The storm outside was only beginning to brew, but inside Elena’s chest, it had already broken. The night was quiet, too quiet, the kind of quiet that followed a dangerous calm. She sat by the long glass window of her apartment, the city lights flickering below like scattered fireflies, and tried to slow her breathing. But every breath she took seemed to tighten something deep within her, a thought she didn’t want to face, a memory that refused to stay buried.Adrian Cole’s face haunted her.Not in the way a man’s charm lingers after a brief infatuation, but in the way an echo from the past grows louder the more you try to silence it. His eyes, the way they lingered when he thought no one was looking, the tone of his voice when he said her name there was something in them she couldn’t escape. It wasn’t just familiarity. It was recognition.She closed her eyes, and suddenly she was no longer in her penthouse. She was back in that old, sunlit courtyard years ago, the one with the cracked