Kaelen Vance's rejection was a different kind of death.
It wasn't the sharp, clean severance of a battlefield wound—the kind I had witnessed a hundred times across a hundred wars, where life bled out in moments and left only the cold peace of stillness behind. It wasn't the slow, wasting illness that had claimed him in past lives, the fevered eyes and rasping breaths that stretched agony into days and weeks. Those deaths, for all their horror, had a kind of terrible dignity. They were inevitable. They were the natural order of mortal things.
This was something else entirely.
This was a calculated, conscious dismissal. Stay away from me. The words were a sterile scalpel, expertly applied to the fragile hope that had begun to knit itself back together inside me. He hadn't just failed to remember; he had actively refused the possibility. He had looked at me—the woman who had crossed centuries for him, as he died in a dozen different lifetimes, who had memorized every iteration of his soul across a hundred different faces—and seen only a threat. A nuisance. A stranger to be dismissed with cold efficiency.
The words echoed in my mind as I walked back to my apartment that night, through streets that seemed suddenly unfamiliar, as if the city itself had become a foreign country. Stay away from me. They played on a loop, accompanied by the image of his face in the moment he spoke them—the hard set of his jaw, the flatness in those eyes that had once held the light of stars.