Page 49 of Dark Chains: First Link
He should have walked away. He had centuries of discipline behind him, centuries of moving through human communities without forming attachments, centuries of rules that he followed to the letter because he couldn't afford not to.
Don't stay too long.
Don't let anyone close.
Don't fall in love.
But Rosa had demolished his rules. She had been nineteen, practically a spinster, given that most girls had married at sixteen or seventeen back then. She had been brilliant, restless, and trapped in a village that couldn't contain her spirit. She spoke four languages at a time when few had learned to read, despite having never traveled farther than the nearest town. She'd read everything she could get her hands on, she'd asked questions that none of the villagers could answer and hadn't been satisfied when they told her to stop asking, and she'd pursued him with a determination that should have alarmed him but instead disarmed him.
He had been helpless to resist her, perhaps because no one had ever pursued him like that before, and he had been lonely and sad.
Their romance had been intense. It started as meetings in the birch grove, conversations that ranged from philosophy to nonsense, and had naturally progressed to physical intimacy that he had tried to refrain from but had been too weak to refuse.
He had known the risks. He had calculated them the way he calculated everything because his survival depended on those calculations, and he had decided that the risk was acceptable because the alternative of continuing to exist in the vast, echoing loneliness was no longer tolerable.
He had been wrong about the risk.
When Rosa had told him she was carrying his child, she had expected him to marry her. The expectation was reasonable. In that village, in that era, a man who had gotten a woman with child married her. It was not negotiable. It was not optional. It was what decent men did, and Rosa had believed him to be a decent man.
He had wanted to do the right thing. He had wanted to say yes, to build a life with her in that village, to watch his child grow and be present in a way his mission and his true identity had never allowed.
But a wife would notice that he never aged, never got sick, never showed the wear of years that every other man in the village accumulated. It meant a community that would eventually ask questions, or worse, assume he was an abomination or a demon and kill him.
Ignorance and prejudice were dangerous things, and they could turn even peaceful villagers into vengeful monsters.
He had done the only thing he could. He'd told her he couldn't marry her, and when she'd demanded an explanation, he couldn't give her one.
The fury that had followed was magnificent in its destruction. Rosa had thrown everything in his house that wasn't nailed down, and some things that were. She had called him names in four languages, each one more creative and devastating than the last, and when she ran out of objects and epithets, she had stood in the wreckage of his house and looked at him with an expression that he had carried in his memory ever since.
It wasn't hatred. Hatred would have been easier to bear. It was the look of someone who had trusted completely and been betrayed just as completely, and the distance between those two states was a chasm that no apology could bridge.
The next day, her engagement to Boris Dorjinsky was announced. Boris was a cousin of the man who had married Rosa's sister Perla, and he was decent and hardworking and dull in the way that stable, reliable men often were. He was exactly the kind of husband that Rosa's family would have chosen for her, and exactly the kind of man that Rosa would spend her life resenting.
They emigrated to America shortly after, and Eluheed had been relieved and devastated in equal measure. Relieved because the distance eliminated the possibility of his secret being discovered. Devastated because the woman he loved was carrying his child across an ocean, and he would never know what happened to either of them.
He had stayed in the village for another year after that, because leaving immediately would have raised questions, and then he had moved on, the way he always moved on, packing his few belongings and walking away.
Unlike the other chapters of his long life, though, which had faded with time, the chapter with Rosa had remained vivid and unresolved.
Now Syssi was sitting across from him, telling Kian about her great-grandmother Rosa Dorjinsky, and the ground beneath Eluheed's feet was shifting.
"Is it possible that you are my great-granddaughter? Is that why Elu brought me here?" he had asked, and the words had come out before the part of his brain that vetted statements for potential risk could intervene.
The answer was that she could be. The timeline fit. If Rosa had carried his child to term, a daughter because the line had to be matrilineal for Syssi to carry the immortal genes, and if that daughter had grown up and had a daughter of her own, the line could lead directly to the woman sitting across from him with her husband's arm around her shoulders and a glass of Moscow Mule in her hand.
Syssi was a seer, just like him, and it wasn't a common trait among immortals. In fact, it was rare.
A remarkable coincidence?
Not likely.
Kian had said that he didn't believe in coincidences and that he could see the Fates' fingerprints all over this. Eluheed didn't believe in the Fates. He was a devoted follower of Elu, the Two-Faced god, but he agreed with Kian, nonetheless. Fate didn't leave fingerprints unless she wanted them found.
"I'll think about it," he had told Syssi about the genetic test, and he'd meant it as a deflection, a way to buy time while he processed the implications.
But the truth was simpler than the deflection.
He was afraid.
