The logical part of his brain—the CEO, the analyst, the man who had built a fortune on rational decision-making—short-circuited. It offered up frantic, useless explanations that collapsed under their own weight almost as soon as he thought them.

  A descendant? Possible, but statistically unlikely to produce such an exact replica across two centuries. The probability of a direct descendant maintaining such precise genetic fidelity was astronomical. And even if such a thing were possible, it wouldn't explain the dreams, the visions, the way his soul seemed to recognize her on a level deeper than conscious thought.

  A doppelg?nger? Possible, but the eyes—the eyes—were not just similar. They were identical. Not in colour alone, but in expression. In depth. In the impossible sense of age, they conveyed. The woman in the portrait looked at him with the same ancient knowing that the woman in the park had looked at him with. That wasn't genetics. That was something else entirely.

  A forgery designed to manipulate him? Possible, but who would orchestrate such an elaborate scheme, and to what end? The resources required to create a forgery this convincing, to plant it in the Laurent Foundation's archives, to ensure it reached his desk at exactly this moment—the cost would be enormous, the coordination nearly impossible. And how could any forger have known about the dreams that had plagued him since childhood? How could they have known about the angel who visited him at the moment of death, about the face that had slowly resolved over decades of sleeping visions?

  No. No, this was real. Whatever was happening, whatever impossible truth this portrait represented, it was real.

  The dreams.

  He closed his eyes, and they came flooding back—not the vague impressions of recent nights, but the sharp, vivid memories of a lifetime of sleeping visions. They rose up from the depths of his consciousness like drowned things returning to the surface, and he let them come, let them wash over him, because there was no longer any point in fighting.

  They had started when he was a child. How young? He couldn't remember a time before them. Four, perhaps five. He would wake in the dark of his childhood bedroom, the walls swimming with shadows cast by the nightlight his mother insisted on leaving plugged in by the door. His throat would be raw from screaming, though he never remembered making a sound. His parents would burst in—his father first, always, moving with the protective aggression of a man who would kill to defend his family, with his mother close behind, her face pale with terror, her hands reaching for him before she was even fully through the door.

  Only to find him sitting calmly against his headboard, wide awake, perfectly composed, his small hands folded in his lap like a little prince awaiting visitors.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  "Kaelen? Baby, what happened?" His mother would gather him in her arms, checking for fever, for nightmares, for any sign of the monster that had made him scream like that. Her hands would run over his face, his arms, his chest, searching for wounds that weren't there.

  "I'm okay, Mama." His small voice, steady even then. "The angel came. She always comes at the end. She protects me."

  His parents would exchange glances over his head—the kind of glances that said everything and nothing, that acknowledged a problem they couldn't solve and didn't understand. They thought it was an imaginary friend. A coping mechanism. A phase he would grow out of.

  They took him to doctors, to child psychologists, to specialists who pronounced him perfectly healthy and perhaps a little too imaginative for his own good. They never understood that the screaming stopped not because the nightmare ended, but because she arrived.

  In the dreams, he was always dying.

  Not peacefully, not in his sleep surrounded by loved ones. Violently. Sword blades through his chest, the metal cold and sharp and impossibly painful. Poison burning through his veins, turning his blood to fire from the inside out. A fever that consumed him from within while a woman's face—always just out of focus, always blurred at the edges—hovered above him, weeping.

  He would feel the cold creep in, the darkness at the edges of his vision, the terrible knowledge that this was the end, that there would be no more mornings, no more sunrises, no more anything. And then—then—she would appear. Not the woman from the fever dream, but another. A figure made of light and shadow, her face obscured by radiance, her hand reaching for his through the gathering dark.

  And the terror would recede.

  He never saw her face clearly in those early dreams. Just the impression of dark hair, of a presence so soothing it felt like coming home after a long and terrible journey. He called her his Vanyel—the old language word for angel, though he didn't know how he knew it. The word simply came to him, rising from some deep place within his child's mind, and he accepted it as naturally as he accepted the sun and the moon and his mother's love.

  In his dreams, he would hear a language so ancient it seemed to predate language itself, words that were older than human speech, older than thought, older than time. And somehow, impossibly, he understood it. He was there, speaking it, breathing it, as if the dreams had unlocked something in his blood that waking life could never reach. The words would flow through him like water, like light, like the very essence of existence, and in those moments, he was not a child in a suburban bedroom. He was something else. Someone else. Someone who had lived a thousand lives and would live a thousand more.

  But in those violent dreams—the ones that left him screaming, the ones that brought his parents running—she would always hold his hand as the darkness closed in. She would be there as the dying version of himself slipped away, her grip warm and steady, her lips moving with words he could never quite hear. They hovered at the edge of comprehension, just beyond the veil of sleep, and he would reach for a sound he couldn't remember and a face he couldn't yet see.

  Then he would wake. Calm. Safe. Alone.