Ethan reaches her through the smoke.
Not metaphorical smoke—not memory, not fear—but the real kind, acrid and metallic, curling low along the corridor as emergency suppression systems hiss uselessly overhead. The estate no longer feels like a house. It feels like a battlefield that has been alive long enough to learn how to bleed quietly.
Scarlett senses him before she sees him.
It is not instinct alone, though instinct plays its part. It is recognition—something old and unbroken threading through timelines that were never meant to touch again. Her pulse shifts, not spiking, not betraying her, but recalibrating around a truth her body has always known.
Ethan Pierce is inside the perimeter.
He emerges at the far end of the corridor just as the lights stutter back to partial power. Tact
