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The letter was impossible.

Elara Voss held it under the work lamp, her gloved fingers trembling against parchment that should have disintegrated decades ago. The ink was iron gall — she could tell by its particular rust-brown fade — and the handwriting was exquisite, each letter formed with the deliberate elegance of someone trained in an era when penmanship was considered a moral virtue.

But it was the words that made her blood run cold.

*To Miss Elara Voss, who will find this letter in the winter of her thirty-first year, in the hidden chamber beneath Ashworth Hall. You made me a promise. I have waited two hundred years for you to keep it.*

She was thirty-one. It was February. And she had discovered the chamber only twenty minutes ago, hidden behind a false wall in the manor's cellar, sealed with bricks that crumbled at her touch as though they had been waiting — patiently, deliberately — for her hands and no one else's.

Inside the chamber: a single portrait, a single chair, and this letter.

The portrait showed a man. Dark hair swept back from a face that belonged on a Roman coin — sharp jaw, high cheekbones, a mouth that hovered between cruelty and tenderness. His eyes were painted in an unusual shade of amber, almost gold, and they seemed to follow her as she moved through the small space. He wore a dark coat with a high collar, and one hand rested on a book whose title she couldn't quite read.

He was, without question, the most beautiful man she had ever seen.

Elara set down the letter and pressed her palms against her eyes. She was a restoration specialist, not a character in a gothic novel. There was an explanation. There was always an explanation. Someone had researched her, planted the letter, staged this elaborate scene—

A knock at the front door echoed through the empty manor.

She checked her phone. 11:47 PM. The nearest village was six miles away, and she hadn't seen another car on the road since arriving that morning. The knock came again — three measured strikes, unhurried, as though the person on the other side had all the time in the world.

Elara climbed the cellar stairs, crossed the entrance hall with its peeling wallpaper and chandelier wrapped in dust sheets, and opened the door.

He stood on the threshold.

The same face. The same impossible amber eyes. The same mouth caught between something gentle and something dangerous. He wore a long dark coat — modern, impeccably tailored — but his bearing belonged to another century. He looked at her the way a man looks at water after crossing a desert.

"You found the letter," he said. Not a question.

His voice was low, textured, accented in a way she couldn't place — as though English were a language he had learned long ago and never quite forgotten, but rarely used anymore.

"Who are you?" she whispered.

"My name is Ashworth. Damien Ashworth." He tilted his head, studying her face with an intensity that made her feel simultaneously exposed and cherished. "And you are Elara Voss, though once you went by another name. May I come in?"

Every rational instinct told her to refuse. Instead, she stepped aside.

He moved through the entrance hall without looking around, as though he knew every crack in the plaster, every warped floorboard. He paused beneath the chandelier and glanced up at it with an expression that might have been grief.

"My mother chose that chandelier," he said quietly. "Venetian glass. She had it shipped from Murano in 1819."

"That's not possible. You'd have to be—"

"Over two hundred years old." He turned to face her, and in the pale light filtering through the fanlight above the door, his eyes caught gold. "Yes."

Elara's pulse hammered in her throat. She should have been afraid. She was afraid. But beneath the fear was something else — a pull, magnetic and ancient, as though some deep part of her recognized him. As though her body remembered what her mind refused to.

"The letter said I made you a promise," she said carefully. "I've never met you before tonight."

"Not in this life." He reached into his coat and withdrew something — a small oval locket on a chain so fine it looked like liquid silver. He opened it. Inside was a miniature portrait, no larger than a coin. A woman's face. Dark hair. Green eyes.

Elara's green eyes.

"Her name was Eleanor Ashworth," Damien said. "My wife. She died on the night of our wedding, February the fourteenth, 1826. Before she died, she made me a promise."

"What promise?"

He closed the locket and held it against his chest. "That she would return to me. That no matter how many lifetimes it took, she would find her way back. And that when she did, she would remember."

The wind shifted outside, and the manor groaned around them — ancient timber settling, old stones adjusting to the cold. Elara felt something stir in her chest, a sensation she couldn't name, somewhere between recognition and longing.

"I don't remember anything," she said.

"Not yet." He stepped closer. He smelled of woodsmoke and something older — rain on stone, the particular sweetness of decay that clings to very old houses. "But you will. You came here. You found the chamber. You opened the letter. Something in you already knows."

"Or someone set this up to manipulate me."

A shadow crossed his face — not anger, but something rawer. Hurt. "You think I would wait two centuries to play a trick?"

"I think people are capable of extraordinary deception."

"Yes," he said softly. "They are. But I am not people. Not anymore."

He extended his hand. His fingers were long, elegant, and unnervingly still — no tremor, no warmth radiating from his skin. She stared at his palm.

"Touch me," he said. "And tell me I'm deceiving you."

She shouldn't have. She knew she shouldn't have. But her hand moved as though pulled by a current older than reason, and her fingers brushed his palm.

The world tilted.

She saw it — not with her eyes but with something deeper, something cellular. A ballroom lit by a thousand candles. A white dress. His face, younger, flushed with life, his eyes bright with tears as he slid a ring onto her finger. The taste of champagne. The weight of joy so immense it felt like drowning. Then darkness. Pain. A cold floor. His voice screaming her name — not Elara, but Eleanor — and the sensation of falling, falling, falling into nothing.

She gasped and pulled her hand away.

"What did you see?" His voice was barely a whisper.

"A wedding," she breathed. "Our wedding."

Something broke open in his expression — two hundred years of control fracturing in an instant. He didn't move toward her, didn't reach for her. He simply stood there, and she watched a man who had outlived empires struggle not to weep.

"How?" she asked. "How are you still alive?"

"I made a bargain," he said. "The night Eleanor died, something came to me. Something old and nameless. It offered me time — enough time to wait for her return. The cost was everything else. Warmth. Sleep. The ability to forget. I have lived every moment of two hundred years in perfect, unbroken consciousness, remembering every second of the seventeen hours I spent as her husband."

"That's not a bargain. That's a punishment."

"Yes," he agreed. "But I would make it again."

The silence between them was charged, electric, alive. Elara felt her heartbeat in her fingertips, in her lips, in the hollow of her throat. She was standing three feet from an impossible man, and every cell in her body was leaning toward him like a flower toward light.

"The letter said if I don't remember by the next full moon, we'll both cease to exist," she said.

"The bargain has terms. Two centuries was the limit. The full moon falls on the fourteenth — three days from now. If you remember fully — not fragments, not flashes, but truly remember who you were and what you promised — then the bargain is fulfilled. I become mortal again. We get a lifetime. One ordinary, finite, magnificent lifetime."

"And if I don't?"

"Then the debt comes due. I return what was borrowed — the years, the consciousness, the waiting. And since your soul is tied to the promise, you go with me. We simply... end."

Elara's mouth went dry. "You're telling me that a promise a dead woman made two hundred years ago has the power to erase me from existence."

"I'm telling you that you are that woman. And the promise was not made lightly."

He moved then — not toward her but toward the window, where moonlight spilled across the floor in a silver parallelogram. He stood in it, and she saw what the darkness had hidden: the faintest translucence to his skin, as though he were not entirely solid, not entirely here.

"You don't have to believe me tonight," he said. "But stay. Stay in this house. Let the walls remind you. Let the rooms speak. This place remembers you, Elara. It has been holding its breath for two hundred years."

She should have left. She should have driven back to London, to her flat with its IKEA furniture and reliable heating and complete absence of immortal men making impossible claims. But when she looked at him standing in the moonlight, something ancient and fierce rose up in her chest — not quite memory, not quite love, but the ghost of both.

"Three days," she said.

He turned, and the look on his face was devastating — hope so fragile it could shatter at a whisper.

"Three days," he echoed.

That night, Elara lay in a bedroom on the second floor, wrapped in blankets she'd brought in her car, listening to the house breathe around her. Somewhere below, Damien moved through rooms he'd known for two centuries, a man out of time, suspended between existence and oblivion by nothing more than a dead woman's promise and a living woman's doubt.

She pressed her hand to her chest and felt her heart beating — steady, insistent, alive.

Somewhere in its rhythm, she thought she heard a second heartbeat. Faint. Distant. Two hundred years old.

Beating in perfect time with hers.

She closed her eyes, and behind them, candlelight flickered in a ballroom she had never seen — or perhaps had simply forgotten.

Three days to remember.

Three days to decide if love could survive death, time, and the terrible patience of a man who refused to let go.

Three days before the moon decided for them both.