Every man I kiss dies

The parking lot lights buzzed overhead, one of them flickering in a rhythm that made the shadows pulse. Elena's car was at the far end, and she was regretting every step of the walk before she'd taken ten of them.

"You're being paranoid," she said out loud, mostly to hear a human voice. Mara had left twenty minutes earlier, peeling off toward her own car with a promise to call, and Elena had stayed behind longer than she meant to, standing at Daniel's grave until the groundskeeper started giving her looks that suggested it was time to leave. The cemetery gates were locked behind her. There was no reason to feel watched.

She thought about Adrian's face the entire walk to her car, the certainty in it, the way he'd said three hundred years ago like it was a fact rather than a delusion. She'd spent three years being told, gently, by well meaning people, that grief made you see patterns that weren't there. Nobody had ever suggested the patterns might be real.

She felt watched.

The temperature dropped first. Not gradually, all at once, like a door opening onto winter. Her breath fogged in front of her, and the streetlamp nearest her car guttered and died.

She ran.

She didn't get far. Something closed around her ankle, not a hand, nothing with fingers, more like rope made of cold smoke, and it pulled. Elena hit the pavement hard enough to scrape her palms raw, and when she twisted to look behind her, the shape from the cemetery was there again, closer now, tall and featureless except for two points of light where a face should have been.

She screamed. It didn't seem to matter. No one came.

Then Adrian was there.

She hadn't heard a car. She hadn't heard footsteps. One second the lot was empty except for her and the thing dragging her toward the dark, and the next Adrian Vale was between them, and the smoke shape recoiled like it had touched fire.

What happened next didn't make sense in any order Elena could hold onto. Adrian moved faster than a person should move. His hand closed around something in the air that had no business having substance, and when he threw it, the shadow shattered apart with a sound like glass breaking underwater, and then it was gone, and the streetlamp flickered back on, and the night was an ordinary night again, as though nothing at all had happened in it.

Adrian crouched in front of her. "Are you hurt?"

"What are you?" Her voice came out smaller than she wanted.

"Right now, the person getting you off this ground." He offered his hand. She didn't take it.

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

She got up on her own, ignoring the sting in her palms, and backed away from him until she hit the side of her car. "You just, that thing was going to, and you just threw it like it weighed nothing."

"It doesn't weigh anything. Not the way you mean."

"Adrian."

"I own a security company," he said, like that explained the impossible thing she'd just watched. "Vale International. We handle threats other people can't. I've spent a long time learning how to fight things most people don't believe exist."

"That doesn't tell me what you are."

"It tells you what I do." His eyes held hers, steady, unbothered by her fear in a way that should have frightened her more than it did. "You want the rest of it, and you're going to get it. Not tonight. Tonight you're bleeding and in shock and you need somewhere safe."

"I'm not going anywhere with you."

"Then you'll go somewhere alone, and it will find you again, and next time I might not be close enough."

Elena's hands were shaking. She hated that he could see it. "How did you know to be here?"

Adrian was quiet for a moment, long enough that she understood the silence was a choice, not a hesitation. "Because I've been keeping you alive without your knowledge for longer than you'd believe if I told you."

"That's not possible. I've never met you before today."

"You have," he said. "You just don't remember it."

"Stop talking in riddles. Every time I ask a real question you give me half an answer wrapped in something that sounds like a threat."

"It's not a threat. It's the truth arriving faster than either of us is ready for it." He crouched again, closer this time, his eyes searching her face for something she couldn't name. "I know how insane this sounds. I've had three hundred years to get used to how insane it sounds, and it still catches me off guard every time I have to say it out loud."

The words sat between them, too large for the parking lot, too large for the night. Somewhere behind his calm, Elena thought she saw something that looked almost like grief, a flicker gone before she could be sure of it.

"I'm calling a car for you," he said, before she could ask anything else. "Not mine. One of my company's. My driver will take you home and someone will be posted outside until morning."

"I didn't agree to that."

"You don't have to agree. You just have to be alive tomorrow to argue with me about it."

He was already texting someone, thumb moving fast over the screen, the billionaire businessman replacing the man who'd shattered a shadow like it was made of glass, and Elena stood there in the ruined quiet of the parking lot, cold all the way through, watching him move between two versions of himself as easily as breathing.

"Who else knows about this," she asked. "About whatever that thing was."

"Fewer people than you'd think. Fewer than I'd like." He glanced up from the phone. "That's part of the problem."

The car arrived within minutes, sleek and black and driven by a man who didn't ask a single question about why his passenger had grass stains on her coat and blood drying on her palms. Adrian didn't get in with her. He stood at the curb instead, watching until the car pulled away, and Elena twisted in her seat to look back at him through the rear window, half expecting him to already be gone.

He wasn't. He stood exactly where she'd left him, hands in his pockets, watching her leave like it cost him something.

Elena faced forward again and pressed her scraped palms flat against her knees, trying to steady her breathing. Whatever was happening to her had stopped being a curse sometime in the last hour. It had become a war.

Her phone buzzed against her leg. One new message, no contact name, only a number she didn't recognize.

Ask him what happened to the last woman who wore your face.