would answer for later, on an elevator button marked only with a number and no floor name. Elena hadn't meant to find

besides the one at its end, reinforced steel instead of glass, and ev

n't tur

p adding to it, filing cabinets that ran the length of one wall, glass cases holding weapons Elena didn't recognize, curved blades and thing

wasn't her, in a dozen different lives Elena had never lived and somehow still recognized, standing beside men and in cities she'd never visited, always with the same tilt to her chin. A woman in a Victorian mourning dress. A woman

Elena would ha

lf think too hard ab

decades of searching laid out like evidence in a case that had never once closed. Elena moved along the wall slowly, he

the room sat a folder marked

s shook as s

it showed three figures instead of two. Adrian stood at the center, exactly as

ft, watching the couple beside her with an expression Elena didn't need three hundred yea

k, in handwriting that had faded but never d

oes, kill her before she re

was Adrian, because she could already hear the way his footsteps stopped dead in the doorway, the way his voic

le

hand, the words on the back of it burn

pproaching something that might shatter if he moved too fast, and gently took the

he said finally. "I didn'

who

rst time since she'd met him, Elena watched something like real fear settle over his face, not for her safety this time, but for

nd at the decades of searching pinned to the walls. "Y

told myself I was doing it to protect you before you even knew there was anything to

the rest

en I told myself I should. Even when I knew find

hat did I

nything he'd told her so far, and that he had been dreading this exact moment since the day he found her standing a