The stranger smiled.
"Did you miss your husband?"
For several seconds, Aliena forgot how to breathe.
Her eyes remained fixed on his face.
Sebastian's face.
No.
Not Sebastian's.
The resemblance was too perfect to be coincidence, yet everything about the stranger felt wrong. His hair was longer, falling past his shoulders in dark waves. His features carried the same impossible beauty, but where Sebastian's face could betray irritation, amusement, tenderness, and fury, this man's expression possessed a terrible stillness.
He looked like a portrait that had learned to breathe.
His eyes were golden-red.
A crown of living darkness rested upon his head, its jagged points moving like the fingers of something alive. Black veins travelled from his temples down his neck, disappearing beneath the high collar of his ancient robes.
And he was looking at Aliena as though the thousands of years separating them had been nothing more than an inconvenient afternoon.
