Yasmine didn't remember the walk back to the villa. Her body moved on autopilot, climbing the path, passing through the gate, crossing the courtyard. The vibrant colors of the bougainvillea looked garish, the cheerful sound of the fountain a mockery. She moved like the ghost Mireya had named her.
She bypassed the common room, the library, all spaces where life was happening. She needed sterility. She needed to scrub the phantom image of that other woman's laughing face from her mind.
Her bathroom was a white-tiled sanctuary. She turned the shower on as hot as she could stand, locking the door. Steam quickly filled the room, fogging the mirror, blurring the edges of the world. She stripped off her clothes, her movements clumsy, and stepped under the scalding spray.
The water was a punishment and a purge. She tipped her head back, letting it beat against her face, her closed eyelids. But it couldn't wash away Mireya's words. You're an echo. A ghost. A death sentence.
In the steam and the roar of the water, her own defenses crumbled. The carefully maintained walls she'd built around her own past, the reason she was in this cage to begin with, dissolved.
It wasn't a clear memory that came. It was a sensory avalanche.
The smell first. Petrichor and asphalt, the metallic tang of coming rain.
The sound. The low growl of her car's engine, the swish of tires on wet road. Her own humming, tuneless, distracted.
Then, the glare of oncoming headlights on the slick street, distorted by her windshield wipers. A blur of movement from the right—a dark shape darting out from between parked cars. A cyclist? A pedestrian?
The screech of her own tires, a deafening, helpless sound. The sickening, unmistakable thud-crunch of impact. The world tilting, spinning.
The taste of blood in her mouth from a bitten lip.
And then, the silence. Worse than any sound. Broken by the first patters of rain on the roof.
Pushing the deflated airbag aside, fumbling with the door, stumbling out into the drizzle. Her legs wouldn't hold her. She fell to her knees on the wet asphalt.
There. A figure. Lying so still. A man, his face turned away, one arm twisted at an unnatural angle. A pool of rainwater, tinged with a darker hue, spreading slowly near his head.
She crawled. One hand, then the other, the gravel biting into her palms. She had to get to him. She had to see.
She reached him. With a trembling hand, she touched his shoulder. He stirred, just a faint groan. He turned his head.
His eyes met hers. They were wide, clear, and filled with an accusation that had no need for words. He saw her. He knew her. In that fragment of a second, he transferred the entire weight of his extinguished future, his stolen breath, his pain, into her soul.
Then the light in those eyes guttered. Went blank. The connection severed, leaving her holding the corpse of a stranger's destiny.
Yasmine gasped, a raw, choked sound that echoed in the tiled shower. She slammed her hand against the wall, bracing herself as her legs threatened to give way. The water was cooling, but she was burning up from the inside.
Guilt. It wasn't an emotion; it was a geological layer in her being. It was the bedrock upon which Yasmine Vale was built. She had taken a life. An innocent life. She had been distracted, maybe going too fast on a wet night, maybe just unlucky. The courts had called it an accident. No criminal intent. A tragic twist of fate.
But she had seen his eyes. She had carried their final, silent accusation for years. It was the reason she was a chronic over-giver, apologizing for existing, believing love had to be earned through suffering. She didn't deserve to be happy. She deserved a cage.
And now, in this beautiful, monstrous cage by the sea, she had met a man whose own soul was a graveyard. A man who saw a ghost from his past in her face. A man who believed his touch was a contagion.
Was this her punishment? Not prison, but this? To fall for a living monument to loss, to be a mirror reflecting his greatest failure, while he reflected hers?
She finally turned off the water, shivering violently in the sudden quiet. She wrapped herself in a thick towel and faced the fogged mirror.
With a slow, shaky hand, she wiped away the condensation.
Her own face appeared, pale and haunted, water droplets clinging to her skin like tears. Her sea-green eyes, wide with pain, stared back at her.
Elara's eyes.
She saw it now. Not just the color, but the shape, the slight tilt. The ghost in the mirror wasn't just her guilt. It was his.
She was a double phantom. A haunt to herself and to him.
The understanding settled into her bones, a cold, fatal certainty. This story couldn't end in sunlight. It was a tragedy written in rain-slick asphalt and on a stormy dock, and she and Rafe were just playing out the final, doomed act. His obsession, his tenderness, his desperate pull—it was all for a ghost. And her own aching need for him? Was it just a desperate, twisted hope that by saving him, she could atone for the life she'd taken?
She leaned her forehead against the cool glass, the ghost in the mirror meeting the ghost in the room.
Mireya was right. This was a death sentence. The only question was who would die first—her hope, his sanity, or both of them together when the Covenant decided they were too damaged to keep.