Page 129 of Without a Trace
Sharper this time. Intentional.
“You okay, Love?” Alden asked, quiet but alert.
I nodded. “Yeah just tired.”
But something had shifted.
The world tilted in that bed—three bodies and a secret humming between us. I didn’t understand it yet, but I felt it. In my blood. In my bones.
In the silver I’d worn without thinking.
They weren’t just mine anymore.
And maybe I wasn’t just theirs.
Whatever we’d awakened tonight, was already awake in me too.
Interlude
The dream came slowly this time.
Like smoke through a locked room.
I was standing barefoot in a corridor I didn’t recognize—long, narrow, stone beneath my feet. Red light poured from torches on the wall, but there were no flames. Just glow. Just heat.
And silence.
My silver bracelet burned. Not painfully—just enough to remind me it was there. I touched it and felt a pulse. Not mine. Deeper. Older. As if something buried in my blood was waking up.
I walked.
The corridor twisted. Time bent.
I saw flashes as I passed doorways that didn’t lead anywhere: Alden’s eyes dark and unreadable. Trace on his knees, blood on his hands. A handprint on glass. The shape of my own mouth crying a name I couldn’t hear.
Then I was outside.
A forest, moonless. Trees bent overhead like ribs. There was no wind, but the leaves whispered.
“Scarlett.”
My name came from nowhere and everywhere.
A silver flame hovered above my palm. It flickered once, then shot up like it had a mind of its own. I didn’t flinch. I watched it dance.
Then he was there.
At the edge of the clearing.
Not close. Not fully visible. But I knew.
Older now. Taller than I remembered. But still—the man who used to carry me in one arm like I weighed nothing. The one I’d buried in memory.
My father.
“You weren’t supposed to choose yet,” he said, voice both near and far. “But then again, neither were they.”
I tried to speak, but the flame grew louder—roaring in my ears like water.
