The bura didn't whisper its arrival. It declared war.
It came shrieking across the Velebit mountain range, a frigid, furious exhalation of the continent itself, and hurled itself at our stubborn little stretch of Adriatic coast. In Zadar, we knew its moods—the gentle bura scura that merely cleared the sky, the steady bura that set the rigging of boats in the harbor humming like nervous insects. But this was the luda bura—the mad wind. And it was in a rage.
It hit my bookshop, Zvona i Knjige ("Bells and Books"), with the force of a physical blow. The old stone building, tucked into a curl of a cobbled alley a street back from the Riva, groaned in its bones. The sign above the door, a charming piece of hand-painted wood depicting an open book with a bell nestled in its spine, swung violently on its wrought-iron bracket. Then, with a wrenching screech of metal, the bracket gave way. The sign tore free, becoming a wooden missile that clattered and spun down the alley before being pinned against the opposite wall by the relentless, invisible force.
"Damn it," I muttered, the words snatched from my lips and shredded by the gale.
My long, wavy light brown hair, which I'd foolishly left down, became a nest of whipping strands, blinding me. I shoved it back, squinting against the grit and salt spray the wind carried even this far inland. The "Open" sign—a smaller, simpler thing on a hook—was next. It ripped from the nail with a ping and flew straight for my face. I caught it on instinct, the edge stinging my palm, and wrestled the shuddering oak door closed against the tempest's will. The sudden silencing of the roar was relative; the wind now moaned through the keyhole, whistled under the door, and made the very walls vibrate.
Leaning against the solid wood, I caught my breath. The shop was a haven of quiet disorder. Towers of books leaned precariously on every flat surface, the smell of paper, old glue, and my morning coffee hung in the still air, and the single, green-shaded banker's lamp on the counter cast a warm, melancholic pool of light into the gathering afternoon gloom. Outside, the world was being scoured clean. Inside, time moved at the pace of turning pages.
I was about to give up on customers for the day, to retreat to the back room with its tiny kitchenette and the latest Isabel Allende, when a movement through the front window's leaded glass caught my eye. A car. A sleek, black Audi, moving slowly, deliberately, up the cliff road that wound its way out of town toward the headland.
No one drove up there in a luda bura unless they had to. Or unless they didn't know any better. The road was exposed, a narrow ribbon etched into the rock face, with drops to the churning, white-capped sea on one side and sheer cliff on the other. Tourists didn't risk it. Locals knew better. The only thing up there was the old Vidakovic house, a crumbling, stone vikendica perched on the very edge, overlooking the terraced lavender fields that ran down to the sea. It had been empty for years, ever since old Dr. Vidakovic passed and his heirs in Zagreb squabbled over it. It was a place of ghosts and stories, a perfect subject for painters and a warning tale for children.
The car moved with a predatory patience, a dark beetle against the bruised purple and grey of the storm-swept sky. It wasn't battling the wind; it was cutting through it. My eyes followed its progress, a strange knot of apprehension tightening in my stomach. I wasn't prone to melodrama. Running a bookshop in a tourist town required a steady temperament. You dealt with sunburned customers looking for beach reads, academics searching for obscure Croatian histories, and the occasional lonely soul who just wanted to talk. You didn't get ominous feelings about passing cars.
Yet, I felt it. A prickle on the back of my neck, a sudden awareness of being a specimen under glass. It was as if the car's tinted windows were eyes, and they had paused their gaze on my little shop before continuing their ascent. I took an involuntary step back from my own window, into the deeper shadows of the shop.
"Get a grip, Lea," I whispered to myself, hugging my cardigan tighter around me. The bura was getting to me. It did that. It frayed nerves, stirred up old anxieties, made you see intention in the weather. The locals said it could drive a sane man to madness and a madman to revelation. My grandmother used to cross herself when it blew, muttering about unclean spirits riding on the wind.
Shaking off the chill, I busied myself with pointless tasks. I straightened a stack of Dubravka Ugrešić essays that didn't need straightening. I reshelved a copy of The Museum of Unconditional Surrender that a browser had left on the wrong table. I checked my phone—no messages. My world was small, carefully constructed: the shop, my apartment above it, a few close friends, the weekly market. It was a quiet life, a good life, built on the simple rhythms of the sea and the seasons, punctuated by the bura's fury. I was content in my solitude. At twenty-five, I'd had enough of Zagreb's chaos, of relationships that demanded more than I wanted to give. Here, I was just Lea, the bookseller with the too-big green eyes. It was enough.
But as I moved around the shop, the feeling of being observed didn't leave. It clung like the damp. I found myself glancing out the window, up toward the headland. The car was gone, swallowed by the curve of the road or arrived at its destination. The Vidakovic house was invisible from here, hidden by the cliff's brow. Yet, I imagined it up there, a dark silhouette against the raging sky, its windows now lit from within. A new light in a long-dark place.
The afternoon bled into a premature, storm-tossed evening. The wind's scream settled into a constant, droning roar. No more customers came. At six, I decided to close early. Locking the door felt like sealing a tomb. I climbed the narrow, creaking staircase at the back of the shop to my apartment.
It was a cozy space, lined with my personal library—favorites, first editions, the books too precious to sell. I made tea, ate a simple dinner of bread and cheese, and tried to read, but the words wouldn't stick. The bura was a physical presence, a giant shaking the building. It was in my bones.
Just after nine, the power flickered and died. The sudden plunge into darkness, save for the frantic glow of my phone, was absolute. The wind's voice grew louder, more personal, in the absence of electric hum. Cursing, I fumbled for candles. I had a stash of them for precisely this reason. Soon, the apartment was alive with dancing, anxious shadows.
It was then, in the flickering semi-darkness, that I saw it. A pinprick of light up on the cliff. Not a star—the sky was a wool blanket of cloud. A steady, yellow light. A window in the Vidakovic house.
He was there.
I didn't know who "he" was, but the pronoun arrived in my mind fully formed, certain. The occupant of the black car. The new light in the dark house. The source of the watchful feeling.
I blew out the candles, one by one, until I stood in complete darkness at my own window. Across the distance, through the veils of wind and rain, that single light burned. A challenge. A beacon. I felt a ridiculous urge to signal back, to wave, to acknowledge this strange, new connection. Instead, I stood frozen, a secret observer of my own observer, until the cold from the glass seeped into my skin and forced me to retreat to bed.
Sleep, with the bura howling like a pack of wolves, was impossible. I lay in the dark, listening to the symphony of destruction outside—a trash can clattering, a loose shutter banging with metronomic regularity. My mind raced, painting pictures of the stranger in the cliff house. A recluse? A developer? A fugitive? The most plausible theory, given the house's state, was an artist of some kind. They were the only ones who sought out such dramatically inconvenient isolation.
Finally, near dawn, the wind began to tire. Its screams subsided into exhausted sighs. The banging shutter fell silent. In the sudden, relative quiet, I slept.
The world the next morning was washed clean and bruised. The sky was a hard, brilliant blue, the kind that only follows a luda bura. The sea was still churned and white-capped, but the air was calm, cold, and crystal-sharp. Everything looked newly made, and every sound—the cry of a gull, the distant putter of a fishing boat, the clatter of my sign being rehung—was startlingly loud.
The sense of being watched had vanished with the wind. In the clear sunlight, my nighttime apprehensions seemed foolish, the product of an overactive imagination fueled by isolation and storm. I opened the shop, aired out the faint smell of damp, and made a strong pot of coffee. The routine was comforting.
The morning passed quietly. A few regulars drifted in, more to discuss the storm than to buy books. Old Mrs. Petrović from down the alley brought me a jar of fig jam, her hands gnarled as olive roots. "For your nerves, dušo," she said, her eyes knowing. "The mad wind speaks to those who listen too closely."
I just smiled and thanked her.
It was late afternoon, the sun already beginning to slant towards the islands, when the bell above the door chimed with its soft, brass sound.
He entered not with a flourish, but with a subtle absorption of the space's atmosphere. The light from the window didn't so much illuminate him as it seemed to gather around him, deepening the shadows he cast.
My first impression was of height and stillness. He filled the doorway, then paused, his dark eyes sweeping the room with a swift, analytical completeness that felt more like an inventory than a browse. He was in his thirties, with hair the colour of dark roast coffee, swept back but with a rebellious wave that fell just over his brow. His features were sharp—a blade of a nose, a strong jaw shadowed with stubble, a mouth that looked like it was more accustomed to being set in a line than smiling. He wore a simple black wool coat, open over a charcoal sweater and dark trousers. He was handsome, but not in a way that put you at ease. It was a handsomeness that felt like a warning.
He didn't head for the shelves. His gaze landed on me, standing behind the counter, and held. It was a direct, unnerving look, completely devoid of the polite pretense of casual interest. He saw me, all of me, in that single glance.
"Lea."
He said my name. Not a question. A statement. His voice was lower than I'd expected, a soft baritone with a gravelly undertone that seemed to resonate in the quiet shop.
I stiffened. "Yes? Can I help you?" I was proud that my voice came out steady, polite, professional.
He moved then, his steps silent on the worn wooden floor. He didn't approach the counter directly but began a slow circuit of the perimeter, his long fingers trailing over the spines of books without pulling any out. He was reading the shop, reading me.
"They tell me you have the Boccaccio," he said, his back partially to me as he studied a section of local histories. "The Decameron. The 1925 limited edition. The unexpurgated translation."
A thrill, part shock, part illicit excitement, shot through me. That book. It was one of my secret treasures, acquired from a private collection in Split. It wasn't listed in my general inventory. Only a few serious collectors even knew it might be here.
"They tell you correctly," I said, cautious. "But it's not on display. It's in the back. For… special customers."
At that, he turned. A ghost of a smile touched his lips, not reaching his eyes. "And what qualifies one as a 'special customer'?"
"A serious interest," I said, holding his gaze. "And the means to afford it."
"I have both," he said simply. The smile faded. "May I see it?"
The request hung in the air. The back room was my private domain, cramped, chaotic, and intimate. Letting a stranger back there, especially this stranger, felt significant. Dangerous.
But he was a customer. A potentially significant one. And my curiosity was now a living thing, squirming in my chest.
"Of course," I said, with more bravado than I felt. I lifted the hinged section of the counter to let myself out. "Follow me."
I led him through a narrow archway hung with a velvet curtain into the back. The room was smaller, colder, lined with shelves of overstock, rare finds, and my own repair tools. A single bulb hung from the ceiling. The Boccaccio lay in a solander box on a small, cluttered desk.
The space felt suddenly, overwhelmingly small with him in it. I was acutely aware of the scent of him—clean wool, a hint of cedar, and beneath it, something else, dark and smoky, like a spent match.
I moved to the desk, my back to him, and opened the box. "Here it is. The paper is pristine, the binding is—"
"They also tell me," he interrupted, his voice now closer, just behind my left shoulder, "that the bura spoke to you last night."
I froze, my hands on the rich leather binding. I turned my head slightly. He was standing too close. I could see the individual threads in his sweater, the faint pulse at the base of his throat.
"The wind doesn't speak, Mr…?"
"Karlo. Just Karlo." He didn't offer a last name. "And it does. It scours. It reveals. They say it drives people mad." He took half a step closer. I didn't retreat. The air between us crackled with a strange, static energy. "I think it simply strips away the veneer. Shows us who we already are, deep down where the weather doesn't reach."
His words from the manuscript floated, unbidden, into my mind: The bura doesn't create monsters; it just blows away the sand hiding their footprints. A coincidence. It had to be.
"Is that why you're here?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper. "To be scoured? Revealed?"
His gaze dropped from my eyes to my mouth, then to the vulnerable curve of my neck exposed by my pulled-up hair. "I'm here for inspiration. The quiet here is… loud. And the loud," he glanced towards the front of the shop, as if seeing the ghost of the storm, "is deafening. It's perfect."
"For what?"
"For work." He finally reached past me, but not for the book. His hand hovered near my hair, and then he did what I had imagined in the dark: he touched a single, loose strand that had escaped its knot. He wound it gently around his finger. The touch was electric, a bolt of pure sensation that went straight to my core. "For understanding the architecture of fear. And desire."
I should have pulled away. Slapped his hand. Said something cutting. But I was transfixed. By his audacity. By the dark, knowing look in his eyes. By the sheer, overwhelming reality of him after a night of phantom imaginings.
"Are you an architect, then?" I managed, my breath shallow.
"Of a sort." He released my hair, his finger brushing my cheekbone as he withdrew. "I build worlds. And then I watch what people do inside them." He finally looked at the book, his attention shifting like a spotlight. "How much for the Boccaccio?"
I named a figure that was both outrageous and fair. He didn't blink.
"I'll take it." He pulled a wallet from his coat, extracting a amount of crisp kuna notes without counting. He laid them on the desk beside the box. "Don't wrap it. I like the feel of it as it is."
He picked up the heavy box, tucking it under his arm. The transaction was complete, but he made no move to leave. He looked at me again, and this time, his scrutiny felt even more intimate, as if he were memorizing the details—the exact shade of my eyes in the dim light, the rapid flutter of the pulse in my throat.
"You have a remarkable face," he said, almost to himself. "It holds its secrets in plain sight. In the eyes. A writer could get lost in eyes like that."
"And are you? A writer?"
He gave a slow, single nod. "Goodbye, Lea. I have a feeling the bura will bring me back."
And then he was gone, the curtain swinging in his wake. I heard the soft chime of the door, and then silence.
I stood in the back room for a long time, my heart pounding a wild, uneven rhythm against my ribs. The space where he had stood felt charged, empty yet full of his presence. The money lay on the desk. The most valuable book in my shop was gone.
I walked back out to the main shop on unsteady legs. It was empty. The late afternoon sun streamed in, full of motes of dust. Everything was as it was. And yet, nothing was.
I went to the window and looked up. The cliff road was empty. The house on the headland was just a smudge of stone against the sky. But I knew. He was up there. Karlo. The architect of worlds. And he had looked at me as if I were a fascinating, complex blueprint.
The first cold, clean breath of the evening wind whispered down the alley. It was just the gentle bura scura, clearing the last of the storm's chaos. But as it brushed against the windowpane, it sounded like a promise. Or a threat.
I felt watched again. But this time, the feeling didn't come from outside. It came from within, from the part of me he had stirred awake with a single touch and a handful of cryptic words. He was right. The bura revealed. And it had just begun to blow.