Ava's POV
I woke up at three in the morning with my heart beating too fast and my skin on fire.
Literally on fire,not just a figure of speech or at least that was what it felt like, a burning that started at the surface and went deeper than skin, moving through muscle and bone like something trying to get out from the inside. I sat up gasping and grabbed the edge of the mattress with both hands and waited for it to pass.
It took four minutes. I counted the seconds.
When it faded I was drenched in sweat and shaking and the room felt too small and too dark and too enclosed in a way it never had before. I went to the window and opened it and leaned out into the cold night air and breathed until my heartbeat stopped trying to escape through my throat.
I stood at the open window for a long time, letting the cold settle the burning, and told myself it was stress. Stress did things to bodies. Stress caused physical symptoms that had no other explanation. I was living in a stranger's house under a false marriage while my former life was being picked apart by tabloids and my former fiancé was apparently involved in something that had gotten me dropped into all of this.
I almost believed it.
I looked terrible at breakfast.
Damian noticed immediately but he said nothing, just poured a second cup of coffee and set it in front of me without comment, which was somehow more considerate than any amount of asking if I was okay would have been.
I wrapped both hands around the mug and looked at him across the table.
"I didn't sleep well," I said. Not because he asked. Just because the silence felt like it needed something in it.
"I heard you," he said.
I looked up. "Heard me what?"
"Moving around. Opening your window." His eyes were on his phone but his attention wasn't, I was starting to be able to tell the difference. "Around three."
"You were awake at three?"
"I'm often awake at three."
"Why?"
He set his phone down and looked at me properly. "Light sleeper."
I knew it was a lie. I was becoming familiar with the shape of Damian's partial answers, like he was giving me pieces and waiting to see what I built with them.
"It was probably nothing," I said. "Bad dream."
"Probably,"
I drank my coffee and let it rest.
****
Elena called at noon.
I was on my lunch break, sitting in the small courtyard behind Petals with a sandwich I was not eating, watching a pigeon make extremely poor decisions near the bread cart across the street, when my phone rang and her name appeared on the screen.
"Hey," I answered.
"Hey" Her voice had that careful quality it got when she was up to something. "How are you?"
"I'm fine"
"Physically. How are you feeling physically."
I paused. "Why are you asking like that?"
"Because I'm your cousin and a doctor and I'm allowed to ask. Ava," she paused, then continued "Have you been experiencing anything unusual? Physically, I mean. Anything that feels different or hard to explain."
"Like what?"
"Warmth. Heightened senses. Sensitivity to light or sound. Feeling too hot at night. Vivid awareness of your surroundings in a way that feels…new, y'know" She listed them carefully, like she was reading from something. "Any of that."
"Elena," I said slowly. "How do you know about those things?"
Silence on her end. The particular quality of silence was not the absence of something to say but the presence of something being decided.
"I think we should have coffee," she said finally. "Soon. This week if possible."
"Elena. Tell me how you know about those things."
"Ava…"
"I woke up at three in the morning feeling like my skin was burning from the inside." My voice came out steadier than I expected. "I have been feeling warm in ways that don't make sense for a week and a half. My senses feel like someone turned the volume up on them and I cannot explain any of it. So I need you to tell me right now how you knew to ask about those specific things."
Another silence. Longer this time.
"Not on the phone," she said quietly. "Please. Meet me Thursday. I'll come to you."
"Thursday is two days away."
"I know. I'm sorry." And she sounded sorry, genuinely, with something underneath it that sounded almost like guilt. "Just, until Thursday, try not to be around large crowds. And if the burning gets worse, call me immediately. Day or night."
"Elena…"
"Thursday, Ava. I promise I'll explain everything." A pause. "And maybe don't mention this conversation to your husband."
She hung up before I could respond.
I sat in the courtyard for a long time after that, sandwich still in my hand, and tried to organize my thoughts into something that resembled a coherent response to what had just happened.
Elena knew something. Elena had always known something. The careful way she had reviewed the contract, the speed with which she had assessed it, the fact that she had called to check on me at all when Elena was not by nature a person who checked in without reason. She was a doctor who operated on information and she had been operating on information about me that she had chosen not to share and I did not know whether to be frightened or furious or both.
Both. Definitely both.
Jamie appeared in the courtyard doorway with her coat on and the expression of someone who had been watching through the window. "Bad call?"
"Confusing call."
"Scale of one to ten."
"Eight." I stood up, threw the sandwich away. "My cousin knows something about whatever is happening to me and she won't tell me until Thursday and she told me not to tell Damian."
Jamie was quiet for a moment. "Are you going to tell him?"
"I don't know yet,"
Jamie held the door open for me. "For what it's worth," she said as I passed her, "I think he already knows more than you do."
"What makes you say that?"
She shrugged with the particular expression she got when she had an instinct she couldn't fully explain. "The way he looks at you. Like he's watching for something…specific." She let the door close behind us. "Like he's waiting for it to happen."
I went back to work and spent the rest of the afternoon trimming stems with more force than necessary and thinking about Thursday and burning skin and a cousin who had always known something and a husband who was always awake at three in the morning and the particular quality of his partial answers that felt increasingly like a man managing a countdown he hadn't told me about yet.
This week is going to be a long one…even the days ahead.
****
That evening I went to the piano room and sat in the armchair anyways.
I don't know what I was waiting for exactly. The room felt different from the rest of the house, less formal, less performative. The bookshelves were full of actual books, worn spines and cracked covers, not the decorative kind that rich people bought by the meter to fill space. The piano itself had small marks on the fallboard that suggested decades of use. Or maybe centuries. This was not a room that had been designed for appearance. It was a room that had been used.
Damian appeared in the doorway.
He stopped when he saw me. Then he came in, moved to the piano bench, sat down, and opened the fallboard without saying anything. Like my being here was unremarkable. Like we had been doing this for years.
He played for a while and I watched the lamp throw shadows across the bookshelves and let my mind go quiet in the way it only seemed to manage in this room.
"Can I ask you something?" I said during a pause.
"You can ask."
"Do you always sleep badly?"
His hands rested on the keys without playing. "Define 'badly'."
"Awake at three. Every night or just sometimes?"
"Often enough." He pressed a single note, Let it fade. "The house is old. It makes noise."
"That's not why you're awake."
He turned to look at me then, properly, the way he had in the car after the board dinner, that look that lasted slightly too long. "No," he said. "It's not."
"Are you going to tell me why?"
"Not tonight."
"Is there a night on the schedule when you plan to start telling me things?" I kept my voice even, genuinely curious rather than accusatory. "Because I have noticed that you give me pieces and I am working with a very incomplete picture and I would like to understand what I am living inside."
Something shifted in his face. That door moved again, more than usual this time.
"Soon," he said. "I'll tell you soon."
"How soon is soon?"
"Before you need to know and after I figure out how to say it."
I looked at him across the piano. The lamplight was doing the same thing it had done the first night, catching the edges of his face and making him look less composed than his daytime version, more like the person underneath the performance.
"Are you in danger?" I asked quietly.
"Yes." No hesitation. "Are you surprised?"
"No. Are we both in danger?"
A pause. Longer than I wanted. "Yes."
"Okay." I settled back in the armchair. "Then play something and let me think."
He looked at me for a moment with an expression I couldn't fully name, something between surprise and something softer that he covered quickly. Then he turned back to the piano.
He played for another hour.
I sat in the armchair and thought about Elena's phone call and Jamie's observation and the burning at three in the morning and the way my senses had sharpened at the board dinner and the way the warmth moved through me every time Damian was close enough to reach.
I thought about my mother, who had died when I was sixteen and left behind a photograph and a gap in my history that I had never thought to question because grief had a way of making you accept absences rather than examine them.
I thought about the word soon and the way he had said it like it cost something.
Somewhere in the second hour I fell asleep in the armchair.
I didn't mean to. One moment I was listening and thinking and the next the music was still playing and I was somewhere warm and dark and unafraid in a way that my waking self had not managed in quite some time.
I woke up to silence and a blanket I did not remember having.
The lamp was still on. The piano was closed. Damian was gone.
I sat up slowly and touched the blanket, dark wool, warm, the kind of warm that suggested it had been placed recently rather than some time ago.
I sat there in the quiet piano room for a long moment.
Then I folded the blanket carefully, left it on the armchair, and went upstairs to bed.
The burning didn't come back.
For the first time in over a week I slept straight through until morning, deep and dreamless and completely still. I didn't examine why.
Some things were easier left unexamined.
At least for now.