Chapter 7 — What He Did Not Tell Her
620 Words
Calixta spent the next morning in a fog of unease.
She had been right to fear him—not just because of what he was, but because of what he knew.
He remembered. Every detail.
Every heartbeat of the life she thought she had left behind.
Every choice, every misstep, every soft word that had been spoken in the wrong hall or whispered at the wrong hour.
She didn’t notice him until she turned a corner in her apartment building’s parking garage.
“Calixta.” His voice was low, casual, but it carried the weight of inevitability.
She stopped. Her fists clenched at her sides. “You—how did you—”
“I am always where I need to be,” he said, as if that explained everything. “Especially when it concerns you.”
She forced herself to look him in the eyes. “You’re terrifying.”
“Not terrifying,” he corrected smoothly. “Necessary.”
It was true, and that truth was worse than fear.
“Why did you—kill me?” she demanded, the words spilling before she could stop them. “Why then? Why ever?”
Voltaire’s expression did not waver. He had rehearsed this, she knew, as carefully as he had plotted her death in the past life.
“Because I had to,” he said simply.
“You—what?!”
“You belonged to a line,” he explained, tone calm, deliberate, as if recounting history in a classroom.
“A line that could challenge my kingdom. You were more than a princess. You were a key. Marry another man, and the claim you carried in your blood could have destroyed everything I built—everything I had a right to protect. I gave you one life, rather than allow thousands more to perish.”
Calixta’s mind reeled. She had felt hatred in the past life, fear, betrayal—but understanding twisted it into something more complicated, more suffocating.
“You—killed me to save your kingdom?”
“Yes,” he said, stepping closer.
“And I would do it again. But not this time.”
“Not this time?” Her voice was a whisper, shaking with disbelief.
“Not this time,” he repeated.
“Because now, I want you alive. Because now, I want your choice to be mine to influence, even when you think you are deciding for yourself.”
She swallowed hard. His obsession was no longer abstract. It was a calculated plan, executed over decades, carried through memory and reincarnation. It was not love. It was control.
And yet… she felt it. That impossible pull. That magnetic force that twisted fear and desire into the same knot inside her chest.
“You think you understand the choice,” he said, the voice softer now, almost intimate.
“But the past has already been decided. I only guide what is inevitable.”
Calixta backed up against the concrete wall of the garage. Her heartbeat was deafening.
“I will never be yours,” she said, voice trembling, though she felt the lie in it even as it left her lips.
“You already are,” he replied calmly.
“I simply wait for you to realize it.”
She felt the truth pressing in. Every corner of her existence, every careful plan, every step away—he had accounted for it. Every avenue of defiance was mapped, anticipated, and countered.
And for the first time, she understood the full scope of what she faced: Voltaire Francisco was not just a man who remembered a past life.
He was a force that existed beyond time, beyond consent, beyond morality.
And she was trapped.
- Writer
