Lena didn't come to the library to read.
She came because she couldn't breathe anywhere else.
The house felt too small. The town felt too loud. Her own skin felt like it was holding a heartbeat that didn't belong to her. And ever since the café — ever since him — nothing inside her had been quiet.
So she pushed open the heavy oak doors of Blackthorn's library, the oldest building in town, and stepped into the kind of silence that felt like it was listening.
It wasn't peaceful.
It was expectant.
The air smelled like dust, leather, and stories that hadn't been opened in decades. Sunlight cut through the stained-glass windows, splintering across the floor in fractured color — red, gold, green — like the floor itself remembered more than it ever said.
She walked in slowly, fingertips grazing the spines of books she didn't read, pretending she came here for something ordinary.
But nothing felt ordinary anymore.
Yesterday she was just a woman with a fiancé and a new town to adjust to.
Today?
She was waking up with dreams that weren't dreams. Hearing a voice that wasn't hers. Feeling a pulse beneath her wrist like the mark was alive.
That mark.
It was darker today. No longer just faint light — but something deeper, like it had burned itself into her.
She flexed her hand, covering it with her sleeve.
She didn't want answers.
She wanted silence.
But she wasn't alone.
She felt it before she saw him.
That same shift in the atmosphere — like gravity rearranged around one body.
Killian Hayes.
He was seated at the far end of the library, in the dim section where the shelves towered like watchmen. A stack of old texts in front of him, pages open, but his eyes weren't on the words.
They were on her.
He looked like a storm held still. All dark restraint, carved jaw, sleeves rolled to his forearms, tension set into the lines of his shoulders like he'd been fighting something no one else could see.
He didn't move.
He didn't blink.
But the room tightened around them, as if acknowledging something ancient — something that remembered them even if they didn't remember each other.
Lena forced her gaze away and pretended to choose a book from a nearby shelf.
She could feel him watching.
Not with curiosity.
With recognition.
She found a chair at a table several rows away from him, trying to ignore the magnetic pull in her chest. She hadn't even opened the book when she felt movement behind her.
Slow steps.
Measured.
Controlled.
But the air got thicker with each one, as if his presence didn't just enter the space — it claimed it.
She looked up.
He was standing at the other side of the table.
Close enough to feel the heat of him.
Far enough to pretend it didn't matter.
"You shouldn't be alone," he said.
It wasn't a warning.
It was a confession.
She swallowed. "I'm in a library."
"That's not what I meant."
"The world doesn't revolve around danger, Killian."
"No," he said quietly. "Just around you."
Her breath caught — not because the words were romantic, but because they felt remembered. Like someone had said them to her once, in a life she couldn't access but her soul still clung to.
She looked down, needing something to focus on.
That's when she saw it.
A scar on his hand.
Long, thin, pale — the same shape she'd seen in her dreams, the ones where she wasn't herself, where she was running through trees with someone beside her.
The same scar she had in the dream.
Her body went cold.
"Where did you get that?" she asked, and her voice didn't sound like hers.
Killian stilled.
His eyes flicked to his hand — then to her.
"You remember it," he said, not a question.
"No," she whispered. "I don't. But I've seen it before. In my head. In dreams or… something."
Killian didn't breathe for a moment.
He closed the distance slowly, bracing his hands on the table — one of them inches from hers. The scar was clearer now. Real. Old. He didn't hide it.
"You shouldn't remember anything," he said, voice rough. "Not this. Not me."
"But I do."
"That's the problem."
She stared at him, unsettled. "You said we didn't know each other."
"I said we shouldn't."
She curled her fingers into her palm. "You're not making sense."
"I'm trying not to."
His control was slipping. She could see it now — the tension beneath his skin, the way he held back as if holding himself wrong would break something.
Her voice shook. "Why do I feel like I've seen that scar before? Why do I feel like I know you?"
He didn't answer.
His jaw flexed.
The wolf inside him pushed hard, demanding truth, demanding touch, demanding bond.
He stepped back before he let it win.
"You need to leave," he said, voice tight.
"No."
"Lena—"
"You're hiding something from me. And I think it matters."
He looked at her, and in his eyes was agony and hunger and a history she hadn't lived but somehow carried.
"You're engaged," he said. "You have a life. A future. None of this is meant for you."
"Then why does it feel like it is?"
He said nothing.
Because there was an answer.
But saying it would break everything.
She reached for the book she'd taken earlier — but her wrist slipped out from her sleeve.
The mark pulsed.
Alive.
And Killian's eyes snapped to it.
The wolf in him surged so violently he almost shifted right there.
She flinched back.
"Killian—"
He backed away like she was fire.
"I can't stay here," he whispered.
Then he turned and walked out.
Not because he didn't want her.
But because wanting her was destroying him.