He woke screaming.

  The sound tore from his throat before he could stop it, raw and primal and utterly inhuman, filling his penthouse bedroom with an echo of centuries-old terror. He was on his feet before he was fully conscious, his hand still reaching, still grasping for fingers that weren't there, his body poised for flight or fight or whatever action might be required to save her.

  But there was no her. There was no smoky room, no revolutionary mob, no brocade coat or buckled shoes. There was only his bedroom, modern and sterile and safe, the city lights glittering beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, indifferent to his torment.

  He stood there for a long time, his breath ragged, his heart pounding so hard he could feel it in his temples, his throat, behind his eyes. The phantom sensation of her fingers still burned against his palm, a ghost touch that refused to fade. He could still feel the warmth of her skin, the desperate pressure of her grip, the way she had looked across centuries of impossible separation.

  She had felt real. More real than anything in his carefully constructed life. More real than his board meetings and his scientific breakthroughs and his billion-dollar deals. More real than the city spread out below him, than the bed behind him, than his own body standing.

  The desperation in her eyes. The way she'd spoken his name—his name—in a room that existed hundred years before he was born. The way she had looked at him like he was the only thing in the universe that mattered.

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  At three in the morning, standing in his penthouse in nothing but his boxers, his hand actually reaching for the phone, he had almost called his mother to tell her that he was losing his mind, that the dreams had finally crossed the line from strange to terrifying, that he could still feel the ghost of her touch on his skin and he didn't know what to do.

  But he didn't. He couldn't make the call. What would he say? Hey, Mom, remember those nightmares I had as a kid? Well, they have always been around but now there's a woman in them who calls me by my name even though has been she's living for centuries and had not aged, and I think I'm in love with her.

  No. He poured himself a drink instead—a double scotch, neat, the same thing he always drank when the world became too much. He stood at the window until dawn, watching the city slowly wake, and told himself it was just a dream. Just his subconscious, processing stress, creating narratives where none existed. He was Kaelen Vance. He didn't believe in past lives or soulmates or any of that romantic nonsense. He believed in data, in evidence, in the cold hard facts of existence.

  He almost believed it.

  And then he walked into a coffee shop three months later, and a woman with dark hair and ancient eyes looked up from her table, and every dream, every death, every desperate reaching across the void of time came crashing down on him at once.

  He'd run. Of course he'd run. What else could he do when confront with proof that he wasn't mad—that the angel of his childhood, the woman of his dreams, the love he'd been chasing was suddenly, impossibly, terrifyingly real?