Every man I kiss dies

The rain had stopped an hour ago, but the ground hadn't gotten the message. Elena's heels sank into the wet grass with every step, and she hated that she noticed something so small at a funeral. She hated that her mind kept reaching for details that didn't matter, the shine on the casket, the black umbrella someone had left open beside a headstone three rows over, instead of the one detail that did.

Daniel was dead. Seven days after he kissed her.

She stood near the back, arms crossed over her coat, close enough to hear the priest and far enough that no one would ask her to come stand with the family. She didn't deserve to stand with the family. She was the reason there was a family to stand at all, hollowed out and quiet in the front row, the kind of grief that made even strangers lower their voices.

"You didn't have to come," Mara whispered beside her. "Nobody would've blamed you."

"I would have."

Mara didn't argue. She just laced her fingers through Elena's and held on, the way she'd been holding on for three years now, through David, through Marcus, through the string of names Elena had stopped saying out loud because saying them made it real in a way that thinking them didn't.

Four names. Four funerals. Four men who had been alive and laughing and reaching for her, and then, exactly seven days later, weren't. Elena had stopped believing in coincidence somewhere around the second one. By the fourth, she had stopped believing she was allowed to want anyone at all.

That was when she felt it. The look.

Not from the family. Not from the priest. From somewhere behind her, off to the left, where the cemetery's old oaks threw shadows long enough to swallow a person whole.

She turned.

He was already looking at her.

He stood alone, apart from the mourners, wearing black that fit him too well to be anything off a rack. He wasn't young. He wasn't old either. He had the kind of face that made age feel like the wrong question to ask, and something in the way he held himself, still and unhurried, made him look like he belonged to a different century than everyone else in the cemetery. Dark hair, sharp cheekbones, and eyes that were watching her the way you'd watch something you'd been waiting a long time to see.

Elena had been stared at before, pity stares, curious stares, the careful sideways looks of people who'd heard the rumors about the girl whose men kept dying. This wasn't that. This man wasn't looking at her like she was cursed. He was looking at her like he already knew, and like the knowing didn't frighten him at all.

"Who is that?" she murmured.

Mara followed her gaze and frowned. "No idea. I don't think he's with the Whitmores. He's staring at you."

"I noticed."

The service ended. People began to move, that slow shuffle of black coats toward black cars, and Elena lost him in the crowd for one panicked second before he reappeared, closer now, though she hadn't seen him cross the grass.

"Elena Voss."

Not a question. She stiffened. "Do I know you?"

"Not yet." His voice was low, unhurried, the kind of calm that didn't belong at a funeral. "Adrian Vale."

The name landed somewhere in the back of her memory, familiar in the way a headline is familiar. Vale International Security. Billionaire. The kind of man whose face showed up in business magazines she never read, attached to numbers she couldn't picture.

"I don't know why a security billionaire would be at Daniel Whitmore's funeral," she said, "but I'd like you to leave me alone."

"I'm not here for Daniel." His eyes didn't move off her face. "I'm here for you."

Something cold moved through her, and it wasn't the wind. "Excuse me?"

"Four men, Elena. Seven days apart, always. David. Marcus. The one before that, Ethan. Now Daniel." He said the names like he'd memorized them a long time ago, not like he'd read them off an obituary that morning. "You think you're cursed."

"Who told you that?" Her voice cracked on the last word, and she hated it. "Did Mara..."

"No one told me. I've been looking for you for a long time."

"That's insane. I don't know you."

"You will." He said it simply, without arrogance, like a fact rather than a promise. "What's happening to you isn't a curse. Not the way you think it is."

Elena's pulse was loud in her own ears. Behind her, Mara's voice was calling her name, distant, like it was coming from underwater. "Then what is it?"

Adrian's gaze flicked, just briefly, past her shoulder, toward the tree line, where the shadows under the old oaks had gone a shade too dark for four in the afternoon. Something in his expression sharpened.

"We don't have time for that right now."

"For what..."

"Don't turn around."

She turned around.

The shadow beneath the trees wasn't a shadow. It moved the way smoke moves in wind that isn't there, folding in on itself, and for one impossible second Elena thought she saw the shape of a woman inside it, tall, still, watching her the exact way Adrian had been watching her, except there was nothing patient in it at all. The air around it seemed to bend, the grass beneath it browning as though something had drained the life straight out of the ground.

Then it was gone, and the ordinary gray afternoon closed back over the cemetery like nothing had happened.

Elena's breath came fast. "What was that?"

Adrian's hand closed around her arm, not rough, but absolute, the grip of a man who had decided something and would not be argued out of it. "Something followed you here. It isn't the first time, and it won't be the last."

"Followed me from where?"

He looked at her the way you'd look at someone standing at the edge of a cliff they didn't know they were on.

"From three hundred years ago," he said, "though you don't remember that yet."

He let go of her arm before she could answer, before she could do anything but stand there with her heart slamming against her ribs, and by the time Mara reached her, calling her name for the third time, Adrian Vale was already walking away through the wet grass, unhurried, certain, like a man who knew, without any doubt at all, that she would come find him.

She didn't sleep that night. She kept hearing it. Three hundred years ago. And somewhere past midnight, staring at her bedroom ceiling, Elena realized the real reason she couldn't shake it wasn't fear.

It was that some part of her, buried and impossible, believed him.