meaning it. It refuses to be only words.

All hours end, but love does not.

You do not know whose love the sentence claims. You tell yourself a story: a phrase travelled; a hand copied; a sketcher practised a face enough to discover a type; you are a person who wants the world to make sense and is therefore finding sense everywhere.

You turn onto your side and, to your own surprise, you almost believe yourself.

Your phone buzzes once on the nightstand. A message from Maya: Found a stray: French pamphlet, late 1780s, margin motto suspiciously similar to yours. Will request. Sleep. A beat later, another buzz: Also, get some air tomorrow. The living need maintenance too.

You smile into the dark at her friendship. You set the phone face down and count the day’s proofs like prayer beads. When you run out, you keep counting, and sleep takes that as permission.

You go because you promised Maya to be a person who remembers joy.

She insisted on sequins; you compromise with a velvet half-mask and a dress that has a semblance of behaving. The loft is already warm with people by the time you step out of the elevator—paper lanterns floating, a DJ in lace gloves keeps the room’s pulse steady, and champagne is poured in coupes because the birthday girl has a thing about stems. You have promised yourself an evening of disobedience from your research. You even left your notebook at home, a gesture that feels almost indecent.

Maya appears with a glass of the golden bubbles.

“Two hours,” she says, raising it towards you. “No manuscripts. No Latin. Only joy.”

“You wound me,” you protest, grinning despite yourself. “I was going to talk about watermarks.”

“I will throw you in the Hudson.”

“Fair.”

You let joy overtake you: dancing without choreography, laughing when a friend’s peacock mask loses a feather and the entire circle treats it like a fallen soldier, delivering a toast to a woman you like because she keeps plants alive and people seen. For a stretch of songs and sweat, you manage it—the losing of the day’s edges, the letting of your body choose without minutes organising the choice.

And then you see him.

Mask simple, black, no plumes or sequins to hide behind. Elegance that does not audition for approval. A suit that fits like it has known him longer than he has known himself. He stands a step back from the thickest current of bodies. The moment your eyes find his, your lungs perform their familiar trick of forgetting how to function.

Maya follows your gaze. “Well,” she murmurs into her glass, very pleased. “Somebody grew out of a manuscript.”

“He’s—” you begin, and have no noun that feels sufficiently cautious.

“Hot,” she supplies, utterly unscholarly. “Go.”

“No,” you say, but your feet, the traitors, are already moving.

You pass conversation as you cross the room—Oh my God, where did you get your mask, I’m quitting my job tomorrow morning, no really, he ghosted me but in a feminist way—and wonder which of these languages you speak tonight. When you reach him, he is watching the dancers.

“Hello,” you say, because it is the only honest beginning. “Do you always haunt parties you weren’t invited to?”

His eyes move to you but do not startle. “I was invited,” he says softly.

You laugh, a bit too brightly, because the drinks are doing their wet work in your blood. “To this one?”

“To this one,” he confirms. Under the black of his mask, his mouth curves in reluctant amusement.

“I like your mask,” you add.

“It does its job,” he says, which is to say: it keeps people from seeing him fully.

You are not going to do this, you tell yourself. You will not be the woman who forces a story to begin. You do it anyway.

“Dance with me?”

He looks toward the floor where bodies are twirling through the bass lines. He looks back at you, and whatever lives behind his eyes is carefully hidden before you can read it. “I don’t dance.”

“Liar.”

He bends his head, conceding the point in theory if not in practice. “Not tonight.”

“Then talk.” You take a small step closer. “You said something to me on a train.”

“I did.”

“Say something else, then,” you challenge, smiling because you do not want to admit you are shaking slightly.

He leans in, and the smell of him is the maddest sobriety—clean, faint traces of citrus, and a note that seems uniquely him. His mouth nears your ear, and when he speaks, it is no more than a whisper.

“You should not be near me.”

You flinch. Heat climbs the back of your neck. Offence and confusion arrive at the same time and cannot decide who will lead.

“Okay,” you say, and are proud, later, of the calm in it. “Then I won’t be.”

You turn, not dramatic, not wounded—just leaving, which is its own drama. You find Maya in the kitchen arguing lovingly with a bowl of olives. “I’m tapping out,” you announce.

She clocks you in an instant. “You good?”

“I’m a scientist of paper,” you say, as if that sentence answers anything. “I should go home and not talk to men in masks who think they’re prophets.”

“Do you want me to come?”

“Stay. Please. Dance for both of us.”

“Text me when you land.”

“Yes, Mum.”

You leave while the party is still going—lights still pulsing, gossip still benign. In the hallway, the air cools and quiets. The elevator’s mirror gives you back a face that looks a little bruised. On the street, wind scrapes the glitter from your hair.

He did not say I don’t want you. He said You should not be near me. Which is a different cruelty. Or a different kindness. You do not know which, and you keep not knowing all the way to your door.

Wonwoo has never liked rooms where faces are invited to hide.

But he is here because you are here, and because every other choice his discipline proposes collapses under the simplest weight of your presence. The mask is a courtesy to the evening. The suit is armour of a more modern kind. He stays at the edge of the room.

You find him. Of course you do. You arrive with velvet and competence and a drink that insists on being elegant. He prepares himself to be wise and is not.

When you ask if he dances, he wants to tell you about floors in other countries that learned his steps before he did. When you lean just enough, he wants to unlearn eight hundred years of caution. When you shine, he wants to believe in basic things like gravity and mercy.

Instead, he tells you the truth he has. You should not be near me. He watches the sentence hurt you, and he takes that hurt like the penance he was due for. You leave quickly, and the space where you stood fills with dense silence.

Music changes key. A woman’s laughter climbs the scaffolding and hangs a flag. The room takes on a sheen of unreality it cannot sustain. The smell of wax and wine and powder reaches across the years to take him by the throat.

Gold light everywhere, the candles unionised and overperforming. The ceiling at Versailles is a masterpiece of art. Silk is rehearsing its arguments with skin in every corner. A masked ball with a queen who needs to be consoled by extravagance. He is in borrowed livery, a tutor’s anonymity draped over a body that has learned to pass among ranks without becoming one.

You are standing off to the side, needle-proud and laughing with the kind of disbelief only people who have held hunger can afford. The dress doesn’t belong to you, not really, but you are wearing it as if philosophy had finally found a use. Your mask is an afterthought; your eyes do the work. He hears you before he sees you, and his body recognises the sound before his mind can catch up.

When he is near, you turn your face toward him. Your gaze strips him of disguise. It takes the powdered queue, the white gloves, the measured bow, and returns him to himself.

“Do I know you,” you ask, mischief rippling under the velvet of the question, “or do I only want to?”

“Both,” he says, because lying would be an insult.

“Geneviève,” you offer, tilting your mask, “for tonight.”

He does not mean to touch the locket. He has kept it tucked away. But your hand finds it—immediate—and the iron oval opens as if it has been waiting for your touch. The lily has endured another century; it breathes a green that refuses to fade. You don’t flinch. You press it to your mouth.

“I know you from somewhere I cannot name,” you murmur.

He should leave you in the light because darkness owes you nothing. He does not. He waits until the corridor behind the card room is draped in shadow and the plaster has given up pretending to be marble. He presses you to the wall, and you meet him with your mouth.

It is not a gentle kiss. It is an argument where both parties win. Your hands, work-strong, find the back of his neck; his hands, callus for different reasons, bracket your ribs. There are hitches and half-laughs and the slap of palm against plaster. He follows the line of your throat with his mouth, and you let your head angle in favour of the trajectory of his lips. His coat bunches under your grip; he lifts your skirts and discovers he has not forgotten how to worship with his hands. The corridor understands privacy. You pay for it with urgency and gratitude.

“After,” you whisper against his jaw, “tell me your true name.”

“I will,” he promises.

Revolution arrives like a joke. Pamphlets breed. Someone throws a rock harder than they meant to, and it hits the correct window to make everyone decide the reign should end. The crowd outside is its own orchestra—boots and the percussive clatter of intent becoming action. He turns to you to say, ‘Run,’ and finds your smile catching the light. You tug the locket once, as if to test whether the chain will betray you. It will not. You nod, and you both step into the night.

The air is hot with speeches. The mob is many things—hungry, right, wrong, bored, holy—and one thing always: indifferent to individuals. The press of bodies becomes a physics problem. Wonwoo keeps you against the wall, a poor shield against numbers. You try to laugh because laughter has saved you before. It cannot purchase the space you need.

He feels the exact moment when you are lifted off your feet by the wave of people. He has fought tides more merciless than men, but bodies become water when they decide to, and you are carried three steps away and then seven and then so many he can no longer count. The last time he sees your face that night, your hair has come down, and your mouth is open, and the sound you are making is silent. When he reaches the place where you were, there is only the emptiness of you, a shoe with a bent buckle and the old, precise quiet that grief uses to introduce itself.

In New York, a woman in a red mask trips over her own heels and laughs, and the echo is enough to make him put a hand to a wall to confirm the century. He breathes.

He told you not to be near him because the difference between a ball and a mob is sometimes only an hour. He does not follow, because he has followed you for too many centuries that did not forgive him for it.

Wonwoo imagines this city picking you up and putting you down somewhere that will be kind to your ankles. He imagines you at home, removing sequins and recovering your dignity, making a face at yourself in the mirror that only you are allowed to see. He closes his eyes long enough to let the old Paris light fade, then opens them to the honest dark of Brooklyn and begins the long, unwitnessed walk back to himself.

You decide walls are made for research you cannot fit on paper.

Maya is already at a table with her laptop open and a stack of requests flagged in neon tabs when you enter. She pushes a folder toward you.

“Paris, 1788,” she says. “Ledger and pamphlet. Same hand? You tell me.”

You loosen the string, lift the cover, and the smell of ink and old starch lifts too. The ledger is tidy: narrow columns, numbers penned neatly. On the back flyleaf, a different nature intrudes—looser script, impatient, someone who has waited for a margin the way the hungry wait for bread. The ink has browned to that particular polish you know.

Omnes horae finiunt, amor autem non.

All hours end, but love does not.

The stroke is not the same as the Crusader margin, nor the psalter, and the rebellion of differences only strengthens the fact of sameness. You slide the ledger aside and take up the pamphlet, a flimsy thing that once cost a coin and the courage to sell it. Inside, a rant about bread and taxes performs its righteous fury; on the last page, faint and sideways, your line again, as if someone couldn’t resist leaving truth amongst its siblings.

“Twice,” you say, voice low. “Two separate hands.”

Maya leans in, eyes narrow. “Travelling phrase, like we thought. But this—look.” She points to a purchase line midway through the ledger, written in another clerk’s tidier script. “Tutor for the Dauphin—interviewed at court by M.A.—payment delayed.” Her finger taps the name attached, half-legible yet still recognisable: Wonwoo. The shape of it kickstarts your heart.

“That’s not a French name,” you murmur.

“No,” she says, already opening a new tab. “But courts collected the exotic like hobbies. We can chase the paper trail.”

The day unfolds like a hallway with doors that keep opening. Microfilm reveals a broadsheet image of a masked ball, with labels scribbled later by some amateur historian—the Queen, the Austrian, the tutor, the girl with the ribbons. You print and circle and try not to draw lines to faces.

The second discovery belongs entirely to Maya. She materialises at your station and fans out a scan with a grin.

“Florence, 1765. Unknown painter—Lucia something the cataloger couldn’t untangle. But—”

The portrait is small, and it knocks the breath out of you. The subject is a man in three-quarter view, coat simply cut, jaw set, eyes turned slightly aside. He looks like the Crusader sketch taught itself oils. He looks like the stranger who keeps insisting on centrifuging your day into its own orbit. He looks like Wonwoo.

“Lucia,” you read, and the name rings familiar. “No surname?”

“Only ‘Lucia, apprentice to—’ and the master’s name is illegible,” Maya says. “But the museum note mentions a legend: the subject insisted on being painted by her, not the master. There’s a rumour of… well. Gossip. Liaisons. Forbidden this and that.”

“Of course there is,” you say, and it comes out soft instead of scoffing.

She taps the lower corner. “And look at the edge of the frame. Someone scratched a motto into the gesso before the varnish set.”

You squint. The letters are faint, slanted, an impatient hand carving where paint would later cover. You can just make it: Omnes horae finiunt— then the surface fades with age.

The third find is yours and nobody’s: a psalm leaf in a miscellany, the kind of anthology monks made to house what couldn’t find a home in holy scripture. The Latin rolls along until the scribe stutters into a story: a soldier made a vow to a woman not of his nation; God tested him; love proved itself and suffered anyway. It’s not a tale so much as the memory of one. You trace the words with your gaze until your vision blurs.

You become efficient in your descent.

Requests, scans, photocopies, a disgruntled printer that requires petting to behave—your arms fill with paper until the stack has a satisfying weight. You sign things. You label. You borrow the archive’s stapler.

“Wall?” Maya asks, seeing the way your notebook is not going to be enough.

“Wall,” you confirm, and mean the one at home.

You carry your bag toward your apartment and unload it once inside. On the largest empty wall—the one you’ve always promised a print you never bought—you tape the first anchor: the Crusader sketch, printed and trimmed, the line beneath it clear. To its right, the psalter photocopy with the same sentence in the margin. Below those: the Paris ledger’s flyleaf, the pamphlet’s last page. To the left: the Florentine portrait by Lucia.

You step back.

You add twine because you cannot help yourself. A string from the Crusader to the psalter, from both to the Paris documents, a neat angle toward Florence. The line crosses the portrait. You pin clippings along it: notes in your hand, Maya’s emailed references, a photocopy of the broadsheet and its scrawled labels—tutor?

In the far corner, you pin the psalm leaf with its tiny story about forbidden lovers. You stand on a chair and add one more photograph high above the others: a blown-up crop of the word Wonwoo in the ledger, letters fat with old ink, underlined by your pencil.

“You do know this looks like an obsession board,” Maya says over speakerphone later, benevolent and blunt.

“It’s a map,” you answer. “I’m trying to find the way out of a thought.”

“Or into it,” she says, and lets the silence settle. “I put in a request on Lucia. If they give us the verso image, maybe there’s an inscription. Artists wrote to themselves where nobody else could see.”

“Thank you,” you say, and mean it.

You make tea, sit on the floor with your knees up to your chest, and look at the wall. The repetition of the phrase is both reassuring and terrifying: comforting because patterns exist, terrifying because patterns can be cages.

“All hours end, but love does not,” you read aloud quietly.

Your phone lights with a text from Maya: Florence inventory list also has “consumption” by a sitter’s note—someone sick in the studio that year. Might connect. Sleep soon.

“Soon,” you lie into the air. You reach for a roll of washi tape printed with tiny stars and add a frame around the Lucia portrait.

The longer you look, the less ridiculous the impossible appears.

You know exactly how to dismantle this: call it apophenia, a brain’s party trick; call it the librarian’s disease, seeing echoes where there are only habits; call it grief, though you could not say for what. You could go to bed and decide to be a citizen of sense in the morning.

Instead, you stand closer to the Crusader image until your eyes prick. You notice that your hand has reached up of its own accord to touch the paper, and you let it.

“Who are you?” you whisper, and the wall does not answer.

Days lengthen, and the board expands. You and Maya stop pretending this is a side quest.

At the Print Room, a clerk rolls out a folio of engravings from the 1790s. In the margin of one plate—a street scene of the Palais-Royal—someone’s pencil has circled a figure half-turned from the viewer. Underneath, a curator’s note: Unidentified man appears repeatedly in crowd scenes by three different engravers. You copy all three. In each, the man’s profile is familiar enough to make your hands tremble.

Maya raids auction catalogues: a lot description from 1901 lists a signet ring with lily crest, motto: Omnes horae finiunt, provenance estate of W. J. W., reclusive patron of letters. She points, eyebrows up. “J. W. W.—could be anything, but lilies again.”

At the Music Division, a box of field recordings from the Highlands coughs up a pencilled staff on the inside flap: three notes, marked shepherd’s call; two-note whistle. You hum it before you know what you’re doing.

In a drawer of ephemera, a battered prayer card from a New York funeral in 1893 bears a black border and a Latin line in glossy script. On the back, faded pencil: he never married. You photograph both the front and back, and feel disloyal for hoping the line belongs to him.

Maya, gleeful, produces a theatre playbill from 1892 with an advertisement: Patronage courtesy of W. Won. You want to be sensible; you fail.

A shipping manifest from 1847 lists passengers bound for New York; one entry is scratched out and re-entered as Mr. Woo (Won-woo?) with a clerk’s irritation sharpened into ink. It is nothing. It is everything. You copy it anyway.

In the Rare Map room, a 1780s pocket atlas has a bookplate: a lily stamped above a ribbon. The binding is loose; inside the back cover, someone has hidden a slip of paper with a line in French: Toutes les heures finissent… The ellipsis ends before the last part. You hold the slip with tweezers.

From Florence, the museum replies with a verso image of Lucia’s portrait. The back is plain wood, but in the corner someone—her?—has written in a quick Florentine hand: per lui, quando le ore non bastano (for him, when the hours are not enough). You stumble into a chair.

Maya tracks court transcripts from the Scottish Borders, 1546: depositions in a clan feud include a woman named Elspeth and a father who swore revenge. In a later hand, a justice notes: a wandering foreign knight, unnamed, absent from the hearing. A lily is doodled in the margin.

You request an 18th-century Paris police register—étrangers surveillés—and find a line promising in its mundanity: Won Wu, professeur, observé, pas dangereux. Someone else—later? Amused?—has pencilled a lily beside the name.

A conservator lets you examine a fragmentary locket in the study collection: iron oval, stiff hinge, glass gone. Inside, a ghost of fibre where something once lay. On the edge, a scratched quotation that time has chewed away; you catch only …am— non.

You add them all. The wall takes each piece of evidence. Twine multiplies; tape fights gravity; pushpins receive extra attention.

You try to be wary of seeing him where he does not belong. You and Maya establish rules: at least two independent items per leap; at least one primary source; no modern reproductions unless they can be traced. It doesn’t save you from belief; it makes the belief wear better shoes.

One evening, Maya sits on your rug with a legal pad and her sensible pen and plays devil’s advocate with tenderness. “He could be a type,” she suggests. “A composite face artists used. The line could be a fashionable phrase. Lily is common.”

“I know,” you say. “I know.” And you do. But you know, too, the way your pulse stepped sideways at each mention of ‘Wonwoo’ and the way the three-note whistle fit in your mouth.

“Can I ask—” Maya hesitates. “Were you baptised?”

The question rings unexpected. “No,” you say slowly. “My parents weren’t religious. They meant to—then didn’t. Why?”

She shrugs. “Only the way the psalm’s little story keeps framing the lovers in church language.” A beat. “Sometimes the absence matters as much as the presence, you know?”

You think about a priest-shaped figure in a ruined chapel you can’t possibly know and refuse yourself the luxury of thinking further.

On the fourth night, the wall crosses the line from research to company. You catch yourself greeting it when you come in, the way people greet plants or cats: hello, I have not forgotten you. You move the Lucia portrait half an inch higher because the string begs for a cleaner angle. You add a small envelope taped to the bottom labelled outliers, where you tuck things that might belong later: a 1931 Times clipping about an anonymous donor of lilies to a hospital ward each year on the same date; a 1917 photograph of a Red Cross station where a man at the edge looks mundanely like everyone else and also like him.

Your phone buzzes. Maya again: Pulled parish book from Paris—one page has a tiny note in the margin beside a death record: “trampled by the crowd.” Sending scan. Also: tea tomorrow. You need something green that isn’t a flower.

You type back: Thank you. For all of this. Then, after a fight with your dignity, What if he’s real?

Three dots pulse and pause. “Then the wall is a letter,” she sends, “and you’re answering.”

The room is very quiet after that. You switch off the bright lamp and leave only the string of fairy lights that outlines the map like a constellation. You sit on the floor, back to the couch, and let your eyes soften.

You think of the man in the mask saying he is keeping you safe and of the ledger saying his name anyway.

Wonwoo.

You let your head fall against the cushion and listen to the apartment’s small noises—the hum of the fridge, the elevator’s polite ding, the neighbour’s spoon in a mug—and you accept, not belief, but attention. It will have to be enough, until it isn’t.

Wonwoo lets the email sit unread for an hour, then opens it anyway.

The subject line is practical—Verso imaging request: “Portrait of a Gentleman,” Florence, c. 1765 (Lucia, attr.)—and the museum’s tone is all courtesies and professional jargon. They inform him, politely, that the Archives Department of a partner institution has requested a high-resolution image of the painting’s backboard. As owner of record and long-term lender, his consent is required. There is no reason to refuse. There are too many.

He stares at the thumbnail the registrar has embedded, a modest rectangle of oil: his own face, light fitted to cheekbone, mouth undecided. You had painted him honestly: without mercy, without kinked sentiment. The locket is not visible, but he remembers how it bumped lightly against his sternum when he breathed, how the lily inside—already impossibly old—scented even the studio’s chalk and linseed.

He types Approved and pauses. The cursor blinks. He adds two lines: Please handle with gloved hands; the lower-left corner is dry and will flake if flexed. Kindly share any new findings with the lender. He sends the email and is surprised by the steadiness of his fingers.

The room goes quiet, and the present loosens like an untied knot.

The studio smells of wet plaster and bruised rosemary.

Windows are cracked just enough to keep varnish from sulking, shutters are angled to persuade the light, a damp cloth is thrown over the basin. You stand on a box to make yourself taller. Your hair has come loose. You measure his face with your brush, not with your eyes.

Wonwoo sits on a simple chair, turned three-quarters, as you instructed. You scolded him for arriving in a black coat—dark, scuro, complaining men always think shadow is flattering—and draped him in a rough linen sheeting instead. He does not mind.

The locket rests tucked beneath the linen. He has told himself for days that he will not show it to you. He will be prudent. He will be a canvas that behaves. He will sit, and you will paint, and the world will allow him this anonymous human hour in which nothing catastrophic occurs.

Your assistant moves in the corner, grinding pigments, quick with the chore. You keep your brush aloft, eyes narrowing at the hinge of his jaw.

“Stand still, signore,” you say, not unkind, as if stillness were an etiquette you expect to be familiar.

The assistant peeks from behind the easel, the impetuousness of youth ungoverned.

“He is still,” the girl argues, “only not inside.”

You step around the scaffolding of the sitting. He had seen you already, in a market two mornings before, haggling for eggs, and his body had filled with the old recognition. Now, inches away, he avoids looking fully at you because he believes in survival.

Your brush lifts, tapping his jaw.

“Look at your shadow,” you instruct, “not at me.”

You pass near him, and reach to adjust the linen drape at his chest—only that—but your wrist grazes the cloth. The iron oval finds your skin.

It opens.

The lily is there, impossibly whole.

He watches your face remake itself around memory. The change is not theatrical. It is the click of a latch. Your mouth opens and does not need breath to speak the word it wants.

“Beloved,” you whisper.

The assistant looks from you to him and says nothing, because silence is an art and she is learning when to practice it.

He could tell you to put the locket away. He could laugh, as men do when frightened, and call it a poet’s plant. He could stand and leave the portrait a headless rumour in the corner of a room that will be whitewashed when the landlord decides. Instead, he rises too quickly for the scaffold’s sanity, closes his fingers around your hand, and you close your fingers around his.

The world creates a new space for the two of you.

In that expensive quiet, you make a plan. You will not say the word love again. You will starve the air of that sound. You will finish the portrait under your own steady hand. In the church of San Miniato, you will light a candle for someone else and stand near its smoke until you both smell it. You will, as if the verb had patience, wait.

It works, for a while, so long it feels like the beginning of winning. He poses; you paint; you hand yourself brushes from the tray; he brings bread from a man who lives a street away; you eat too fast and then apologise; he pretends he did not hear your apology and passes you another piece. You never say the word. Your hands say it on each other’s skin, in the laundry room, in the stairwell where light forgets to live.

Your cough begins like an afterthought. It quickly becomes more aggressive.

You lie to him at first.

“Florence,” you say, shrugging, “there is dust in this city.”

He believes you for precisely a week.

Then the cough keeps a laugh from you, then a street, then an afternoon. You clamp your jaw and paint faster, working light over his cheekbones. He spends money on doctors whom you charm into admitting the futility of their own profession. He opens the locket when you are sleeping and lets the lily steady the air. When you wake, he closes it as if he has been caught kissing the hem of a garment he should not touch.

The portrait reaches completion on the same morning your body decides to be honest with your lungs. You sign your name in the wet paint at the lower right, then write another message no one will see on the back. You cry and call it turpentine.

He keeps the word love out of the room, but thanks you in the language that lives under spoken languages. You hold his hand, and he lets you, because what else could he do? When you can no longer hide your need for air, you turn your face and fight with dignity. He sits on the floor by the bed because chairs make him too tall to bear the distance from your mouth to his.

One morning, you call him with two fingers. He bends until his forehead touches yours, and your breath warms his face.

“Even silence is love,” you whisper, “All hours end, but love does not.”

He says nothing, because he promised. He holds your hand until your hand stops being a hand and becomes a ghost.

Hope dies cleanly that time. Not like a candle. Like a door, latched.

Outside, carts complain about cobbles, and a man shouts about figs. Inside, the portrait dries.

Wonwoo understands, with a clarity that makes him laugh violently, what the priest in the ruin sold him: not reunion, only recurrence. If God did not end it, the Devil would not let it. The bargain was not to see you again and have you; it was to see you again and learn how to lose you correctly, in every dialect the centuries can invent.

He returns to his window now, not because the view comforts him; New York resists that duty.

He chose solitude after Florence. He chose it so thoroughly it felt like virtue. Centuries ran around him: wars burned, empires mispronounced themselves into extinction, cities learned steel and then glass and then learned to pretend they had invented both. He acquired things because the world respects owners; he declined joys. He learned how to blend in with the surroundings. He learned to dress as the decade required. He learned a hundred languages well enough to buy and acquire. He did not learn hope.

Two hundred and sixty years of silence: a number that sounds like legend yet feels like a kitchen timer if you live inside it. Then a library lamp showed your face and made a believer of him in the oldest superstition there is: faith.

He allows himself one small relief: you have not remembered. Not the hills. Not the chapel. Not Versailles. Not the morning when you signed your name and coughed a thread of blood and still smiled at him. The absence of recognition is the only mercy this curse presently offers.

His phone lights up again—a second email from the registrar, brisk and grateful: ‘We will proceed with care.’ He places the phone face down.

He gives the museum what they ask. He will watch the verso image arrive in an archive across the city and imagine your hand—the same hand that refused to tremble in Florence—catalogue it beside other evidence. He will keep his distance, because he understands, at last, the exact size of his curse: not to be denied you, but to know precisely how you are taken.

He touches the locket and permits himself one small hope: that you might go on not remembering long enough to live. He cannot stop the connection; the centuries have wired the route from you to him. But maybe the wire can hum under the floorboards without setting the house on fire.

He approves, silently, a thousand requests no registrar will ever send, because abstinence is the only mercy he can grant, and he will sign every permission, open every door, surrender every claim—so long as each act keeps you safe by keeping you from him.

You choose the café because it is familiar.

Steam fogs the front windows; milk hisses, cups clink, and the grinder whines. You order what you always order and stand at the end of the bar with your receipt in your palm, rehearsing errands, refusing thoughts of your wall. When the barista calls your name, you reach, and your sleeve knocks a napkin holder, and he is there, steadying it before it falls.

For a breath, the room unthreads.

He stands too close to pass for coincidence. The light snags on the angle of his jaw. He looks like the portrait you pinned above your desk.

“Wonwoo,” you breathe.

He dips his head at the sound of his name passing your lips. The smallest smile appears and is then removed with professional care. You hear yourself continue.

“You look exactly like someone in a Crusader portrait I found.”

He freezes. Not with offence. With recognition, or the fear of it. The silence he gives you has weight; it sets the coffee shop slightly off-kilter. Around you, spoons continue, a stroller squeaks, and still his not-speaking is louder than any other noise.

“Say something,” you whisper, because the quiet begins to feel like a threat you can’t stomach.

He blinks once, slowly, as if returning from deep inside himself. “Another time,” he says lowly, and steps back.

You follow the vector of his coat through the door. The bell above the frame rings. Outside, the day has taken on a grey hue. The sidewalk is slick with rain and thaw. He turns left. You turn left. He lengthens his stride. You match. He slips into the narrow run of an alley filled with dumpsters and steam pipes. You catch his sleeve and pull him to a halt.

“No,” you say. “Not again. Not this vanishing.”

He stops because you have asked him to, and because there is something about your voice that refuses to bend. You let go of his sleeve and step in front of him, back to the wet brick.

“Tell me who you are,” you say. “Tell me why I keep seeing you in places you have no right to be. Tell me why you look like a man drawn six hundred years ago by someone with a shaky pen in a monastery who did not know you would be standing here under a broken pipe in Manhattan.”

He leans his shoulder into the wall, studying your face, his mouth folding into a shape akin to grief.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he says.

“You already are.”

He winces. “If I answer, I will hurt you differently.”

“Stop protecting me with abstractions,” you reply, sharper than you meant. “I’m not made of glass.”

He exhales. The air leaves him painfully. He searches for a sentence that won’t become a weapon in his mouth and fails.

“I have carried your deaths longer than any man should bear,” he says, as if offering the least damaging fragment of a larger truth.

The alley narrows. The sky closes in. Your mind rejects the syntax even as your bones behind it agree. You swallow the impulse to laugh; the impulse to cry shows up as heat behind your eyes.

“My deaths,” you repeat, slowly.

“Not here,” he says, almost a plea. “Not in this place with its bins and steam and other people’s ears.”

“Then give me something.”

He looks past you at the wet line of light where the street resumes. A muscle works in his jaw. He picks a stone from the ground in silence and sets it between you.

“I knew you at a time when the word for mercy had not been invented yet,” he says. “And again, when silk was a language for hunger. And again, when paint could not dry fast enough to keep the air in your lungs. You do not remember those rooms. It is mercy that you do not.”

You try to arrange your face into a shape that can take this in without breaking. It fails. You try a different tactic: the librarian in you, the scientist of paper you’ve trained yourself to be.

“Give me something I can check,” you say. “A name. A place.”

He lifts his hand as if to touch your cheek and thinks better of it. “I could give you a list and it would be a prayer you would not believe. Acre. The Border hills. Paris. Florence.” He stops, because the next word does not belong in this alley, on this day.

Something old moves through your chest. Your mouth finds rationality because it is the only raft in reach.

“You read the same books I did,” you manage. “You looked at the same images.”

“I looked at you,” he says, and the precision is unkind to both of you.

Anger arrives, faithful to its job of keeping you from drowning in other things. “Is this a game to you? Is this performance? Because if you’re going to gaslight me with poetry, I’m going to find a less handsome stranger to be haunted by.”

He laughs once, an ugly, involuntary sound, then shuts it down. “I deserve that,” he says. “But no. No games. I wish I could lie to you well enough to save you.”

“From what?”

He looks at your mouth instead of answering, and you realise there is a category of terror reserved for the moment when wanting and warning occupy the same square inch of air.

“Fate,” he says at last, embarrassed by how much work it took to be uttered aloud. “From me, when I am its instrument.”

“You’re not an instrument,” you say, surprising yourself with your conviction. “You’re a man in a coat in an alley who is terrified and pretending it’s policy.”

Something in his posture shifts. He leans closer without invading, the way a person does when the thing they need is too fragile to reach quickly.

“Do not try to remember,” he whispers. “Please. If you love your life—”

“I don’t remember,” you say, the truth leaving your mouth stripped of everything but its own nakedness. “I don’t. I only—” You touch your wrist, that small crescent, an old habit you refuse to name. “I only feel like I’ve been carrying a sentence I haven’t had the words for. And then I look at you and the words get close and—”

“And the room tilts,” he finishes, quietly.

You nod. The steam pipe sighs and shivers; a drop of water finds your hairline and slides down your cheek. He watches its path like a man with holiness before him and no right to touch.

“Tell me your name. Your real one,” you ask, because names are anchors, and you would like to stop drifting.

“Wonwoo,” he confirms.

The name falls between you. You say it once, soft, to see if your mouth will accept it, and it does, as if practised. He flinches at the sound.

“And mine?” you venture, half-mocking, half-terrified of the answer.

He shakes his head. “The one you wear now is the only one I will let myself say.”

“Why?”

“Because every other name is a curse that calls down storms.”

You ought to walk away. You watch yourself not. Your hand lifts and finds his face instead. Your fingers learn the curve of his cheek, the cool at his temple, the tense kindness of his mouth. He trembles under the touch.

“Why does it feel like I’ve done this before?” you ask in the space between his breath and yours.

“Because you have,” he says, breaking the rule he set himself a moment ago. “Because time is a wheel and I traded my soul for a seat on its rim.”

You take your hand back as if burned. He closes his eyes briefly, and when he opens them, there is that old, exhausted mercy in place.

“You’re scaring me,” you tell him, and this, too, is love’s honesty.

He nods. “I should. I am trying to.”

“Then why can’t I leave?”

He swallows. “Because I can’t either.”

You laugh—short, helpless, not unkind. “You are remarkably bad at keeping me safe.”

“I know,” he says, and the concession has its own bittersweetness. “Forgive me.”

“For what,” you ask.

He does not answer. He steps the smallest step closer, enough that you can count the flecks of gold the light coaxes from the brown of his eyes.

“If I kiss you,” you say, “does the world end?”

He lets out a breath. “It never ends,” he says. “That is the problem.”

“Then it won’t mind if I borrow a little.”

You rise onto your toes as he bends down.

The kiss is not the naive victory of movies; it is a slow catastrophe, careful, a question asked and answered in the same moment. His hand finds the back of your neck and then, remembering himself, gentles. Your mouth learns his name as a shape and then as a taste. The alley disappears like a curtain pulled on a bad scene.

When you part, your foreheads rest against each other. He speaks into the skin just above your lip.

“Come with me,” he says—plea, request, command, finality, a choice braided into a single sentence.

The thirteenth night leans close, all whispers and promise.

His home is spare, almost monastic—glass, steel, dark wood—yet there is a softness to the space, a hush that feels protected.

You don’t plan to cross the room as quickly as you do. You don’t plan the way your coat finds the back of a chair or how your lips find his again, harder this time.

His mouth is warm; he tastes clean, heady, addictive. He tilts his head, and you meet him, lips parting, breath mixing. You pull his bottom lip between your teeth and he shudders; you soothe the nip with your tongue slowly. He answers with steady pressure, then a tug, then the kind of open-mouthed kiss that leaves no room for doubt.

His hands stop hovering and find you—one at the small of your back, pulling you in, the other circling your waist and anchoring you to him. He learns the pace you like and matches it: press, glide, a brief retreat, then a return that makes you chase him. You fist his shirt and hold him there, kissing until your lungs ache, breaking only to breathe against his cheek before you find his mouth again.

You pin him to the wall, palms flat on his chest, boxing him in. He looks straight at you—wide, focused, thirsty—and waits. Your laugh slips out quick and bright, not nervous, just sure of yourself.

“Tell me to stop,” you murmur, already knowing he won’t.

“I couldn’t,” he says, voice rough, “my beloved.”

You don’t overthink it. Instead, you take his mouth again. He answers with a low moan, his lips parting, his hands tightening on your waist, surrender and need in the same motion.

You guide him along the wall, fingers curling in his shirt, hips close enough to feel his heat. When the backs of his knees hit the couch, you push lightly at his chest. He sits. You climb into his lap without breaking the kiss, knees bracketing his thighs, dress riding to your hips. You settle your weight over him until you feel exactly where he is against you; his clothed length pushing against your clothed heat. You set a slow grind and make him hold still for it.

Your hand comes up to his throat. You don’t squeeze; you don’t press. You place your fingers there to feel him—the jump of his pulse under your thumb, the swallow he can’t hide—your other hand fists in his hair to keep his face tilted to yours. He freezes for half a second at the touch and then yields, eyes on yours, chest lifting against yours. You keep kissing him, steady and deliberate, holding his throat while you move in his lap and take exactly what you came for.

“You’re shaking,” you say, and smile.

“I have been cold for so long,” he answers, “and then you walked in.”

You kiss the corner of his mouth, then the other, then the spot below his ear. You work down the column of his throat with an open mouth—tasting, learning—feeling him tense and soften, tense and soften beneath your tongue. Your hands slip beneath his shirt, mapping him: the ridges and planes of his muscle, the heat that gathers at his waist, the indrawn breath when your nails drag lightly over his ribs.

“Let me see you,” you whisper. He nods mutely.

You undress him button by button, slow on purpose, working down his shirt until it falls open and off his shoulders. When he’s bare from the waist up, you settle back on his thighs to take him in. You look first, then touch. You trace an old scar on his chest with your fingertip and follow another cut on his shoulder. His skin is hot and tight and responsive under your touch.

“You’re beautiful,” you say, and mean it.

Something raw and grateful crosses his face. “You are…” He stumbles, then finds the words. “You are the hour I never deserved.”

You slide to your knees between his legs without looking away. His breath hitches; his fingers curl around the cushion as if to brace himself. You undo his belt, then his zipper. When you free him, his cock is hot and heavy in your palm. You stroke him once, slowly, and watch his eyes half-close, his mouth fall open and then grit shut, your eyes holding a silent question.

“Yes,” he manages, “please.”

You lower your head and take him into your mouth—first the tip, then deeper—tongue flattening to lap, then curling to stroke as you sink and draw back in a steady pull. His gasp hits your scalp; his thighs tense. You wrap one hand around the base of his length and work in time with your lips, slow at first, then a little faster, keeping him where you want him while your other hand pins his hip when he tries to thrust up to meet you.

Eventually, that bracing hand slips away, dragging under your dress, under your waistband, until your fingers slide between your legs and find how wet you are. You rub tight circles over your clit, matching the pace of your mouth, shameless about the way you moan around him when the pressure lands just right. You take him deeper into your throat, cheeks hollowing, tongue pressing along the underside of his shaft; your fist twists as your lips glide, and his head falls back with a broken groan. The sight of your hand working yourself while you suck him turns his control brittle; the slick rhythm of your fingers and your mouth turns his restraint to tinder.

“Beloved,” he says, and then again—a reverent curse—“beloved.”

You hum, and the vibration makes him curse softly into his fist. You draw back to kiss the head, slow, teasing, then circle your tongue and take him in again, your throat opening. His head falls back against the couch; his chest rises and falls. You feel him fight for control because he wants to give you everything you have come to take. You thumb your clit harder, chasing a spark while you worship him with your mouth, and his hands shake, helpless, at the sight.

“If you keep—” His voice breaks; he tries again. “If you keep doing that, I will shame myself like a boy.”

You smile around him. “Good,” you mumble, and do it again.

His cock pulses on your tongue, and the sound he makes—choked, breaking—turns your bones soft. You ease your pace, then tighten it, merciless and tender, until his hand lands in your hair.

“Enough,” he gasps, “not like this—let me—”

You release him with a pop and rise, wiping the corner of your mouth with the back of your hand, your eyes never leaving his. You straddle him again and kiss him, letting him taste himself on your tongue; he groans into your mouth at the tang. Your dress slips off your shoulder; his hands follow the new geography, tracing your collarbone, cupping your breasts through the fabric of your bra, then under it when you guide him. His thumbs circle your nipples until your breath goes ragged. You roll your hips against him and feel his answering surge.

“Tell me what you want,” he says, voice gone dark.

“You,” you say simply before lifting your hips and pushing your panties aside to guide him to your entrance.

You ease down onto him in one slow, claiming thrust. The stretch steals sound from you; he catches the unvoiced cry with a kiss, his hands firm at your waist, holding you open, holding you steady. You set a rhythm, rolling your hips, rising and falling, taking him to the hilt and then almost out, your breath stuttering with each deliberate stroke. He watches your face like he is printing it on the inside of his eyelids.

“Look at you,” he murmurs, awed. “Look at what you do to me.”

Confidence lives in your spine. You ride him harder, your hands on his shoulders, fingers digging in when the angle hits a place that lights you from the inside. He meets you halfway, lifting his hips, driving up into you with control. Sweat beads at your temple; his mouth finds it and licks it away. You bite his lower lip; he gasps and laughs in the same breath, undone and delighted.

“Say it,” you pant, not sure what you want until it arrives. “Say you’re mine.”

“I have been yours in every century I dared to breathe,” he answers, broken and true.

You tip your head back and ride him faster, the wet sounds spilling into the quiet of the penthouse. Your body begins to tighten, heat coiling low, and you chase it with shameless focus. He slides a hand between you, fingers finding your clit easily—circling, pressing, dragging you closer to that edge with an understanding that feels older than this room—while his mouth lowers to your breast, lips closing around your clothed nipple, tongue teasing the nub until your spine bows. The double attention spins you higher.

“Yes,” you cry, “don’t stop—”

He doesn’t. He sits up, his mouth still at your breast, sucking and flicking in time with the steady pressure of his fingers against your core, and you cling to him as the wave suddenly overtakes you—hips stuttering, mouth open against his neck, a sound you do not recognise tearing from your throat. He holds you through it, whispering against your hair—praise, promise, your name like a blessing he can’t help repeat.

You are still shaking when he grips your hips and flips you gently, laying you back on the couch cushions. He kneels between your knees and drags you to the edge, one of your legs lifted, bent, carefully set over his shoulder. The position opens you and makes you gasp.

“Look at me,” he says.

You do.

He pushes back into you, the stretch fresh and exquisite. The new angle pushes another moan out of you; he swallows it with a kiss and sets a rhythm—deep, bruising, relentless. One hand locks around your thigh, holding you open; the other cups your jaw, thumb at your cheek, keeping your face tipped to his so he can watch your eyes glaze on every thrust. You meet him without flinching, hips rolling to take him, matching his rhythm.

“You take me so well,” he groans. “You were made for me.”

“Yes,” you gasp—because it fits, because it’s true.

He drives harder, and the couch creaks in gentle protest. The city blurs beyond his shoulder. He bites gently at your ankle where it rests against his collarbone; pleasure shocks through you again. You clamp your hand around his forearm and feel everything—muscle flexing under your fingers, the slick heat of his skin, the steadiness of his strength—and the way he looks down at you, wrecked and tender, tells you exactly what you are to him: threshold and home, both at once

“I would burn eternity for one hour with you,” he groans.

“Then stay,” you answer, not fully understanding the depth of your words.

The coil in your stomach builds again and you are greedy for it. He is unravelling too— jaw tight, breath ragged—and still he holds your gaze. When you come, it is with his name in your mouth, and when he follows, it is with your name in his—both of you flung and filled, both of you shaking as the orgasm rips through you, and his seed spills inside.

He collapses forward and presses his forehead to yours, both of you breathing hard, laughing once from the shock of relief. He kisses you again, slow now. Your leg slides from his shoulder; he catches your calf, kisses the inside of your knee, then the slick pulse at your throat, then your mouth.

“My beloved,” he whispers.

You touch his damp face, thumbs brushing the high bones of his eyebrows, and something fierce and uncomprehending rises in you. “I love you,” you say, stunned by your own certainty, “I don’t know why or how, but I do.”

He closes his eyes and kisses you, as if sealing the words between you. He doesn’t get up. He gathers you, turns you gently, and guides you down the dim hall with his body close to yours until his bedroom opens—quiet sheets, soft darkness. He lies back and pulls you over him, settles you on his chest, then draws the blanket up to your shoulders. One arm locks around your waist; the other cups the back of your head, his fingers moving slowly through your hair.

You match your breathing to his as you rest your head on his chest. City light lays pale stripes across his collarbone. He says your name once, then softer: “my beloved.” The tightness in your chest eases. Heat becomes warmth; urgency thins to ache; ache settles into calm.

Your eyes close. Your body gives in to gravity and the steady drum of his heartbeat. He keeps still, as if any extra motion might break the spell. You drift, then drop into sleep while his hand keeps its slow, patient path through your hair.

The dream does not announce; it floods.

The air inside the ruined chapel tastes like iron and smoke; a broken roof frames a sliver of night; the moon peers down. A lily lies crushed on the broken altar beside a strip of linen dark with blood. Your hands are slick—yours, someone else’s, his—and the pain becomes white.

Arrows. The shout of men who don’t know your name and wouldn’t care if they did. A face in a helmet. His face without it. The stunned way his mouth formed prayer and blasphemy at once.

Acre. Anna. Forbidden hands touching anyway in corners that pretended to be private.

—

The Border wind stings, your cloak a joke against it. His horse snorts softly, patiently. A shed, a sack of seed, a mouth greedy for silence and heat. You laugh into the curve of his jaw because for one hour, the world can’t find you.

A door bursts, boots, a curse. The blade you weren’t supposed to need. Blood on planks. Your father’s voice and then the silence that follows men who think they were aiming at someone else.

Scotland. Elspeth. Murder you didn’t see coming because love told you to look away.

—

A ceiling painted with people who never had to sweat. Wax breathes rich and heavy; silk argues with skin in every corner. Your mask is crooked; you don’t fix it. You don’t need eyes to find him. In an empty corridor, you learn the taste of your own name said with a mouth that your past remembers. Outside, the crowd becomes a tide; you are swept away. Feet, wheels, shouts, a fall; your shoe’s buckle bending under pressure.

Paris. Geneviève. Trampled by a revolution that does not pause for individuals.

—

Light muddied with clay dust. A woman standing on a box to be taller than her easel. His shoulders holding still for your brush. Your cough starts soft—scusatemi—then becomes a fact that the room has to organise itself around. He opens a locket: iron, humble, stubborn. Inside, a white lily refusing to brown. You press it to your lips. You tell him what you have no right to say out loud: Even silence is love. All hours end, but love does not. He holds the vow between his teeth and swallows it so you won’t die under the weight. You do anyway.

Florence. Lucia. Hope cut to the quick by consumption.

—

You bolt upright in bed, chest heaving, as if yanked up from deep water. The ceiling is unfamiliar; the room is a smear of shadow. It takes a second for the shapes to settle, for memory to catch up. Your hands scrabble across linen: sheets, not banners, not hay, not cobble; your skin now, not then. You find metal on your chest—his locket, the locket—hot from the heat you’ve been leeching into it all night. You clutch it in your palm.

“Why do I remember dying?” The whisper rasps your throat. The question isn’t a question. It’s a verdict you’re begging him to appeal.

Wonwoo is already up, already there, hand warm on your back.

“Breathe,” he says, a gentle command. “In. Out. Slow. With me.”

You try. Air goes in the wrong way.

“Why do I remember dying?” The second time, your voice is stronger, angrier. Wonwoo closes his eyes—only for a blink—but you see it: the way fatigue drags across his face. He opens them on purpose. He keeps his voice low when he responds.

“Dreams borrow,” he says. “Sometimes they take more than they should.”

“Don’t make it pretty,” you cut in. “You sound like a doctor trying not to announce the end.”

He flinches—as if you struck him—and shifts. “Pieces,” he tries again. “Rooms. Hours. Sometimes the mind—”

“The mind?” You laugh, and it’s not happy. “Then whose blood was that? Whose shoe? Whose cough?”

He looks at your hands. You realise you’re gripping the locket so hard your knuckles have whitened. He looks back at your face.

“Yours,” he says. “But not this body’s.”

You swing your legs out of bed as the room spins around you. The cold of the floor on your feet is a small, clean pain that feels like proof you’re still alive.

“Tell me what you are,” you say, fighting for calm and failing. “Tell me what I am to you.”

Silence. It is not evasive; it is careful.

“I am a man who made a bargain he cannot unmake,” he says. “And you are—” He stops, jaw working, then: “You are the reason I regret it, and the reason I don’t.”

“So you’re not going to deny it,” you say, heart pounding. “Acre. Scotland. Paris. Florence. Those were me. Those were you.”

His breath leaves him as he nods. The room shrinks. Your pulse is ringing in your ears. Panic overtakes your senses.

“Get away from me,” you whisper, and you hate how your hands shake. “I can’t— if I stay here I’ll—”

“I’ll make tea,” he says absurdly, as if this were a typical emergency. “We can sit. You can ask me anything. I’ll answer—”

“Answer?” The word snaps. “With what? Fate? Destiny? We’re cursed!” You can’t bear how final it sounds now that you’re saying it out loud. “I don’t want this story.”

He nods as if you’re right to refuse it. “Neither did you,” he says softly. “Any of you.”

“Stop.” The syllable shakes. “Don’t call me that. I don’t want to be an any.” Your chest tightens. Tears threaten, but you refuse them out of spite. You cross the room. Your dress from last night is a dark puddle on the chair. You drag it on, zipper crooked, but you don’t care. You jam your feet into your shoes and leave a heel unbuckled. Your bag is where you left it. You grab it so hard the strap protests. The chain at your throat suddenly feels wrong—you hook a finger beneath it, yank the clasp free, and tear the locket off. You curl it into your palm and keep it there, fist closed.

“Don’t run,” he says. His voice breaks, trying to stay gentle.

“I have to,” you say.

He takes a step. Stops. Forces his hands to stay at his sides. “Then let me come with you.”

“No.”

“Please.”

“No.” The word tears. “I don’t know you. I only know what you make me feel, and none of it is safe.”

He nods like a man being sentenced and finding a way to agree. “You are you,” he says, a last try. “Only you.”

You don’t wait to see if he’s right. You run.

Wonwoo knows what it means to watch a woman run from him, who believes he is the danger. He has trained his muscles not to grab, his mouth not to beg, his feet to follow just far enough to be there when the world fails.

He snatches his coat but doesn’t put it on; the elevator is somewhere doing what elevators do: wasting urgency. He takes the stairs because stairs do not wane. He hears your feet banging into the concrete two floors below. He says your name, and the stairwell throws it back at him.

The morning has not picked a season. The street offers its usual chaos: a delivery van half-parked on the crosswalk; a cyclist angry at the van; a rideshare vehicle angled into an imaginary spot; a cab deciding laws are suggestions; a man with a coffee discovering the politics of gravity. The light at the corner counts down in red.

You are a streak of hair and white knuckles and the locket’s chain cutting a bright arc with each step as it dangles from your hand. You are not looking. You are not looking because the past is louder than the present, and you are trying not to hear it. He sees the car approach.

Not again, his mind says.

He calls your name. It is not a name, not now; it is a flare. You turn your face toward him—only a fraction—and that fraction is all it takes for you not to see the white sedan deciding amber means go.

The sound is wrong. It isn’t loud. A horrible soft-hard knock. It is the sound of something breaking that shouldn’t.

Your body lifts, not far. Comes down badly. A bag spills; your phone skitters; the locket catches itself against your body and refuses to fall.

He is there before his brain has finished issuing the order to move. His knees slam into asphalt; he doesn’t notice. He slides his palm under your head. He sees your eyes—open, unseeing; then blinking; then trying to decide whether to be here. He hears nothing else for a while. The city narrows to your breath, stingy, irregular. The rest is a blur.

A woman is sobbing too loudly for her size. “Oh my God, oh my God.” The driver is making a noise composed entirely of the consonants guilt values: I— I— I— A man says he’s a nurse and asks for gloves. Somebody yells at the sedan. Somebody else yells at the yeller to shut up and call 911. The light finally changes.

He puts two fingers on your throat. Pulse. Unreliable, thready. The locket is wedged between your hands and your chest; the chain has looped once around your wrist. He murmurs “Easy,” and with the same care he would use to free a snare from a bird’s leg, he unwinds the chain from your wrist and eases the locket from your grip.

“Stay,” he says. The word is a command, a plea, a curse. “Stay with me. Breathe. Again. Easy.”

Your mouth shapes something. He leans closer. You manage one word that breaks him:

“Why?”

He could say everything. He could say because the Devil bargains in fine print; he could say because I was a boy and grief was a god; he could say because I have hauled your deaths behind me and I am tired and still not sorry. He says the only thing that has ever been the truth.

“Because I love you.”

Your eyes finally focus. They find his and hold. In them, he sees the chapel, the hill, the corridor, the studio—but also the couch from last night, and your hand on his throat, your mouth saying yes, the way a woman claims her life and not a man. He thinks, with a calm he will later hate: If this is the hour, at least it had an hour before it ended.

Sirens sound. Blue light washes the street into aquarium gloom. A paramedic slides to her knees beside him. “Sir, I need you to step back.”

He doesn’t. He can’t. He looks up at her. “Gently,” he says.

Something in his voice makes her nod. She positions her hands where his were, enters the space he has been guarding. Another medic appears with a backboard and a C-collar. The nurse from the curb gives a brisk report; someone parks a police car at an angle. The driver keeps saying I didn’t see her as if the sentence could turn back time.

“Sir, are you family?” the other paramedic asks, efficient, compassionate in the way he was taught. “Do you know her name?”

Family. The word tears into his tissue. Eight hundred years of the wrong nouns. Lover, stranger, ghost, sin, miracle, curse. None of them buy him the right to touch you without being asked. He says your given name.

“And you are—?”

He opens his mouth and says, ‘I am,’ and finds there is no answer that does not make him look like a problem, or a liar, or a myth. His silence is its own confession.

“We’ll take it from here,” he says. “Please step back.”

He does, and it is the worst obedience of his life. His hands hang stupid at his sides; one fist sealed around the locket.

The collar goes on. The backboard slides under. They lift you, tuck blankets, strap, tape, check, speak to each other in crisp shorthand. Wonwoo memorises the cadence.

A police officer corrals the driver to the curb. The man is shaking, shock-pale. “Sir, had you been drinking?” “No, no, I swear—” “Phone?” “On the dock— look— it’s—” A witness inserts herself; the officer holds up a palm; the witness obeys. The city tries not to stare and fails.

They wheel you toward the ambulance. He follows as far as the doors and stops because a paramedic’s hand touches his chest.

“We’ll be at St. Luke’s,” she says, reading his face. “You can meet us there.”

“Please,” he says, and does not know which God might receive this. “Please let me—”

“Sir, we need space to work.” Firm, kind, final.

The doors shut. Blue light blooms again, then slides away as the ambulance pulls into the mass of cars. Wonwoo stands in the middle of the street and learns, again, how quiet faith can make a man.

The police begin their bureaucracy of mercy and blame. Statements. Cones. Photos. A chalk mark he hates on principle. The driver is crying for his mother; a witness tries to describe the geometry of the hit with their hands and fails. Someone thrusts a paper cup at him; he doesn’t drink.

The police finish with the driver and turn toward him. “Sir, can we get your statement?” He nods because he knows how to perform compliance. He tells them what they need—speed, colour, direction, timing—in a voice that doesn’t sound like the one he uses daily.

When they release him, he looks down. On the asphalt, a drop of blood seeps into the crevices.

He turns toward the direction of St. Luke’s and begins to walk. He does not run. Running has never made time kinder.

Behind him, the driver’s voice breaks into a new shape: apology or defence, he’s not sure. Ahead, blocks away, the hospital’s glass front shows as a set of doors that will ask him to explain who he is. Above him, the sky tries and fails to make up its mind. The first real rain starts, thin and hesitant, dotting his sleeves. He doesn’t bother to hide from it. He tells the weather, because it is the only thing that might be listening, the only sentence he can bear to let out:

All hours end, but love does not.

Wonwoo finds the church by accident.

On his way to the hospital, he cuts through a street he never takes, past a shuttered bakery and a florist hosing sleep from the pavement. A steeple interrupts the sky. The door stands open and warm air escapes—wax and old wood, the mild smell of incense. He steps inside.

The nave is small, the kind of parish that keeps its courage in votive glass. Red lamps bud along a side altar; a row of kneelers waits in the centre. Light filters through stained glass—saints, lilies, a shepherd with a lamb. He moves down the aisle and stops at the stoup. Holy water shines thin in the basin. He hesitates—half expecting it to brand him, to reject him. Nothing happens. He touches the water to his brow, his chest, his shoulders. He does not remember the words, but his body remembers the motion.

He kneels. His hands do not know what to do with themselves until they find the locket and hold it within their grasp.

“I do not know how to speak to You anymore,” he begins. “I haven’t since Acre.”

Memory cuts clean: a ruined chapel, you on the stones, a man in a priest’s habit with a mild voice and teeth he did not show. He sees again the moment his faith snapped. He had spat a boy’s rage at heaven, and a patient devil had caught it.

“I cursed You,” he says. “I did. I took what I was offered. I chose a lie because it looked like hope.” His breath trembles. “I have carried it for eight centuries. I have carried her deaths.”

He presses the locket to his forehead. The metal is cold.

“Take me,” he whispers. “Take me. Take my soul. Unmake what I am. Let her live. Let her be free from me.”

He lays down what he can: pride, grief, the strange vanity of despair.

“If there is a ledger—I owe. If there is a scale—put all my weight on her side. If there is a door—lock me out and open it for her.”

Silence greets him. Somewhere in the back, a pipe settles, a building’s old bones remembering the lack of heat. He kneels until the ache in his legs becomes the only clarity.

“I am not asking for forever,” he says, and is surprised to mean it. “I am asking for now. Let this hour belong to her. Take me.”

Footsteps. Soft, ecclesiastical, unhurried—the gait of someone who has walked sanctums before. A priest appears at the end of the pew: cassock plain, collar white. His eyes are gentle yet not naive.

“Son,” the priest says, and the word lands without condescension, “you look as if you have been fighting the sea.”

Wonwoo swallows. “I have,” he answers, and then corrects himself, “I chose the sea.”

The priest tilts his head. “And now?”

“Now I would drown properly, if it would save her.”

He expects questions—names, dates, doctrine. The priest, instead, sits beside him, as if the best way to hear a man is to share the bench that hurts his knees.

“Tell me,” the priest says.

So he does. Not the whole of it—not the ruin and the bargain and the centuries in the detail they deserve. But the shape. The hour. The street. The ambulance, the blood, the locket caught in your hands. He confesses without flourish.

“I have been wrong in so many directions,” he says finally. “I have been faithful to my error longer than most men get to live. If there is a way to pay—if there is a way to end it—ask it of me.”

The priest considers him in stillness.

“Did you know,” he says at last, “she was never baptised?”

The sentence is simple. It hits like lightning.

“No,” Wonwoo manages. “No. She—” He stops.

The priest nods, not surprised. “The cycle you fear—what the enemy twisted for harm—leans on vows and signs and sacraments he did not make, but loves to counterfeit. If she was never bound by that mark, then she was never caught in that wheel. The curse has no hold.”

The words are an opening. Joy doesn’t ring; it shudders through him. Fear follows swiftly, trained to keep up.

“Then what happens to her?” His voice cracks on her. “What happens to her soul?”

The priest looks toward the sanctuary lamp, small in its red glass. “Mercy is not a contract,” he says. “It is a Person. You brought her here when you said free. Trust that Someone heard and was already nearer to her than you could ever be.”

Wonwoo closes his eyes. He has trained himself to expect bargains. The priest gives him, instead, hope. He loathes it and loves it at the same time.

“I have nothing to offer but myself,” he says.

“That has always been the only thing worth offering,” the priest replies gently. “And you have already placed it here.” He nods at the locket in Wonwoo’s fist. “You carried a flower through centuries so it could remind you what a prayer sounds like.”

Wonwoo almost laughs, but tears stifle the sound.

“If she lives,” he asks very quietly, “may the wheel stop?”

The priest’s smile is small. “You cannot imagine how little power the wheel has in a hand that forgives.”

Silence again. The stained glass seems more alive and less like a picture. Wonwoo breathes in, and for the first time since he said ‘take me’, his lungs do not argue.

He looks aside to thank the man, to ask him—foolishly, ambitiously—for a blessing he has no right to expect.

The pew beside him is empty.

There was no rustle of fabric, no exit, no footsteps reversing down the aisle. Only a soft, lingering sense of a presence. The sanctuary lamp burns on. A draft moves through the church.

Wonwoo remains kneeling until his knees lose feeling. He opens his fist. The locket printed a crescent on his skin. He bows his head once more.

For a breath, the metal stays against his palm—then, without sound, the hinge loosens, the oval fractures hairline-fine, and the thing that survived centuries finally yields: petal to powder, casing to ash. Dust sifts through his fingers and settles on the wood below him, leaving only the crescent mark on his skin and the faintest scent of lily where nothing remains.

For a long moment Wonwoo doesn’t move. Something shifts inside him. Heat spreads under his sternum; his heartbeat changes timbre, less an echo, more present. The emptiness he learned to live around is simply… gone. He blinks, waiting for pain or penalty; nothing answers. He closes his eyes and feels, absurdly, like a man returned to himself.

He stays kneeling until he trusts his legs to carry him, then rises. The nave narrows to aisle, to door, to rain. Outside, the sky has finally made up its mind and unloads water heavily. The hospital is still far, a small glow at the end of the long street, but he doesn’t measure it—he runs, startled by how light the running feels, as if the weight he never sets down has lifted off his shoulders.. Each footfall is a ‘yes’ he cannot help saying.

And somewhere, under the fluorescent hush and soft metronome of a monitor, a pair of eyes open again.

A/N: Fun fact about me: I absolutely love Caleb Landry Jones and Luc Besson. When I heard they would work together again for a remake of Dracula, I went to see it as soon as it was released. Safe to say I loved it. Take this story as the result of what the movie did to me. 💟

Tagging: @tomodachiii

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