The Silent Guardian

Episode 4: Three Years Ago

Elena didn't call the police. She didn't know how to explain a note she couldn't account for, in a room she'd locked from the inside, written in a hand that wasn't hers about an act she had no memory of committing.

She called Kade instead, and this time he didn't make her wait for the truth.

He arrived within minutes, and when he saw the note in her trembling hand, something in his expression collapsed — not surprise, she realized. Dread. The look of a man watching a thing he'd been fearing finally arrive.

"Sit down," he said again, and this time she did.

"Three years ago," he began, "there was a fire. A ritual I know how that sounds, and I need you to let me finish before you decide I'm insane." He sat across from her, elbows on his knees, hands loosely clasped, the posture of a man about to set down something heavy. "You were there. So was I. Neither of us remembers most of it, because the people who arranged it made sure of that. What we do know is that something was done to bind us. Our lives. If one of us dies, the tether pulls at the other. If one of us loses control, the other feels it."

Elena stared at him. It should have sounded insane. Instead, it slotted into place with a horrible, quiet click, explaining the wound on his side that matched her own, the blackouts, the way he always seemed to know the moment something in her had gone wrong.

"That's not possible," she said anyway, because some part of her needed to say it out loud before she could let it be true.

"I know how it sounds. I've had three years to sit with it and it still sounds insane to me." He looked at her, steady now, like he needed her to hear the next part clearly. "The blackouts started because someone is trying to activate what was done to us. Trying to use the bond to make you do something you'd never choose on your own. Tonight wasn't an accident, and it wasn't your hand that wrote that note."

"Then whose was it?"

"I don't know yet." His jaw tightened. "But I think it's the same person who's caused every one of your 'accidents' this year. And I think they know I've been keeping you alive, which means they're running out of patience."

Elena's mind reeled, trying to fit the pieces into something that made sense, and failing. "If we're bound together the way you're describing why didn't you tell me sooner? Why let me think I was going insane?"

Kade's expression flickered with something like guilt. "Because the moment you know what you are to me, you become a bigger target than you already are. I was trying to protect you from that as long as I could." He held her gaze, unflinching now. "We're not supposed to be apart, Elena. If you die, so do I. That's the truth I've been trying to keep from ruining what little peace you had left."

The words settled over her like cold water, terrifying and, in some buried, inexplicable way, a relief — an answer, finally, however impossible, to a year of question marks.

"Show me," she said. "Whatever's left of that night. I want to remember."

Kade hesitated, then reached for her hand, turning it palm-up, and pressed his fingers gently against her wrist, over the same pulse point he'd held during her blackout.

"This might hurt," he said quietly. "I'm sorry in advance."

The moment his skin met hers, the black door in Elena's mind didn't creak open it shattered. Fire. Chanting in a language she didn't know but somehow understood. Two names spoken together, hers and his, binding, irreversible. And behind it all, a third voice, cold and familiar in a way that turned her stomach, murmuring words she couldn't yet place but that she knew, with sick certainty, belonged to someone who was still very much alive.

Tags: Fated · Suspense · Soul Swapping · Memory Loss