The next day, she came back with a heart full of storms.
A week of hiding hadn't quieted her. It had only sharpened the ache, honed it into something dangerous and alive. Beneath the ache was that strange, girlish flutter… the kind that makes even a woman who's been through fire blush like a schoolgirl again.
She told herself she was fine, that it was only music she came for. But her heart knew.
It always knew.
The music center felt different that morning; thicker, heavier, as if the air itself was holding its breath. The smell of varnished wood and old strings mingled with something else… something older. A hum. A pulse.
Somewhere, in a realm the living couldn't name, two restless souls stirred; recognizing each other before the humans wearing them did.
And then she saw him.
Alone
The weight of his gaze struck her like lightning: dark, steady, unreadable, and yet... ancient. It didn't just look at her. It remembered her. As if somewhere, long before this world, long before flesh and names, their souls had met under another sky.
Her lungs forgot how to work. Her pulse stumbled, her grip on the guitar loosened. She wanted to look away, to hide the small, treacherous smile curling her lips. But she couldn't. He didn't let her run this time.
He approached.
And something shifted in the room. The hum deepened, vibrating through the walls, through their bones, through the invisible thread that had tethered them across lifetimes.
There was no polite distance left. No pretending. His hand reached for hers: firm, trembling, fated. The moment his skin brushed hers, the air cracked. Every light seemed to dim, every sound to blur. It wasn't merely touch; it was invocation.
The souls beneath their skins awoke, and the world itself seemed to lean closer to watch.
He pulled her in, and their bodies collided like two halves of a forgotten prayer. His arms wrapped around her... not gently, but desperately, as if trying to anchor something that wasn't meant to stay. When his lips found hers, it wasn't lust alone that burned through them: it was recognition. A reunion written in the marrow.
It was fire, it was ruin, it was home.
Her hands found his shoulders, clinging as though she'd done it before. Maybe she had, in another time, another life. And when her lips trailed to his neck and her teeth sank softly into his skin, the air itself seemed to shudder. The bite wasn't passion. It was claiming.
A seal.
An ancient mark of remembrance.
The world stilled. His breath hitched. His eyes once calm and rational darkened into something primal, wild. For a moment, his soul seemed to slip through, staring back at her, recognizing her not as a stranger, but as something it had once lost and spent centuries searching for.
He pulled back abruptly, jaw clenched, eyes burning with the struggle of two beings at war; the man and the soul. "Enough," his body said, but his silence screamed otherwise. Inside, he swore this would be the first and last trespass. Just once. Only once. He lied to himself.
Because her mark wasn't just on his skin. It was inside him now, woven into the quiet architecture of his being. A quiet, invisible tether pulsing with memory.
And on her side, something just as dangerous stirred.
All her rules, her careful walls, her practiced composure... it all cracked. Her fortress, the one she had built after years of loss, now had his name carved into its stones. She hadn't let him in. Her soul had.
Time ended. Then restarted. Footsteps echoed down the hall. Someone was coming.
Reality returned, cruel and colorless. They broke apart, breathing hard, hearts thrashing like caught birds. But the silence that followed wasn't empty. It was sacred. It was haunted.
They moved through the rest of the day like sleepwalkers, brushing past each other with shy glances that burned hotter than touch. Every time she caught his eye, she felt that pull again. The invisible current, the whisper from somewhere deeper than flesh.
~ "Do you remember me?"
~ "I think I do."
Then fate, with its usual cruelty, twisted the knife.
Someone noticed. A teasing comment, a smirk, a question. His ears flushed red, his voice stumbled, his hand brushed the place where she had bitten him.
When they assumed the mark belonged to his girlfriend, he didn't correct them.
He couldn't.
The lie was easier to bear than the truth.
Her heart shattered... silently, beautifully. The first mark she ever made on him had been claimed by another. It should've destroyed her.
But it didn't.
Because when she looked at him, at his trembling fingers touching the mark, at the guilt in his eyes, at the soul that trembled beneath his skin, she knew.
He felt it too.
The pull. The bond. The remembering.
It wasn't love yet, not in the way humans name it.
It was something older, darker, something that had waited lifetimes to be reawakened.
And though neither of them could see it yet, that day became a quiet awakening.
The day when desire became destiny.
When the ancient strings of fate began to hum again.
And when her name - unspoken, forbidden... began to echo softly in the chambers of his soul, where even guilt dared not tread.