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Eleanor kept her finger firm on the trigger. She hadn't moved. The gun was aimed precisely at the silhouette swallowed by the shadows in her hallway. Only his face glimmered faintly in the dark, cut by the dim orange light that bled through the gap in the curtains. Matis. Still. Patient. Like something risen from her nightmares to occupy a living form.
He stepped forward, deliberate, silent — his movement a ghost brushing against time. As if he had heard her thoughts, he drifted closer toward the couch, into the light. She saw him clearer now. The years had changed the world around her, bent it in unfamiliar ways. But not him. No, Matis remained untouched — like a statue never meant to decay, his presence still clothed in that same black stillness that had once made her feel powerful. Before she knew better.
"Why are you here?" Her voice cracked into the stale air, louder than she intended, almost brittle against the silence.
Out of instinct, she stepped forward. Her boots creaked against the wooden floor, circling the couch's opposite end. The gun never wavered from its mark, and still, neither did he. They were like dancers, opposites in orbit, haunted choreography drawn from blood memory.
A flicker passed through his expression — amusement, maybe, or something more indulgent. He had always loved how predictable fear could be. "You really don't know?" His voice slithered through the silence, deep and warm and cruel. "All these years... I've been trying to find you. Waiting for a sign."
He stopped at the edge of the couch and looked at her the way a painter might look at a masterpiece returned to him after years in exile. He drank in the sight of her — hollowed, wary, rigid — just the way he had left her. And perhaps better. The light caught her in pieces — her face, her hand gripped white-knuckled on the gun. And in that frame, that moment, she looked regal to him. Like a ruined statue.
"That wasn't a sign," she said tightly. "Not from me."
Matis laughed, low and indulgent. Of course not. He'd never expected her to seek him out. He only needed her to expect that he would. And she had. That was enough to him. "Perhaps," he murmured. His eyes gleamed with the memory. "Gotta love the Americans."
He was smiling now, almost playfully, as he recalled the agent's voice — tight with confusion, floundering beneath the weight of questions he barely understood. He'd asked about a woman, careful, unsure. He said her name the way someone says a prayer they don't believe in: Eleanor Beaumont. But he had known. From the moment he's heard his voice on the other side of the call, stinking of desperation and protocol, he had known it was about Louise. But God, he loved pretending otherwise.
"What do they call you now?" he asked. "Oh, yeah — Eleanor Beaumont. You chose that? Very melodic."
The way he said it made her skin crawl. She swallowed hard. The syllables of her name, reborn, felt desecrated coming from his mouth. A fragile, second skin she had stitched together with trembling hands. Louise was the skin he peeled off her in Paris. And somehow, perhaps he was right — maybe he was the only one who still saw what lived underneath.
