Cursed to love you

They say you don't remember dying. But I do.

I remember the scent of burning roses. The feeling of silk ripping beneath my fingers. The sound of my own scream-cut off halfway by a hand pressed too tightly against my mouth.

And his face.

Always, his face.

The silver eyes that held centuries. The blood-stained mouth whispering my name like a prayer-or a curse. And the way he said it-Aria-as if it had once meant something holy. As if it still did.

The first time I died, I was eighteen and barefoot, running through a forest set ablaze by magic I couldn't understand. The trees bowed toward me, groaning with secrets. The night sky above was split open, bleeding starlight. He told me not to look back.

But I did.

And in that half-second of hesitation, everything shattered.

A shadow, fast and silent, lunged through the fire. I felt the burn of claws against my skin, heard the roar of a beast that was not entirely human. He caught me in his arms before I hit the ground. I bled out in them.

And I remember thinking, just before the world faded to black:

It's you. It's always been you.

---

The second time I met him, I didn't know who I was.

They told me I was lucky. I survived a car crash that should've split me in half. No one could explain how I walked away from it with nothing but a hairline fracture and a few bruises.

But I didn't feel lucky.

I felt wrong. As if something had followed me back.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw him.

Not as he was now, but as he had been then. Velvet black coat, hands dripping with someone's blood, silver eyes that looked at me like I was a ghost.

Or worse-a memory.

I was. I just didn't know it yet.

I started keeping a notebook. Scribbling the things I saw in my dreams. Names. Places. A lullaby in a language I didn't know, but sang anyway. It terrified my therapist. She thought I was disassociating. But deep down, I knew it wasn't madness.

It was memory.

---

I started dreaming in languages I didn't speak.

I woke up reciting names I'd never heard, poems written in ash, kisses that weren't mine but left bruises on my lips when I woke.

My best friend, Casey, begged me to stop reading horror novels before bed. She joked about sleep paralysis demons. But I wasn't asleep. And the demons weren't fiction. They had names. Faces.

One of them looked like me.

At first, I thought I was losing it.

Then I saw him. Not in a dream. Not in a memory. But in a crowd on a street I'd walked a hundred times before.

He was standing still. The world moved around him, like he didn't belong. Because he didn't. Not here. Not now.

He looked right at me.

And smiled.

The smile of a man who had seen me die.

More than once.

---

He didn't come to me right away. He waited. Like he always did.

Until the dreams grew sharper. Until I started bleeding from places that hadn't been touched. Until I couldn't breathe without hearing his voice in the back of my mind, saying the same thing again and again:

This time, I'll save you.

But he didn't save me. Not then. Not the time before. Not the time before that.

I didn't know what he meant. I didn't know why he looked at me like he was breaking.

Until the memories came.

And with them, the truth.

---

I've died a hundred times.

In fire. In ice. By blade. By betrayal. By my own hand. And always, always with him watching.

Lucien D'Argent.

The vampire prince with eyes like dying stars. The man who never ages. The one who's loved me across lifetimes and lost me every single time.

He calls it a curse.

But what if it's something else?

What if love isn't the thing keeping us alive, but the thing killing us?

---

I searched for him. Every night. In shadows. In mirrors. I walked alleys and old churches, drawn to ruins and cathedrals like something ancient pulled me toward them. I heard voices in the stone. I felt hands in the fog.

Then I found the locket.

Tucked inside a secondhand bookstore, between a book of forgotten fairy tales and an ancient guide to blood rituals. The chain was broken. But the photo inside was of me.

Except it wasn't.

It was a girl with my face-only older. Sadder. Dressed like the dead.

And beside her was Lucien.

---

Last night, I kissed him.

And this morning, I woke up with blood on my hands.

His blood.

I stood over him with the dagger still warm in my grip, his name on my lips like a prayer. Or maybe a plea.

Then his eyes opened.

Silver. Cold. Alive.

"Aria," he whispered. "You've remembered."

I stepped back. Into silence. Into everything I'd been running from.

---

I don't know how this life ends. But I know how it begins.

With me remembering.

And with him trying to forget.

I don't remember walking to the train station.

All I know is that the wind bites at my cheeks and my breath curls in front of me like smoke. The letter is tucked into the pocket of my coat, folded and unfolding itself in my thoughts on repeat. Meet me where we died the first time.

Where we died. Not just me.

The train is late. Of course it is. Greyhaven transit hasn't been on time since 2009. I stand beneath the flickering platform lights, hands stuffed deep in my pockets, trying not to think about the man with silver eyes.

And failing.

I used to think I was just haunted by trauma. A girl with too much imagination and not enough closure. But Lucien is different. He doesn't feel like a ghost.

He feels like gravity.

When the train screeches into the station, I get on autopilot. I don't remember where I'm going. My feet do. They carry me down empty streets and toward the edge of town-toward the forest that swallowed me in my dreams.

The woods are still here. Just like I remember them. Bent trees. Black soil. That eerie hush like the world holding its breath. The last time I came here, I was with my parents. I was nine. I remember asking if monsters were real.

They laughed.

They didn't laugh when I went missing for two hours.

I stand at the edge of the trees. Then I step in.

One foot. Then another.

The silence is suffocating.

---

Half an hour later, I find it.

A clearing.

Charred trees. Scorched earth. The faint shimmer of something just beneath the surface of the air-as if time has tried to stitch itself back together, but the thread keeps breaking.

I know this place.

I've died in this place.

"You came."

I spin around.

Lucien is there, leaning against a tree like he hasn't aged in two hundred years. He wears the same coat. Same boots. Same impossible expression-like looking at me hurts him.

I swallow hard. "Was any of it real? The painting, the dreams-us?"

He walks closer. Slow. Careful. "All of it."

"Why me?"

His gaze softens. "Because it's always been you."

He says it like a vow