The Silent Guardian

Episode 3: Something Is Wrong With Me

Elena told herself the blackout was a one-time thing. A concussion aftershock, nothing more. She almost believed it for two days.

The second one happened at work.

She was in the middle of a client call, pen in hand, mid-sentence, and then she was standing in the stairwell of her office building with no memory of leaving her desk. Her coworker Priya found her there, pale and blinking, ten minutes and two floors away from where she was supposed to be.

"You just walked out," Priya said, worry creasing her forehead. "Mid-call. Didn't say a word. I thought you saw a ghost."

Elena laughed it off, blamed the concussion, promised to see her doctor. But that night, alone in her apartment, she stood in front of the bathroom mirror and studied her own reflection like it belonged to someone else. Ten minutes. Gone. No sensation of time passing, no dream, no gap she could feel the edges of. Just a clean, surgical absence.

She thought of the jacket, still folded at the bottom of her closet. She thought of Kade's hand around her wrist, the way he'd said stay with me like it was something he'd said to her before, in a life she couldn't remember living.

She knocked on his door before she'd fully decided to.

He opened it fast, like he'd been standing close to it. His eyes swept over her, checking for something, the same way a person checks a wound to see if it's reopened.

"You felt it happen again," he said. Not a question.

Elena's stomach dropped. "How did you know that?"

He didn't answer right away. He stepped back and let her in, his jaw tight, and for the first time she noticed how careful he was in his own apartment, how he moved like a man permanently braced for something to go wrong.

"Sit down," he said. "Please."

"I don't want to sit down. I want you to tell me what's happening to me." Her voice cracked on the last word, exhaustion and fear finally breaking through the calm she'd been holding onto for two days. "I'm losing time, Kade. Minutes. Ten minutes tonight. I don't dream, I don't feel dizzy, I just stop. And then I'm somewhere else, and you're always close by when it happens. Always. That's not a coincidence anymore."

Kade was quiet for a long moment, his hands loosely clasped in front of him, like he was holding something in rather than reaching for something out.

"It's not," he said finally. "It's not a coincidence."

The admission hit harder than she expected, even though some part of her had known it was coming. "Then what is it?"

"I can't explain everything tonight. You wouldn't believe me if I did, and I need you to trust the little I can tell you before I give you the rest." He met her eyes, and there was something almost pleading in it, a rare c***k in his composure. "You're not sick. You're not imagining this. But there's a reason it's happening, and a reason it's connected to me, and I promise you, Elena, I am not the danger here."

"Then who is?"

Before he could answer, his phone buzzed once on the counter. He glanced at it, and whatever he saw there changed his face completely, the careful calm replaced by something sharper, more alert.

"You need to go home," he said. "Lock your door. Don't open it for anyone but me tonight."

"Kade"

"Please." His hand closed briefly over hers, warm and steady, and for a second the urgency in his grip felt like the only solid thing in a night that had come completely unmoored. "I will explain everything. I swear to you. Just not tonight."

She went home because she didn't know what else to do. She locked her door the way he'd asked. And she was standing in her dark kitchen, staring at nothing, replaying his face when the phone buzzed, when the blackout took her again sudden, total, without warning.

She came back to herself on her own living room floor, disoriented, her heart slamming against her ribs. But this time, Kade wasn't there to catch her.

This time, she was alone, and her hands were streaked with something dark she didn't remember touching, and on the coffee table in front of her sat a folded note, in handwriting that wasn't hers, that read:

You almost did it again.

Tags: Suspense · Memory Loss · Silent Guardian · Fated