CH 1-10

Summary

Lina Petrović’s gift is a curse disguised as hospitality. At 25, the stunning owner of a cliffside villa on Croatia’s Dalmatian coast, she survives by renting out her family’s ancient stone home. But with every key she hands over, a treacherous touch unleashes a flash of the guest’s future. Haunted by these visions, Lina lives by a rigid system: see, but never speak. That system shatters when a businessman scoffs at her frantic warning—only to end up in a horrific crash hours later. The incident ignites a dangerous chain reaction: a desperate believer arrives, begging for hope; a devastating accident proves her interference can twist fate into something worse; and a lethally handsome journalist checks in, his recorder running, determined to expose her “parlor trick” even as a searing attraction ignites between them.

1 The First Prophecy

The key was cold in my palm, a sliver of polished brass against my skin, but the man’s hand was warm and damp when I placed it there. It was a standard check-in, the kind I’d done a hundred times since converting Nono’s old stone house into Vila Vidrika—The View Villa. The guest was standard, too: a businessman from Zagreb, his suit too heavy for the Dalmatian September, his eyes already scanning past me to the wifi password displayed on the vintage map frame.

“The code is there, and the kitchen is fully stocked. The best bakery is down the steps to the left, and the beach cove is a five-minute walk through the pines,” I recited, my voice smooth as the Adriatic on a windless day. I wore my hostess smile, the one that said Welcome, I am harmless and helpful. It was a mask I’d perfected over two years. Behind it, I was just Lina, 25, trying to keep a piece of family history from crumbling into the sea, one five-star review at a time.

“Excellent, excellent,” he said, his grip tightening on the key. His name was Damir. He’d booked for three nights, corporate rate. That’s when it happened.

It always started with a touch, skin-to-skin contact that lasted a half-second too long. A current, not electric but visceral, shot from the point of contact up my arm, a hook snagging deep behind my sternum. The world—the sun-dappled courtyard, the scent of jasmine and salt, the distant chime of the ferry—blurred, bleached of color, then resolved into a different scene.

A winding road, the D8, carved into the cliffs above a turquoise void. A silver sedan, Damir’s rental, taking a curve too fast. Not speed, but distraction—he was looking at his phone, a spreadsheet glowing on the screen. A flash of red from the opposite lane. A horn, not a blare but a truncated scream. The sickening, metallic shriek of impact. Glass blooming like crystalline frost across the windshield. Then, a dizzying, tilting perspective—the car lurching, teetering on the cliff’s edge, gravel skittering into the abyss. And silence, broken only by the groan of tortured metal and the relentless crash of waves far below.

The vision snapped, leaving me breathless. The hook retracted, but the imprint was seared onto my retinas. My palm, still pressed against his, felt scorched.

Damir was pulling his hand away, the key now in his possession. He hadn’t noticed my momentary absence. These flashes were instantaneous, consuming only a heartbeat of real time, but they left me gasping in a vacuum of dread.

“Thank you, Ms. Petrović,” he said, already turning toward the arched doorway that led to his apartment.

The words were out of my mouth before I could cage them. A soft, urgent whisper, laced with the residue of my fear.

“Don’t take the coastal road tomorrow.”

He stopped, half-turned. His eyebrows, thick and peppered with grey, lifted. Not in alarm, but in bemused irritation. The look of a busy man confronted with unsolicited, folksy advice.

“I’m sorry?”

I forced my hostess smile back onto my face, though it felt brittle. “The D8. The coastal road to Split. There… there will be delays. Roadwork. Very long ones. The motorway is much faster.”

It was a pathetic cover. He’d seen the forecast; everyone knew it was another flawless day tomorrow. No roadwork was scheduled.

He scoffed. It was a short, dismissive puff of air through his nostrils. His eyes did a quick, dismissive sweep of me—my linen dress, my bare feet in their leather sandals, the wild, sun-bleached curls I’d tried to tame into a braid. He saw a young woman playing at being a hostess, a rustic curiosity offering local superstitions.

“I have a meeting in Split at ten. The coastal road is forty minutes of the best views in Europe. I’m not missing that for ‘delays.’” He made air quotes with his free hand, the gesture condescending and final. “Thank you for the concern.”

He didn’t wait for a reply. He disappeared into the cool darkness of the stone corridor, his polished shoes clicking decisively on the ancient slab floor. The sound faded, leaving me alone in the sun-baked courtyard.

I slumped against the rough-hewn wall, the heat of the stone seeping through my thin dress. A familiar, hollow tremor started in my hands. I clutched them together, pressing until the knuckles turned white. Idiot, I berated myself. You never speak it. Never.

This… sensitivity, this curse, had been with me since I was a child, but it had intensified since my grandmother’s death two years ago, the same week I opened the villa’s doors. It was as if her passing had removed a damper, turning a whisper into a shout. They weren’t prophecies, not really. They were glimpses, fragments of a possible future, triggered by touch. Most were mundane: a guest missing a flight, finding a lost earring, receiving a surprising phone call. Some were sweet: a shy proposal, a positive pregnancy test glimpsed in a bathroom. But some, like Damir’s, were shards of catastrophe.

I had rules. Rules born of a childhood of being called “ghost-touched,” of seeing my mother’s weary fear when I’d blurt out what I’d seen. Rule One: You do not seek the touch. Rule Two: You do not interpret; you only observe. Rule Three, the most important: You never, ever speak of it.

And I had just shattered Rule Three.

Why? The visceral terror of the vision, the sheer physicality of that lurching car, the certainty of it—it had bypassed all my careful controls. It had vomited out of me.

I spent the evening in a state of quiet agitation. I cleaned the already-clean shared kitchen, deadheaded the geraniums in their terracotta pots with excessive violence, and tried to lose myself in the mindless paperwork of running a small business. But my eyes kept drifting to the door of Damir’s apartment, the Lavender Room. Silence.

Later, as the sunset bled orange and purple over the Hvar channel, I saw him leave, dressed in chinos and a polo shirt, heading for the waterfront restaurants. He gave me a curt, neutral nod. No mention of my warning. My absurdity was already forgotten by him, relegated to a minor anecdote about the quirky Airbnb host.

I didn’t sleep. I lay in my bed in my own separate quarters at the back of the property, the windows open to the chorus of cicadas. Each time I closed my eyes, I saw the silver car tilting, the gravel falling into silence. I argued with myself. It was just a possible future. One thread among millions. The touch showed likelihoods, not certainties. He would be fine. He would take the motorway, chastened by my odd warning, and have a boring, safe drive. Or he would take the coast road and nothing would happen. The vision would join the graveyard of unfulfilled glimpses that haunted my memory.

By 6 AM, I gave up on sleep. I made coffee in the deep, pre-dawn quiet, the only sound the soft gurgle of the machine and the first tentative calls of swallows. I carried my cup to the courtyard, wrapping my hands around the ceramic for warmth I didn’t need. The sky was lightening to a pale pearl grey.

At 7:15, I heard his door open. Firm footsteps. He was dressed in his suit again, a leather briefcase in hand. He didn’t see me in the shadow of the lemon tree. He walked straight to his rented silver sedan, parked in the courtyard’s corner. He didn’t hesitate. He got in, started the engine, and backed out onto the narrow stone lane that led either left, down to the village and the motorway entrance, or right, up the hill to the old coast road.

The car paused at the junction. My heart hammered against my ribs. Go left, I pleaded silently. For once, listen to the crazy lady.

The car’s indicator flicked right. A bright, confident arrow pointing toward the cliffs. He turned right and disappeared behind a wall of oleander.

The hollow in my stomach became a chasm. I was suddenly, freezingly cold despite the rising sun.

The next two hours were a form of exquisite torture. I tried to read. The words swam. I tried to hang laundry. I stood holding a damp sheet for minutes, staring at nothing. I finally turned on the small, old television in my sitting room, tuned to the local news channel. It was background noise, a morning show with too-chipper hosts discussing a new olive oil festival.

At 9:47 AM, the program cut abruptly. The cheerful hosts were replaced by a somber-faced newsreader at a desk. A graphic flashed on the screen: “BREAKING NEWS – ACCIDENT ON D8.”

My coffee cup slipped from my numb fingers, shattering on the stone floor. I didn’t move. I couldn’t breathe.

“*We interrupt our scheduled program with a tragic update. A serious accident has occurred this morning on the D8 coastal road near the town of Podgora. Early reports indicate a head-on collision involving two vehicles. One vehicle, a silver sedan, is reported to have gone over the cliff edge. Emergency services, including a rescue helicopter, are on the scene. The condition of the occupants is unknown at this time. The road is closed in both directions. We advise all drivers to seek alternate routes.*”

The screen showed helicopter footage—a dizzying view of azure sea, dramatic cliffs, and a scar of twisted guardrail. A tiny, mangled speck of silver was just visible, caught on an outcrop halfway down the rock face. The newsreader’s voice continued, speculating about speed, blind curves, tourist traffic.

I heard none of it. A roaring white noise filled my head. The world telescoped to the shattered terra cotta pieces of my cup, the dark pool of cold coffee seeping into the grout lines. The exact curve from my vision. The silver sedan. The skittering gravel.

It came true.

The thought was not a thought, but a seismic shift in the bedrock of my reality. Before this moment, the flashes were ghost stories I told myself, unsettling daydreams with a coincidental hit rate. I could dismiss them, rationalize them. This was not dismissible. This was a bone-deep, horrifying validation.

A sudden, violent nausea seized me. I stumbled to the small bathroom off the kitchen and was sick, heaving nothing but bile and terror. I clung to the cool porcelain, shaking, sweat beading on my forehead and back.

When the spasms passed, I rinsed my mouth, avoiding my own gaze in the mirror. What looked back was not Lina Petrović, successful young entrepreneur, keeper of a beautiful villa. It was the face of a girl who’d once told her school friend she’d see her father crying that night, and had been correct. A face marked by a knowledge that was no longer just a private weirdness, but a dreadful, active force.

I had to do something. But what? Call the police? And say what? “I had a psychic vision my guest would crash?” They’d laugh, or worse, consider me a suspect, someone with too much local knowledge. My quiet life would be over.

The phone rang, shrill and shocking in the silent house. I stared at it, my heart in my throat. It was the landline, the number listed for the villa.

I walked to it on unsteady legs. “Dobro jutro, Vila Vidrika,” I managed, my voice a thin thread.

“Ms. Petrović? This is Officer Marinović, Split-Dalmatia Police.” The voice was male, calm, professional. “We are calling regarding your guest, Damir Horvat.”

“Is he…” The words wouldn’t form. Alive? Dead? Was it my fault?

“He has been airlifted to the Clinical Hospital in Split. His condition is critical but stable. He was the sole occupant of the vehicle. The other driver sustained minor injuries.” He paused. “We understand he was staying at your property. We will need to speak with you, as a formality. Could we come by this afternoon?”

“Y-yes. Of course. Anytime.” “We have his personal effects. There is a damaged laptop, a suitcase. We will bring them.” “Thank you.” The call ended. I held the dead receiver to my ear for a long moment before replacing it in its cradle.

Critical but stable. He was alive. The vision had shown the crash, the teetering, but not the final outcome. A thread of relief, thin and sharp as a wire, cut through the numbness. He was alive. But he was broken, and I had seen it coming, and my whispered warning had been nothing but a scoffed-at absurdity.

The police arrived in the late afternoon—a man and a woman in uniform, their faces politely grave. I offered them lemonade in the courtyard, my hostess mask firmly back in place, though it felt like it was made of cracked glass. I answered their simple questions: Yes, he checked in yesterday. He seemed normal, preoccupied with work. No, he didn’t mention any travel plans besides his meeting. No, he didn’t seem ill, distressed, or intoxicated when he left.

“Did he say anything at all about his drive?” the female officer asked, her pen poised.

This was the moment. I could tell them. He said he was taking the coast road for the view. I warned him not to. It would be a natural thing to say. A concerned host.

I saw it in a flash: their interest sharpening. The follow-up questions. Why did you warn him, Ms. Petrović? My explanation sounding ludicrous, pathetic. The rumor mill of the village, already slightly wary of the solitary young woman in the old house, igniting. Lina Petrović? Thinks she’s a witch, like her grandmother. Bad luck.

The business, my fragile sanctuary, my entire life here, teetered as precariously as that silver car had.

I took a sip of my own lemonade, the sweetness cloying. “No,” I said, my voice clear and calm. “He just said he had a meeting. I recommended the bakery. That was all.”

They nodded, satisfied. They brought in his suitcase and a sealed plastic bag containing a cracked tablet, a twisted charger, and a water-warped wallet. It felt like receiving a corpse. They left with thanks, their tires crunching on the gravel.

Alone again, I stared at the suitcase. It was a good one, sturdy leather, now scuffed and damp. I should store it. But instead, driven by a morbid compulsion, I touched the handle.

Nothing. No hook, no vision. Objects only held echoes sometimes, and this one was silent, or my own shock had numbed the channel.

The rest of the day bled away. I canceled the cleaning for the Lavender Room, citing “unforeseen circumstances.” I couldn’t bear the thought of someone stripping the sheets, wiping away the last traces of a man whose future I had held, and failed to alter.

As dusk fell, the true weight descended. It wasn’t just guilt, though that was a leaden cloak on my shoulders. It was the horrifying, inescapable knowledge. The curse was real. It was potent. And it was now tied to a real-world consequence—a man fighting for his life in a hospital thirty miles away.

I stood on my terrace, looking out at the darkening sea, the first stars pricking the violet sky. The beauty of it was a mockery. The world was no longer just a place of light and stone and salt air. It was a tapestry, and I could see the fraying threads, the coming rips and tears. And I had just learned that seeing them did not mean I could mend them.

My first prophecy, spoken aloud, had been a death sentence for a version of my own ignorance. The old rules were ashes. I was left with the chilling aftermath and a single, reverberating question: if I saw the next one, what in God’s name would I do?

2 The System

The system was born from necessity, a cage I built to contain the chaos. It had rules, steps, a sterile order that kept the screaming wildness of the Sight at bay. Or so I told myself, in the hollow, quiet hours after the news about Damir Horvat had sunk its teeth into my life.

For three days, the villa was a tomb. I’d put the Lavender Room on “maintenance,” a lie that sat in my online calendar like a bloodstain. I couldn’t enter it. The police had taken his things, but the space itself felt charged, a silent witness to my failure. I existed in a state of suspended dread, jumping at every phone call, scanning the local news online with a sick, compulsive thirst for an update that never came beyond “condition remains critical.”

On the fourth morning, the first of the new bookings arrived. A Dutch couple in their sixties, the Van de Weldes. Their reservation had been made months ago. Canceling would raise questions I couldn’t answer, and my bank account, perpetually teetering on the edge of the stone cliff my villa overlooked, couldn’t afford the gesture. The business demanded life. The system demanded execution.

So, an hour before their check-in, I performed the preparatory ritual.

I started with the bath. Not a quick shower, but a deep, scalding immersion in the old, claw-foot tub. I used coarse sea salt and dried lavender from the garden, scrubbing my skin until it was pink and raw, as if I could scour away the sensitivity itself. The water was a baptism into a role: Lina the Host, not Lina the Seer. I dressed with deliberate simplicity: a plain cotton sundress, no jewelry, my hair tightly braided and pinned. Armor of the ordinary.

Next, the keys. I kept them in a heavy ceramic bowl by the front door, each on a leather fob I’d braided myself, tagged with a small, painted wooden tile—Lavender, Sage, Olive, Fig. I picked up the key for the Sage Room. It was cold. I closed my fist around it, focusing on the hard, unyielding pressure of the metal against my palm. You are a key. You open a door. You are not a conduit. You are a tool. I repeated it like a mantra.

The final step was the grounding. I walked barefoot out to the old olive tree in the center of the courtyard, its trunk gnarled and split by centuries of sun and wind. I placed my palms flat against its bark. The tree was a paradox—immensely alive, yet its thoughts, if it had any, moved with a slowness that was geological. Its future was measured in seasons of rain and drought, not in screeching tires and hospital vigils. I breathed in, trying to sync my heartbeat with its ancient, silent pulse. Be the tree. Be solid. Be here.

A car door shut in the lane. The spell broke.

They were exactly as I’d pictured from their polite email correspondence: tall, silver-haired, dressed in sensible, expensive walking clothes. Annette and Willem. They had kind, crinkled eyes and the relaxed air of people for whom a Dalmatian holiday was a well-earned pleasure, not a frantic escape.

“Welcome to Vila Vidrika,” I said, my voice finding its trained, melodic hostess pitch. “You found us alright?”

“The instructions were perfect,” Willem said, his English lightly accented. “What a magnificent spot.”

The small talk was a dance I knew by heart. The view, the weather, the journey. I offered them homemade lemonade, which they accepted. We sat in the shaded part of the courtyard. As I handed Annette her glass, our fingers brushed. Nothing. A glancing touch, no purchase. The system was holding.

It was time. The core transaction. The moment the system was designed to control.

“Let me show you to your room and get you your key,” I said, rising.

I led them up the external stone staircase to the Sage Room, its door painted a soft, dusty green. I unlocked it, let them exclaim over the vaulted ceiling, the antique bed, the vista of the channel. Then I turned, the key in my hand.

This was the crucible. The system dictated a specific, clinical method. Skin-to-skin contact had to occur for the vision to trigger. A handshake was too formal, too odd for this context. Passing the key directly into an open palm was the vector. I had perfected a technique: I would hold the key by the very edge of the leather fob, extending it so that the brass key itself would drop into the center of their waiting hand. In theory, this minimized contact. In practice, it was a fraught ballet.

“Here is your key,” I said to Annette, smiling. “You’re free to come and go as you please.”

I held out the fob. She reached, her hand open. I let go.

The key fell. It landed across her palm, its metal length pressing into her life line, her heart line. And my fingers, in the act of releasing, grazed the heel of her hand.

It was enough.

The hook. That familiar, sickening lurch in my solar plexus, as if an invisible line had been cast from her soul and snagged on mine. The courtyard bleached to a negative, then resolved.

A kitchen, not this one, but a modern one with stainless steel appliances. Annette standing at a counter, her back to me. She is holding a photograph in a silver frame. A younger man, smiling. Her shoulders are shaking with silent sobs. The grief is not fresh; it is a weathered, familiar coat she is putting on. The date on a wall calendar is blurred, but the season is winter. Then, a shift: Willem enters, puts his hands on her shoulders. He doesn’t speak. He just holds her. The weight of his hands is the only anchor in the room.

The flash lasted less than a second. I was back in the sun-drenched doorway, the key now fully in Annette’s possession.

“Thank you, my dear,” she said, her eyes already looking past me to the sea view.

My mouth was dry. The vision had been quiet, a deep water of sorrow, not the violent crash of Damir’s. But it was intimate, a raw nerve exposed. The system’s first command echoed in my head: Observe. Do not interpret.

But the second command, the one born of Damir’s broken body on a cliff face, followed hard on its heels: Speak the truth.

What was the truth here? That in a few months, she would grieve? She was a woman in her sixties; grief was a traveling companion she likely knew well. The vision wasn’t of a catastrophe, but of an enduring sadness, met and held by love. To speak of it would be a grotesque invasion, a theft of her private moments.

The system warred with itself. The old rule: silence. The new, terrifying imperative from the First Prophecy: utterance.

I opened my mouth. “The… the light in this room is beautiful in the late afternoon,” I stammered, gesturing weakly toward the window. “It turns the stone walls gold.”

It was a retreat. A pathetic, cowardly retreat into hostess babble.

Annette smiled, a gentle, absent thing. “I’m sure we will love it.”

I fled under the guise of giving them privacy.

Down in my kitchen, I braced my hands on the cool limestone sink, head bowed. The aftertaste of the vision was like swallowing saltwater. I had Seen, and I had said nothing. Was that a betrayal, too? If the Sight was real—and Damir was the screaming proof that it was—then did I have a responsibility to these flickers of truth? Or was my only responsibility to survive, to keep this fragile life I’d built from shattering under the weight of a gift I never wanted?

The system was cracking already.

Over the next two days, the Van de Weldes were perfect guests. Quiet, respectful, always thanking me for the fresh pastries I left in the morning. I watched Annette like a hawk, searching for signs of the coming winter grief. I saw only a woman enjoying the sun, reading novels, holding her husband’s hand as they walked to dinner.

On their last morning, Annette found me in the garden, picking rosemary.

“Lina, may I ask you something?” Her voice was hesitant.

My heart froze. She knows. She felt it. “Of course.”

“That first day… when you gave me the key. You had the most strange look on your face for a moment. Are you alright?”

The question was a needle plunged into a bruise. The system didn’t account for this—for being perceived in the act of perception.

I forced a laugh, too bright. “Oh, I’m so sorry! A wasp, I think. It buzzed right by my ear. Startled me.” The lie was swift, polished. Another part of the hostess arsenal.

She nodded, accepting it. But her kind eyes held a flicker of something else—not disbelief, but a soft concern. “This is a lot for one so young to manage alone. This big house, all these guests. It must be lonely.”

The unexpected empathy was worse than suspicion. It undid me a little. “I have the sea for company,” I said, my voice barely a whisper.

She reached out and patted my hand, a grandmotherly gesture. This touch was deliberate, warm, and blessedly visionless. “You’re doing a wonderful job.”

After they left, the room cleaned and silent, the system felt like a lie. It was a protocol for handling a nuclear reactor with oven mitts. It couldn’t contain the energy; it could only hope I wouldn’t get incinerated during the exchange.

The next guest was a test I wasn’t ready for.

Leo. From Berlin. A travel writer, according to his booking. He arrived on a motorbike, a vintage Triumph that growled into the courtyard like a disgruntled beast. He was all lean lines and confident dishevelment, leather jacket slung over a tank top, sunglasses pushed into unruly dark hair. Maybe ten years older than me. His gaze was a physical thing, scanning the villa, the view, and finally, me, with an appraising interest that had nothing to do with amenities.

“Cool place,” he said, his English tinged with a Berlin edge. He had a smile that was all challenge.

The preparatory ritual felt absurd before him. The bath, the grounding at the tree—it was the magic of a frightened child, and Leo radiated a worldliness that would scoff at it. I skipped it. I just took the key for the Fig Room and met him in the courtyard.

“Your room is up there,” I said, pointing to the highest terrace. “Best view.”

“Lead the way.”

The climb up the winding stone steps felt like a procession. I was acutely aware of him behind me. In the Fig Room, he whistled low, walking straight to the French windows and throwing them open to the panorama. “Damn. You live here all by yourself?”

“I run it by myself,” I corrected, my tone cool. I held out the key. “Here you go.”

He turned from the view. His eyes locked on mine. He didn’t immediately reach for the key. He was studying me, the curious, assessing look of a writer collecting details. “You’re not from around here, are you? I mean, you are, but… you’ve got a different vibe.”

“I grew up here. My family’s house.” I jingled the key slightly, a prompt.

Finally, he reached. But he didn’t present an open palm. He closed his hand around the key, and in doing so, closed his hand around my fingers.

The contact wasn’t a graze. It was a capture.

The hook sank in, deep and vicious. The world tore away.

Not a scene, but a sensation first: exhilarating speed, the roar of an engine, freedom so intense it borders on panic. Then: a twist of mountain road, hairpin turns. Leo on the Triumph, leaning into a curve. Not alone. A woman behind him, her arms wrapped tight around his waist, her laughter snatched away by the wind. Her face is blurred. The feeling is pure, unfettered joy. Then, a shadow—not on the road, but in the feeling. The joy curdles, just for a second, into something desperate, like a last grab at light before a door slams. The vision holds on that duality: ecstasy and its shadow, intertwined.

It released me. I gasped, a tiny, audible intake of breath.

Leo was still holding my hand, key and all, his brow furrowed. “You okay? You just went somewhere else for a second.”

I snatched my hand back as if burned. The key remained in his grip. My heart was a wild thing against my ribs. His vision was not tragic, but it was profound, a window into a soul that chased feeling to the edge of a cliff.

“I’m fine,” I said, my voice tight. “Long day.”

He didn’t look convinced. That assessing gaze was back. “Right. Well. Thanks for the key.”

The system had failed utterly. He had taken control of the exchange, and the vision had been as powerful and disorienting as he was. And he had noticed.

That evening, he found me in the courtyard as I was watering the potted hydrangeas. He’d showered, wore a clean shirt, and carried two bottles of local beer.

“Peace offering,” he said, holding one out. “For weirding you out earlier. I have that effect sometimes.”

I hesitated. Every rule screamed to refuse, to maintain professional distance. But the vision of his wild joy and its desperate undercurrent pulled at me. He was a question mark. And after the sterile silence of the Van de Weldes’ sorrow and the echoing scream of Damir’s crash, a question mark felt alive.

I took the beer. “You didn’t weird me out.”

“Liar,” he said, easily, popping the cap off his bottle on the edge of the stone wall. He took a swig, looking at me. “So, what’s the story here? Family place, you said. Parents?”

“Gone.” The word was final.

“Brothers? Sisters?” “Just me.” He nodded slowly. “And you stay. Holding the fort. It’s romantic. Or it’s a trap.” His perception was unnerving. “It’s home,” I said, a weak defense. “Home can be both.” He leaned against the wall. “I’m writing a piece on places that get under your skin. This coast… it’s all beautiful, but it has a melancholy. A lot of history in the stones. You feel it?” I felt everything in the stones. I felt echoes of footsteps, of arguments, of my grandmother’s songs, of my own childhood nightmares. “I suppose.” “You’re a local. You must know the real spots. Not the Instagram piers. The weird ones. The… haunted ones.” He said the last part with a playful grin, but his eyes were serious. A cold trickle went down my spine. “Haunted?” “You know. Stories. Old legends. My grandmother was Slovak, she had all sorts of tales about people who could see things. Mátohy. Spirits. Or people touched by them.” The beer turned sour in my mouth. I put it down. “This is a Catholic country. We have saints, not spirits.” “Saints are just spirits with better PR,” he quipped. But he was watching me, the writer collecting details. “Come on. There must be something. An old witch in a village? A house everyone avoids?” My house. My family. The thought was a splinter of ice. I stood up. “I have breakfast to prepare for tomorrow. Enjoy your beer, Leo.” I left him there in the gathering dusk. Back in my quarters, I locked the door. He was dangerous. Not because he was a bad person, but because he looked for stories, and I was a living, breathing story I was desperate to keep unread. The next day, he was gone on his motorbike before dawn. He returned late, smelling of salt and gasoline. We exchanged polite nods. The system, with him, was reduced to avoidance. His check-out day arrived. I braced myself. The system’s final step: the return of the key. Sometimes, on the return touch, I’d get a second flash, a coda to the first. Often, I got nothing. He handed the key back in the courtyard, placing it directly into my open palm. Our fingers touched. A flash, sharp and quick: Leo at a cluttered desk, typing. The screen shows a document. The title: “The Keeper of Stones: Melancholy and Myth on the Dalmatian Coast.” A subheading: “The Girl Who Sees the Wind.” He let go. I stood frozen, the key biting into my palm. “Thanks for everything, Lina,” he said, slinging his bag over his shoulder. “It’s a special place. You’ve got a story here. I can feel it.” He walked to his motorbike, kicked it to life, and roared away without a look back. I looked down at the key in my hand. The Girl Who Sees the Wind. He hadn’t seen a vision. He was a writer. He’d seen a vibe, a mystery, and he’d named it with poetic instinct. But the accuracy was a psychic wound. He was going to write about me. Not the truth, but a version of it, and that version would be a beacon for the curious, the skeptical, the desperate. The system lay in ruins around me. It was never a containment field. It was a表演, a pantomime of control. The gift I never wanted was not a passive thing to be managed. It was an active, hungry force. It connected me to the secret hearts of others—their coming grief, their desperate joy, their latent curiosity—and then left me stranded with the knowledge, alone on my cliffside, holding a key that felt less like a tool and more like a sentence. Damir’s prophecy had proven the Sight’s power. Annette’s grief had shown me its intrusive intimacy. Leo’s perception had shattered my illusion of secrecy. The system was broken. I was standing in the wreckage, and the only thing left was the terrifying, undeniable truth: when the next key passed from my hand, something true would pass with it. And I had no idea anymore if I was meant to speak it, to change it, or simply to drown in the knowing.

3 The Believer

The first autumn storm was gathering over the channel, a bruised purple wall of cloud advancing from the west, when she arrived. The air had turned thick and electric, and the sea, usually a placid sheet of blue, was churning itself into white-capped ridges. I was securing the shutters on the upper terrace when I heard the timid crunch of gravel on the drive.

She stood by a modest, dusty hatchback, clutching a worn leather handbag to her chest as if it were a life preserver. She was in her late sixties, perhaps early seventies, with a gentle, wrinkled face framed by soft grey hair swept into a careful bun. But it was her eyes that arrested me. They were not the eyes of a tourist seeking a picturesque getaway. They were wide, almost painfully so, and in their pale blue depths was a raw, unfiltered hope so potent it felt like a physical force pushing against the charged atmosphere.

“Lina Petrović?” she called, her voice trembling slightly against the rising wind.

“That’s me. Welcome. Let me help you with your bag—we should get inside before it breaks.”

She didn’t move towards the boot. She took a few steps closer, her gaze fixed on me with an intensity that was unnerving. “You are the one,” she stated, not asked. “The one they talk about in whispers. The vidovita.”

The word—the “seer” or the “one who sees”—struck me like a slap. It was an old word, a village word, laced with equal parts reverence and fear. It was a word from my grandmother’s generation, from stories told over winter stoves. Since Damir, I’d felt the shift in the village’s regard—the longer looks at the market, the sudden silences when I approached a group of older women. But no one had ever named it to my face.

“I’m Lina, the owner of the villa,” I said firmly, forcing a hostess smile. “You must be Sonja?”

She nodded, but the hope in her eyes didn’t dim at my deflection. “I have come a long way. From Samobor.”

That was hours away, near the Slovenian border. Not a casual trip.

The first fat raindrops began to fall, spattering the dusty stones. “Please, let’s get you settled,” I insisted, moving past her to fetch her single, small suitcase.

The ritual felt grotesque now. The bath, the grounding tree—they were spells against a reality that had just parked in my driveway and called me by my true, dreaded name. I didn’t perform them. I simply led her to the Olive Room, the one on the ground floor with a view of the storm-lashed garden. She followed silently, her eyes taking in nothing of the rustic charm, the antique furniture, the handwoven rugs. Her entire being was focused on me.

In the room, she finally set her bag down. The wind howled around the corners of the house, and rain began to drum a frantic rhythm on the terracotta tiles overhead. I held out the key, the cold brass already feeling like a divining rod.

“Your key,” I said, the words hollow.

She didn’t reach for it. Instead, she clasped her hands together, her knuckles white. The desperate hope in her eyes overflowed, spilling down her cheeks in two silent tracks.

“Please,” she whispered, the word torn from her by the storm outside. “Tell me.”

My breath caught. The system, Leo’s prying curiosity, the police inquiry—all of it was a prelude to this moment. This was the demand I had always feared. Not a scoff, not a journalistic hypothesis, but a plea from a breaking heart.

“Tell you what?” I asked, though I knew.

“If I will see him again. My son. Marin.” Her voice cracked on the name. “He is… lost. Not gone, but lost to me. In the world. In his own mind. The drugs, the darkness… I have prayed. I have lit candles in every church from here to Zagreb. Nothing. Then I heard… in my sister’s village, they spoke of a young woman on the coast. A girl with stone-colored eyes who knows the shape of what is to come.” She took a step closer, her perfume a faint scent of lavender and worry. “I don’t need details. I don’t need a time or a place. I just need to know… will the light come back into his eyes? Will I know my boy again before I die?”

The raw vulnerability in the room was thicker than the storm air. It pressed on me, a suffocating weight of maternal love and despair. This was no longer about the gift I never wanted; it was about the need I could not possibly fulfill.

“Sonja, I’m not… I can’t…”

“Please.” She said it again, and this time she sank to her knees on the woven rug. It was a gesture of such utter surrender, such archaic supplication, that it shattered my remaining defenses. “Just touch my hand. Look at me. And tell me what you see. I can bear the truth. I cannot bear this not knowing anymore.”

I was trapped. The key was still in my outstretched hand, a ridiculous prop. To refuse her now would be a cruelty akin to pushing her into the storm. But to agree was to step fully into the role of the vidovita, to accept the mantle I had spent a lifetime fleeing.

I let the key fall to the small wooden desk with a clatter. I knelt down in front of her, on the cool floor. Our eyes were level. The hope in hers was a drowning pool, and I was her last gasp for air.

“I don’t control what I see,” I said, my own voice trembling. “It might be nothing. It might be something you don’t want.”

“Anything is better than this void.”

Slowly, I reached out. I didn’t take her hand. I placed my palms gently on either side of her face, my fingertips touching her temples, my thumbs resting on the soft, papery skin of her cheeks. It was an intimate, tender gesture, one I had never used for a vision. But this felt different. This was not a transaction; it was a communion.

The moment my skin made full contact with hers, the hook did not snag—it dissolved. There was no violent yank, no disorienting lurch. It was as if a door within me simply swung open, and her essence, her future, flowed in like a quiet tide.

The vision came not as a flash, but as a slow, unspooling film.

I saw a small, sun-drenched garden, not this one. A vegetable patch with neat rows. Tomato plants staked, beans climbing a trellis. The sound of bees. Sonja, older by a few years, her hair a little whiter, kneeling in the dirt, her hands earthy. She is not alone. A man is there, his back to me at first, hands in his pockets. He is thin, his shoulders hunched with a permanent weariness. He turns. It is Marin. His face is etched with lines that haven’t been earned in joy, his eyes are shadowed, but they are clear. Sober. He is looking at his mother. There is no dramatic reunion, no weeping embrace. He simply reaches down and picks up a watering can. He moves to the row of peppers and begins to water them, his movements careful, deliberate. Sonja looks up at him. She doesn’t smile. She just watches him water the plants, and in her eyes is a serenity so deep it is like still water. A quiet, ordinary moment. A shared, silent task under the sun. The peace in the scene is not the absence of struggle, but the presence of a fragile, hard-won truce. It is the light returning, not as a blinding sun, but as the gentle, dappled light through the leaves of a fruit tree.

The vision faded, leaving me filled with a profound, aching warmth. It was the first purely beautiful future I had Seen since the curse had sharpened. It held no tragedy, no violence, only the quiet, monumental victory of a mother’s love and a son’s slow, grueling return.

I lowered my hands. My own cheeks were wet. I hadn’t realized I was crying.

Sonja searched my face, her breath held, her whole life poised on the cliff-edge of my next words.

I didn’t speak the truth as a cold fact. I spoke the vision as I had felt it.

“You will be in a garden,” I began, my voice soft but clear against the drumming rain. “It’s small, full of vegetables. Tomatoes, beans… peppers. The sun is warm. You are kneeling in the soil.” I saw her eyes cling to each detail, building the sanctuary I described. “He is there. He is thin. Tired. The shadows are still with him.” I saw her flinch but hold steady. “He doesn’t speak. He picks up a watering can. He waters the peppers. You watch him. And in that moment… in that simple, quiet act… you will know him again. The light will be there. It will be a quiet light, but it will be real. It will be yours.”

For a long moment, she was perfectly still. The storm raged, shaking the windows. Then, a great, shuddering sigh wracked her body. The desperate, clawing hope in her eyes melted, transformed. It did not turn to jubilation, but to something far more profound: a serene certainty. The unbearable tension of years snapped, not with a shout, but with a release so complete it left her boneless.

She wept. But these were not the silent tears of supplication. They were deep, heaving sobs of relief, a river of pent-up fear and sorrow finally finding its way to the sea. She crumpled forward, and I caught her, holding her as she cried into my shoulder. I held her, this stranger, in the middle of the storm-swept room, and I felt the rightness of it. For once, the Sight had not been a curse, but a balm.

When her sobs subsided into hiccups and then into a quiet, exhausted peace, she pulled back. She took my hands in hers, her grip surprisingly strong.

“Thank you,” she said, the words solid as stone. “Thank you for your eyes.”

She did not ask for more. She did not ask when, or where, or how. She had been given the only thing that mattered: a glimpse of the shore after a long, terrifying voyage in the dark.

She stayed for three days. The storm passed, leaving the world washed clean and sparkling. Sonja was a ghost of a guest. She barely left her room, but her presence filled the villa with a new, peaceful energy. She didn’t seek me out again for prophecies. Sometimes, I’d find her just sitting in the courtyard, her face turned to the sun, a small, tranquil smile on her lips. She was living already in the future garden, and it was enough.

On her last morning, she brought me a package, wrapped in simple brown paper and tied with twine.

“This is for you,” she said. “It was my mother’s. I carried it with me for… for luck. But I don’t need it anymore. I think you should have it.”

Inside was an old, leather-bound book of Psalms, the pages tissue-thin and illuminated with hand-painted flowers in the margins. It was not a valuable antique, but a deeply personal one, soaked in a lifetime of faith.

“I can’t take this,” I protested.

“You already took the heavier burden,” she said gently. “Let me give you this light one.”

After she drove away, the villa felt different. The stone walls seemed less like a fortress and more like a sanctuary. Sonja’s visit had rewritten the rules again. With Damir, the Sight was a dangerous truth-teller. With Sonja, it was a compassionate healer. Which was it? Was it merely a mirror, reflecting back the nature of the person who sought it?

I wandered into the Olive Room to clean. The space still held her scent—lavender and calm. As I stripped the bed, a small, folded piece of paper fluttered from beneath the pillow.

It was a photograph, creased and worn from handling. A young man, Marin, perhaps in his early twenties, with his mother’s pale eyes, smiling shyly at the camera. On the back, in a spidery script, was written: Marin, 19, before the clouds.

She had left it deliberately. Not as a request, but as an offering. A testament of the boy she remembered, the man she now believed would return to her. I placed the photograph carefully inside the book of Psalms.

That evening, for the first time since the First Prophecy, I felt a flicker of something other than dread about my cursed gift. A fragile sense of purpose. Perhaps it wasn’t a curse to be managed, nor a weapon to be feared. Perhaps it was a tool, albeit a terrifyingly powerful one, and its use depended on the hand that wielded it and the heart that received it.

But as I stood on the terrace, watching the sunset paint the channel in fiery hues, a cold undercurrent of doubt tugged at me. Sonja was a believer. She had come in hope and left in peace. What would happen when the next seeker came not in hope, but in demand? What would happen when the vision I Saw was not one of serene gardens, but of unmitigated despair? Would I still speak it? Could I bear to be the messenger of that?

The gift I never wanted was revealing itself to be a shapeshifter. It was a responsibility with no rulebook, a power with no off switch. Sonja’s serene joy was now a part of me, a sweet weight in my chest. But I knew, with a certainty as deep as the Sight itself, that such a pure, healing moment was a rarity. It was the calm in the eye of the hurricane.

The storm of other people’s futures was always gathering, just over the horizon. And I was the lonely keeper of the lighthouse, now obligated to shine the light, regardless of what rocks it might reveal.

4 The Skeptic

The scent of Sonja’s lingering peace had barely faded from the Olive Room when he arrived, a streak of polished cynicism cutting through the villa’s newfound serenity. It was a crisp, crystalline afternoon, the kind that made every leaf and stone look hyper-real. I was in the courtyard, repotting a rebellious rosemary bush, my hands deep in dark, fragrant soil—a grounding act. The roar of an expensive, understated rental car engine shattered the quiet.

He unfolded himself from the driver’s seat with an athletic grace that seemed practiced. Mid-thirties, with the kind of sharp, intelligent handsomeness that belonged in a political thriller—dark hair swept back, a strong jaw lightly stubbled, eyes the color of slate behind stylish, minimalist glasses. He wore a perfectly fitted charcoal linen shirt and trousers, and a leather messenger bag was slung across his chest. He didn’t look around at the view, at the ancient stone, at the breathtaking sprawl of sea and sky. His gaze zeroed in on me, kneeling in the dirt, and a small, professional smile touched his lips. It didn’t reach his eyes.

“Lina Petrović?” he called, his voice a smooth baritone, his Croatian accent colored by what sounded like years spent abroad.

“That’s me.” I wiped my hands on my apron, leaving smudges of earth. The contrast between us couldn’t have been more stark: him, the epitome of metropolitan cool; me, the rustic keeper of herbs and secrets.

“Marko Vuković.” He approached, not offering a hand. He was already reaching into his bag. “I’ve booked the Lavender Room for a week.”

The Lavender Room. Damir’s room. A cold finger traced my spine.

“Of course. Welcome.” I stood, feeling suddenly small and grubby. “Let me show you.”

As we walked through the arched passageway, he didn’t make the usual tourist small talk. No comments on the architecture, the climb, the scent of jasmine. He was observing, his eyes flicking over details—the worn stone step, a slightly crooked shutter, the quality of the light—as if mentally cataloging them for a report.

Inside the Lavender Room, he gave a slow, appreciative nod. “Excellent renovation. Sensitive to the original structure. You did this yourself?”

“With local craftsmen,” I said, my guard instinctively rising. Most guests just said ‘wow.’

“It shows.” He set his bag on the carved chest at the foot of the bed. And then he turned, and the professional mask slipped just enough to reveal the blade beneath. “It also provides the perfect ambiance for the service you’re really selling, doesn’t it?”

I froze. “I’m sorry?”

He reached into his bag again and pulled out a small, high-quality digital recorder. He pressed a button; a tiny red light glowed like a malevolent eye. He placed it deliberately on the wooden table between us.

“Authentic Dalmatian stone villa. Check. Picturesque, solitary young hostess. Check. Whispers of local legend. Check.” He leaned against the doorframe, crossing his arms. “It’s a brilliant package, Ms. Petrović. The ‘mystical experience’ Airbnb. I’m here to write about it. For a new travel magazine with a focus on… curated authenticity. Or, in this case, the exploitation of it.”

The air left the room. The warmth of the sun streaming through the window turned cold. He wasn’t a believer like Sonja. He was an inquisitor.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The lie was automatic, brittle.

“Come now.” His smile was razor-thin. “Sonja Kolar. Widow from Samobor. Drove six hours based on village gossip, left after three days looking like she’d seen the face of God. Paid in cash. Then there’s the incident with the businessman, Damir Horvat. A warning about a road he ignored, followed by a near-fatal accident. Coincidence makes for a great story, but patterns make for a business model.”

He’d done his homework. Deep homework. This wasn’t a last-minute booking. This was a calculated ambush.

Anger, hot and defensive, surged through me, burning away the shock. “You think I caused that accident? You think I… what? Told a grieving old woman fairy tales for a few hundred kuna?” I took a step toward him, my soil-stained hands clenched. “Get out.”

He didn’t flinch. He simply picked up the recorder, making sure the red light was still captured in his vision. “I’m a paying guest, Ms. Petrović. I’ve booked and paid for seven nights. Unless you want a very public dispute over terms of service and a scathing article about fraudulent hospitality practices, I suggest we proceed.” His gaze was cool, analytical. “I’m just here to observe. To document the ‘parlor trick,’ as it were. You go about your business. I’ll go about mine.”

The parlor trick. The words were meant to diminish, to provoke. And they did. The gift that had just brought Sonja peace was now being dissected as a cynical scam. The injustice of it choked me.

I had the key in the pocket of my apron. I pulled it out, the cold brass a familiar weight. The system was in ashes. All that remained was survival.

“Here is your key,” I said, my voice flat and dead. I held it out, not by the fob, but by the teeth, offering him the metal.

He looked at my outstretched hand, then at my face. A challenge glittered in his slate-grey eyes. He wanted contact. He wanted to see the mechanism of the trick up close.

He reached out. Not to take the key from me, but to take my hand. His fingers closed around mine, trapping the key between our palms. His skin was cool, dry, intelligent.

The hook slammed into me with a violence I hadn’t felt since Damir. It wasn’t a gentle flow or a quiet unspooling. It was a punch to the psyche.

The vision was of falling. Not from a cliff, but from a great height. A metaphorical zenith. I saw Marko in a sleek, glass-walled office, receiving an award. A plaque catching the light. His face was triumphant, arrogant. The article he wrote—my article—was framed on the wall behind him. The headline was a smear I couldn’t read, but the tone was one of devastating, sardonic exposure. He was at the peak of his career. Then, a shift. The glass walls cracked, not from the outside, but from within. Whispers in corridors. A source discrediting him. A photograph—blurred, incriminating—on a front page. His triumph curdled into panic. The fall was slow, public, and humiliating. Not a physical crash, but a professional and social disintegration. He was left alone in a cheap bar, the same award plaque now used as a coaster under a sweating glass, his sharp eyes dulled by shame and cheap whiskey. The great fall was not of the body, but of the ego, the reputation, the very identity he’d built.

The vision released me, leaving a metallic taste of schadenfreude and dread in my mouth. I gasped, yanking my hand back. The key clattered to the stone floor between us.

Marko didn’t move. He watched me, his recorder still silently witnessing. He’d seen the tremor, the momentary absence in my eyes, the gasp. He’d felt the strange intensity of the contact. A flicker of something—not belief, but scientific curiosity—crossed his face.

“Fascinating,” he murmured, more to himself than to me. “The physical response is genuine. A practiced dissociation technique? Or perhaps a self-induced hypnotic state to access prepared narratives?”

He bent and picked up the key, his movements economical. He examined it as if it were a piece of evidence. “So? What’s my reading, vidovita? Do I win the lottery? Find true love? Should I avoid any scenic roads?” The mockery in his voice was a thin veneer over a deep, probing hunger.

I stared at him, the image of his future disgrace overlaying his current, smug superiority. The words were there, on my tongue, acid-sharp. You will climb so high just to fall so much harder. Your victory will turn to ashes in your mouth. You will be alone and disgraced.

Sonja’s serene face flashed in my mind. The healing power of a truth delivered with compassion. This was its opposite. This truth, spoken now, would be a weapon. It would be an attack from a place of wounded pride, a retaliation for his cynicism. It would confirm his theory that I was a malicious fraud, lashing out.

And, a quieter, more terrifying thought: if I told him, would that set the fall in motion? Or was it already inevitable? Was my vision a warning of a future I could help him avoid, or a preview of a fate I would cement by speaking it?

The system was gone. The believer had shown me one path. The skeptic was demanding another. I chose a third: silence.

I turned and walked to the door. “The WiFi password is on the map. The market is on Wednesdays. Enjoy your stay, Mr. Vuković.”

I left him standing there, the key in his hand, the recorder’s red eye blinking, capturing only the sound of my retreating footsteps.

The week that followed was a cold war waged under the Mediterranean sun. Marko was a ghost, but a palpable, intrusive one. He was always there, on the periphery. I’d find him at dawn, sitting on the upper terrace with his laptop, typing. He’d be at the small village konoba in the evening, notebook beside his plate, engaged in conversation with the older fishermen—probing for stories about my family, about local superstitions. He took long walks, his sharp eyes missing nothing.

He tried to engage me several times, always with the recorder subtly present.

“The stonework on the south wall is 17th century, but the lintel over the Lavender Room door is older,” he said one morning as I watered the geraniums. “Salvaged from somewhere else? A church, perhaps? Adds to the aura of reclaimed sanctity.”

Another time: “I spoke to the baker’s wife. She remembers your grandmother. Said she had ‘knowing eyes.’ A neat generational link for the brand.”

Each comment was a scalpel, dissecting my life, my home, my history, and packaging it as a commodity. My anger hardened into a cold, stony resistance. I said nothing of substance. I became the perfect, bland hostess: polite, efficient, invisible.

But the vision of his fall haunted me. I saw it when I closed my eyes. The cracking glass, the shame in his eyes. I began to watch him not just as a threat, but as a tragic figure walking a path he couldn’t see. My hatred became tinged with a terrible, reluctant pity.

On his fifth night, a storm rolled in, not as violent as Sonja’s, but persistent. The power flickered and died, plunging the villa into a deep, roaring darkness broken only by flashes of lightning. I was lighting the old oil lamps in the main hall when I heard a curse from the direction of the Lavender Room.

A moment later, Marko appeared in the doorway, illuminated by the flash of my lamp. He looked different without his glasses, younger, and for the first time, slightly undone. He held a dead flashlight.

“Generator?” he asked, his usual smoothness frayed.

“No generator. It’ll be back on in a few hours. The grid here is… temperamental.” I handed him a lit lamp. “These work better.”

Our fingers brushed in the exchange. No vision came—the touch was too brief, or my defenses were too high.

He looked at the flame, then at me, his face cast in dramatic, shifting shadows. “It’s the perfect atmosphere, isn’t it? For your work. Shadows hide the seams.”

I was too tired for the fight. “Or they reveal the true shape of things,” I said quietly, turning to go.

“Wait.” The word stopped me. He sounded less like a journalist now, more like a man in a dark, unfamiliar place. “Why don’t you ever defend yourself? Why don’t you try to convince me?”

I turned back. In the lamplight, his handsome face was all angles and uncertainty. “You’ve already written your article in your head, Marko. Nothing I say will change it. You’ve decided I’m a fraud. So be it.”

“What if I wanted to be wrong?” The question hung in the dark, charged air between us.

It was a trap. It had to be. A way to get me to drop my guard, to make a claim he could eviscerate. I saw the fall again, the shattered glass. This was how it started—a moment of false intimacy, a revelation he would twist.

“Then you’d have to learn to see with something other than your skepticism,” I said. “And I don’t think you know how.”

I left him standing in the circle of lamplight, surrounded by the ancient, whispering darkness of the house that had, for generations, seen far more than he ever could.

The power returned just before dawn. The next day, his last full day, he was gone again on one of his investigative walks. I found myself drawn to the Lavender Room, not to clean, but to feel the space he’d occupied. The bed was neatly made. His things were organized with military precision. On the desk lay his notebook, open.

I shouldn’t have. I knew it was a violation. But the temptation was too great. I needed to see the monster he was constructing.

I stepped closer. The page was filled with his tight, precise script. Not notes about me, but a draft. The headline was sketched out: “The Oracle of Orebić: Authenticity in the Age of Experience.” My heart hammered. I skimmed the lines.

“…the villa is undeniably beautiful, a masterclass in sensitive restoration. Petrović herself is a compelling figure—young, strikingly beautiful, with an air of melancholic solitude that is either entirely genuine or brilliantly performed…”

“…local testimonies are contradictory, a mix of awe and old-wives’ tales. The ‘incident’ with the businessman is unverifiable and smells powerfully of post-hoc coincidence…”

“…the true product here is not a prediction, but absolution. For a price, the anxious modern tourist can offload their existential dread onto the shoulders of a pretty rustic seer. It is a therapy session disguised as folklore, and it is, in its own way, genius…”

He was dissecting me, but not with the savage exposé I’d feared. It was analytical, almost… respectful in its clinical way. He wasn’t calling me a fraud; he was framing me as a savvy entrepreneur catering to a spiritual marketplace. It was still a reduction, still an invasion, but it lacked the vengeful tone from my vision.

Then, at the bottom of the page, a separate note, circled: “Key question: Why does she look at me like she’s attending my funeral?”

I stepped back from the desk as if burned. He’d seen it. He’d seen the pity in my eyes, the knowledge I carried. He was observant, damn him.

On his final morning, he brought his bag down to the courtyard. He handed me the key, his movements formal. Our fingers touched as I took it.

Nothing. No flash, no hook. Just the cool metal and the warmth of his skin.

“I’ll be filing my piece next week,” he said, his journalist mask firmly back in place. “It will be fair.”

“I’m sure it will be what you need it to be,” I replied.

He hesitated, slinging his bag over his shoulder. For a second, the skeptic wavered. “That first day… when you gave me the key. You saw something. Didn’t you?”

I met his slate-grey gaze, the gaze that would one day be dulled by shame. I held the vision of his great fall inside me, a dark, heavy stone. I had chosen silence to deny him a weapon, to deny myself the role of vengeful prophet. Now, I chose silence for a different reason: because some falls are necessary. Some truths, delivered with malice or even with pity, only hasten the descent.

“I see many things, Marko,” I said finally, my voice calm. “Most of them are just reflections.”

A faint, puzzled frown touched his brow. He gave a curt nod, turned, and walked to his car without looking back.

I stood in the courtyard long after the sound of his engine had faded, the key growing warm in my clenched fist. The skeptic was gone, his article a coming storm of a different kind. But the greater storm was the one inside me. I had seen a future of ruin for a man I despised, and I had let him walk toward it. Was that mercy? Or was it the coldest revenge of all?

The gift I never wanted was becoming a burden of impossible choices. To speak was to interfere, to weaponize. To stay silent was to be complicit. And I no longer knew which was the greater sin.

5 The Weight

The silence after Marko left was not an absence, but a presence. It was a thick, syrupy thing, saturated with the echoes of his cynicism, Sonja’s desperate hope, and the ghost of Damir’s screeching metal. The courtyard, usually a sanctuary of dappled light and buzzing bees, felt like a stage after the actors had departed, the set still vibrating with the energy of their performances. I stood there until the sun climbed too high, baking the stones, and the metallic taste of his future—the fall, the shame, the sweating glass on the award plaque—finally receded from the back of my tongue.

Then, the ritual began.

It wasn’t part of the system. The system was for the transaction, the passing of the key. This was for the aftermath. This was exorcism.

I walked into my private quarters, the cool, dim room with its own small terrace overlooking the private cove. The space was spare, almost monastic—whitewashed walls, a simple bed, a desk with my laptop, shelves of my grandmother’s books. It was the one place where Lina the Hostess was not required. But today, even here, I felt contaminated.

I went to the bathroom, a tiny room with original, sea-green tiles that were cool under my feet. I turned on the tap in the deep, porcelain sink, the one with the lion’s paw feet. I let the water run until it was as hot as I could bear, steaming the antique mirror. I didn’t reach for the gentle, lavender-scented soap I sold to guests in little woven bags. I reached under the sink for the coarse, yellow bar of sapun my grandmother had always used, made with olive oil and lye and crushed laurel leaves. It smelled of discipline and forgotten kitchens.

I lathered my hands, the suds stark white against my skin. I started with my palms, the epicenter of every touch. I scrubbed at the lines—the heart line, the head line, the life line—as if I could scour out the impressions left by other hands. Damir’s damp, distracted grip. Sonja’s papery, pleading cheeks. Marko’s cool, intelligent capture. The lye bit into my skin, a sharp, clean pain.

Scrub.

The vision of the car, teetering. The sound I hadn’t heard but had felt in the vision—the groan of metal, the whisper of gravel giving way.

Scrub.

Sonja’s face, the moment the serene future replaced the desperate hope. The weight of her gratitude, a heavier burden than her sorrow.

Scrub.

Marko’s eyes, behind his glasses, calculating the market value of mystery. The crack in his future office glass, a spiderweb of impending disgrace.

The water turned cloudy. I rinsed, my skin glowing an angry pink. But the echo wasn’t in the skin; it was in the marrow. It was in the space behind my eyes where the visions played. The soap couldn’t reach that.

I dried my hands on a rough linen towel, but they still felt foreign, treacherous. They were not just tools for gardening, for cooking, for typing emails. They were conduits. They were thieves, stealing fragments of strangers’ destinies and leaving me to hold the loot.

The day stretched before me, empty of guests. I had a week until the next booking—a German couple, their emails full of excited questions about hiking trails and wine tours. A week of silence. A week alone with the weight.

I tried to garden. I knelt in the herb patch, the sun warm on my back, the scent of rosemary and sage rising around me. I plunged my hands into the soil, seeking its dumb, blind solidity. But as I crumbled a lump of dark earth between my fingers, I didn’t see roots and worms. I saw, for a fleeting, horrible second, Sonja’s garden, the neat rows of peppers being watered by her reclaimed son. The future had bled into the present, staining the very earth.

I jerked my hands back, wiping them furiously on my trousers.

I tried to read. I pulled my grandmother’s copy of The Island by Ivo Andrić from the shelf, seeking solace in someone else’s measured words about fate and stones. But the sentences swam. The words “destiny” and “fortune” and “omen” leapt from the page, taunting me. I threw the book onto the couch. It landed with a soft thud, a sound of defeat.

The weight was not a passive thing. It was active. It pressed down, yes, but it also pulled. It pulled me back into the visions, forcing me to relive them, to search for clues I might have missed, for a way the tragedy could have been averted, for a guarantee that the serenity would hold. Had Damir’s phone simply fallen? Had someone called him? Was there a moment, a millisecond, where my whispered warning had altered something, saved him from death but not from broken bones? Would Sonja’s son stay clean, or was the vision just a moment of respite in a longer tragedy? Was Marko’s fall already in motion, triggered by his arrival here, by my silent condemnation?

The questions were rats gnawing at the foundations of my mind.

By late afternoon, the pressure in my skull was a physical ache. I needed to get out of the villa, out of this cage of stone and memory. I changed into a swimsuit, threw a thin dress over it, and took the steep, winding path down through the pine forest to my cove. It wasn’t a true public beach, just a crescent of smooth, grey pebbles accessed by a path that was technically on my property, known mostly to locals.

The sea was calm, a vast, breathing sheet of azure. The cold shock of the water as I waded in was a blessing. I dove under, letting the silence of the underwater world envelop me. Here, there were no voices, no visions, only the blurred blue light and the muted rumble of my own blood. I swam out, strong, practiced strokes carrying me past the rocky point that marked the edge of the cove. I floated on my back, staring up at the endless, empty sky. For a few minutes, the weight suspended. I was just a body in salt water, under the sun.

Then, a voice called from the shore. “Lina! Bog, is that you?”

I turned, treading water. It was Mrs. Gavran, one of the village widows, a woman with a face like a friendly walnut and eyes that missed nothing. She was with her sister, both in sensible, dark swimsuits and sun hats, sitting on folding chairs they’d carried down.

I swam in reluctantly, the weight settling back onto my shoulders as I left the buoyancy of the sea.

“We haven’t seen you in town,” Mrs. Gavran said as I wrung out my hair. “Always busy with your foreigners.”

“It’s the season,” I said, forcing a smile.

Her sister, Ana, nodded sagely. “That one last week, the writer. Handsome, no? He bought me a coffee at the square. Asked many questions.”

The water on my skin turned icy. “Oh?”

“About the old families. About the… unusual ones.” Mrs. Gavran’s eyes twinkled, but it wasn’t a friendly twinkle. It was the look of someone holding a tasty piece of gossip. “He asked about your grandmother. About her ‘remedies.’ He was very interested.”

Marko, digging. Of course. The cold spread from my skin to my gut.

“My grandmother knew a lot about herbs,” I said lightly, picking up my towel.

“More than herbs, some said,” Ana murmured, not looking at me. “My baka said the Petrović women always had one foot in the other world. Said your great-aunt could find lost things just by thinking about them.”

A stone of dread dropped into the pit of my stomach. This was the echo, manifesting in the real world. Marko’s skepticism was one thing. This village lore, stirred up and given new life by his questions, was another. It was a softer, more insidious form of weight.

“Old stories,” I said, my voice tighter than I intended. “People like to romanticize.”

Mrs. Gavran patted my arm. Her touch was dry, papery. A tiny, insignificant contact.

But it was enough.

A flash, so fast it was barely more than an impression: Mrs. Gavran, in her small, immaculate kitchen, holding a letter. A official letter. Her hands are shaking. Her face is pale with shock. Grief, but a sharp, new one. Not the weathered grief of a long-time widow, but a fresh wound.

I flinched back as if electrocuted.

“Are you alright, dušo? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!” Mrs. Gavran laughed, a rasping sound.

I had. I’d seen hers. Another one. They were everywhere, leaking out of every casual touch. The barrier was thinning. The weight was making me porous.

“A… a cramp. From the swim,” I stammered, wrapping the towel around me like armor. “I have to go. Things to prepare.”

I almost ran back up the path, my feet slipping on the pine needles. By the time I reached the villa, I was breathless, nauseous. I didn’t go to the sink this time. I went straight to the shower. I turned it on ice-cold and stood under the brutal, needling spray, gasping, letting it hammer against my skull, my closed eyelids, my cursed hands. I scrubbed again, this time with a loofah, scraping at my skin until it was raw and screaming. The physical pain was a welcome distraction from the psychic one.

Clean, shivering, and wrapped in a thick robe, I finally succumbed. The silence and the weight won. I lay on my bed in the fading light, letting the visions roll over me like a tide of ghosts.

Damir’s crash. Sonja’s garden. Marko’s fall. Mrs. Gavran’s trembling hands. Leo’s desperate, windy joy. The Dutch woman’s silent kitchen grief. A kaleidoscope of stolen futures, a cacophony of silent screams and quiet joys that were not mine to witness.

Why me? The childish question, one I hadn’t asked since I was a teenager, bubbled up. What had I done? Was it some sin in a past life? A genetic flaw? My grandmother had called it “the touch,” and she’d feared it. My mother, I now knew from whispers and my own fractured memories, had been crushed by it. She hadn’t seen futures; she’d seen presents—the hidden pains, the secret betrayals happening in the same room. It had driven her into a silence so deep she never really came out, before the fire took her and left me with this amplified, twisted legacy.

I was the heir to a kingdom of ghosts. And the rent on the throne was paid in the sanity of the queen.

As full dark fell, I dragged myself up. I had to eat. I had to move. In the kitchen, I made a simple meal I didn’t want. As I chopped an onion, the knife slipped. A bright line of pain flashed across my fingertip. A bead of blood welled, vivid red against the white tile.

I stared at it, mesmerized. This pain was my own. This blood was my own. It was a clean, simple, present-tense reality. No visions, no echoes. Just a cut.

I didn’t bandage it immediately. I let it throb, a tiny, anchoring point of pain in the vast, nebulous agony of the weight. I pressed it, making it hurt more. This is real. This is now. This is mine.

It was a pathetic rebellion. But it was all I had.

Later, my finger neatly bandaged, I sat at my desk. The villa was a dark ship on a hillside, and I was its lone, cursed lookout. I opened my laptop, not to work, but to search. I typed in “Damir Horvat Split hospital.”

A news update, three days old. “Businessman Remains in Stable Condition, Long Recovery Ahead.” He was alive. He would live. My vision had not been of his death, only his crash. The weight shifted slightly, a milligram lighter. Perhaps not all foreshadowed ends were final.

Then, almost against my will, I typed “Marko Vuković journalist.”

His byline appeared on articles from Globus, Jutarnji, a few international outlets. Investigative pieces, political analysis, sharp cultural commentary. He was good. He was respected. I saw a headshot—the sharp, intelligent face, the confident gaze. I imagined that gaze turning dull with shame. The weight slammed back down, heavier.

I slammed the laptop shut. The silence rushed back in, but now it was filled with the phantom clicking of his keyboard, the sound of my own story being constructed.

I went to the cupboard and took out the bottle of travarica, my grandfather’s homemade herb brandy. I poured a finger into a small glass and drank it in one burning gulp. It didn’t silence the echoes, but it blurred their edges, turned down their volume.

I knew then, with a clarity that was itself a kind of despair, that the scrubbing, the swimming, the cold showers, the self-inflicted pain—none of it would work. The weight was not on my skin. It was in my soul. The echoes were not in my ears; they were etched into the fabric of my being. I could no more erase them than I could erase my own DNA.

The gift I never wanted was now the core of who I was. It had stolen my peace, my privacy, my simple ownership of my own hands. It had made me a custodian of a thousand potential tragedies and joys, a silent witness to a parade of fates I was powerless to change or unsee.

I looked at my hands in the lamplight, still pink from scrubbing. They looked innocent. They were liars.

The only way to escape the weight would be to cease touching, to cease living. To become a ghost in my own stone house.

But the German couple was coming in a week. Their hands would be outstretched for keys. Their futures, whatever they were, would be waiting for my treacherous touch.

The weight was eternal. And it was mine alone to carry. I poured another glass of brandy, not to blur, but to anesthetize, and waited for the empty, echoing night to pass.

6 The Invitation

The German couple left on a Sunday morning, their car packed with pottery and sunburns, their hearts full of pleasant, uncomplicated memories of coastal hikes and grilled fish. They were the perfect guests—their touch, when I’d given them the Fig Room key, had yielded only a benign, sun-dappled vision of them two years hence, decorating a nursery in Düsseldorf. A clean, happy future. It left no residue, no weight. Their departure left the villa humming with a neutral quiet, a blank page.

I spent the afternoon in a state of deliberate emptiness. I did not scrub my hands. I did not seek the grounding tree. I simply cleaned the room, changed the linens, and let the mundane, physical labor occupy the space where anxiety usually lived. The weather had turned, a blustery Bora wind scouring the coast, whipping the channel into a froth of whitecaps and lending the sky a hard, brilliant clarity. It was a wind that felt like an eraser, scraping away the soft, humid thoughts of summer.

I was on the upper terrace, battling to secure a flapping sun umbrella, my hair a wild Medusa’s crown of curls around my face, when I heard the car. Not the sensible rental of a tourist, but the low, purposeful growl of something sleeker. It didn’t stop on the road. It turned into my drive, gravel crunching under aggressive tires.

I turned, one hand holding my hair from my eyes, the other gripping the umbrella pole.

It was him.

Marko Vuković stepped out of a dark blue Audi, a different car from the one he’d rented before. He was dressed not in journalist’s casual chic, but in simple, well-cut dark jeans and a grey sweater that made his eyes look like storm clouds. He’d left his glasses in the car. He looked less like an investigator and more like… a man. The Bora wind tore at his hair, and he ran a hand through it, a gesture that seemed uncalculated, slightly nervous.

My heart did a complicated, painful somersault—part dread, part fury, part something else I refused to name. The weight of his future fall, which had become a dull, constant ache, sharpened into a fresh wound.

He didn’t approach immediately. He stood by his car, looking at me, as if waiting for permission to enter the arena. The wind roared between us, carrying the scent of pine and cold salt.

“I’m closed,” I called out, my voice barely carrying over the gale. “No vacancies.”

“I’m not here for a room.” He took a few steps forward, stopping at the edge of the courtyard, respecting an invisible boundary.

“Then you’re trespassing.” I wrestled the umbrella down, collapsing it with more violence than necessary.

“I came to apologize.”

The words were so unexpected they momentarily stole the wind from my lungs. I stared at him. The skeptic, the dissector, here to apologize? It was a new tactic. A more dangerous one.

“Your article hasn’t been published yet,” I said, suspicion layering my voice. “Is this the pre-emptive apology? The ‘sorry for the character assassination, but the truth is the truth’ kind?”

A flicker of pain crossed his face. Genuine? Performed? I couldn’t tell. The wind made everything raw and hard to read.

“There is no article,” he said.

The world seemed to tilt. The roaring wind faded to a distant hum. “What?”

“I killed it. I filed a different piece. About the challenges of sustainable tourism on sensitive coastlines. Vila Vidrika got a paragraph as a positive example of sensitive restoration. That’s all.”

I let go of the umbrella. It clattered to the stone floor. I walked to the terrace wall, needing the solidity of it under my hands. “Why?”

He closed the distance between us, stopping at the base of the stairs leading up to me. He had to look up, and the angle stripped him of some of his power. “Because I was wrong.”

“You’re never wrong. You’re a journalist. Your whole identity is built on being right.”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” He gave a short, humorless laugh, swallowed by the wind. “That’s what you saw. The day I checked in. When you looked at me like I was already dead. You saw the fall.”

The admission was a physical blow. He’d pieced it together. The pity in my eyes, my silence, his own notebook scribble. He’d connected it to his own arrogance, and it had terrified him.

I didn’t confirm or deny. I just watched him.

“After I left,” he continued, his words coming faster now, as if he’d rehearsed them on the drive down, “I couldn’t write it. Every sentence felt like… like building my own gallows. The tone was off. It was cruel. It was performative. I was trying to prove how clever and unsentimental I was, and all I proved was that I was an asshole.” He dragged a hand through his hair again. “And then the thing with the Kolar source fell apart.”

“Source?”

“The ‘evidence’ I’d dug up about Sonja Kolar being a known hysteric, prone to paying psychics. It was garbage. Misinformation from a rival of her late husband. I’d been so eager for the cynical angle I’d skipped basic verification. My editor called me on it. It was a small thing, but it was the first crack. Just like you saw.”

The great fall. It was beginning. Not with a scandal, but with a quiet professional misstep, a chink in the armor of his own perceived infallibility.

“So you’re here because your career is wobbling, and you think the vidovita can give you a lucky charm?” The bitterness in my voice was a shield.

“No.” His gaze was unwavering. “I’m here because for a month, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you. About the look on your face. About the fact that you saw my ruin and didn’t gloat. You just… let me walk into it. That’s a mercy I don’t understand. And I haven’t earned.”

The word ‘mercy’ hung between us. It was the last word I would have used. Silence as a weapon. Silence as cold revenge.

“It wasn’t mercy,” I whispered.

“Then what was it?”

I had no answer. Or too many.

The Bora whipped around us, a frantic, cleansing force. He took a step up the stairs, then another, until he was on the terrace with me. The space felt suddenly small, charged with the electricity of the wind and his confession.

“I’m not here for a story, Lina,” he said, his voice low, intimate against the roar. “I’m here for a drink. And… for you.”

For you.

The simplicity of it, the terrifying directness, bypassed all my defenses. He wasn’t probing, analyzing, or dissecting. He was asking. And in that asking, I Saw.

It wasn’t triggered by touch. It came unbidden, a surge from the storm inside me, a direct response to the raw vulnerability in his slate-grey eyes.

A tangle of limbs in dim light. My sheets. Skin on skin, heated and desperate. The scent of him, of salt and pine and something uniquely male. A gasp that was mine, a groan that was his. It was not gentle. It was a collision, a trying to get inside, to forget, to feel something other than the terrible knowledge we both carried. It was passion edged with a profound, aching sadness. I saw my own hand clutching the back of his neck, my fingers in his hair. I saw his head buried in the curve of my shoulder, his expression one of anguished release. And woven through the physical frenzy was the clear, cold thread of heartache. This would not end in a garden of peace. It would end in tears, in accusations, in a deeper, more personal kind of ruin. It was a cliff we would jump from together, for the fleeting, glorious sensation of flight before the inevitable crash.

The vision was so visceral, so present, that I swayed on my feet. He reached out, his hand hovering near my elbow, not touching. “Are you alright?”

I looked at his hand, then into his eyes. I saw the man from the vision—the one capable of both this piercing honesty and this devastating passion. I saw the heartache coming. I saw the fall, now intertwined with my own solitude.

I had a choice. I could send him away. I could cite the coming pain, protect us both. I could cling to the sterile safety of my cursed isolation.

But the weight of the silence, of the endless scrubbing, of being the eternal witness, was too heavy. The vision of the tangle of limbs was not just a prediction of pain; it was a promise of life. Of feeling. Of being seen, not as a seer, but as a woman. However briefly. However foolishly.

The wind screamed its warning.

I ignored it.

“Yes,” I said, the word torn from me. “Yes. I’ll have a drink with you.”

The storm outside found its mirror in the one that began inside the villa. We didn’t go to a bar. We went to my private quarters, a boundary I had never let a guest cross. He brought a bottle of expensive red wine from his car, a peace offering that felt like a sacrament.

The first drink was drunk in stiff silence, standing in my small living area. The second, sitting on the worn sofa, the wind rattling the old window frames. The third, as the conversation began to flow, no longer about articles or visions, but about books, about the maddening beauty of Dalmatia, about the loneliness of professions that turn people into subjects.

He was clever, funny in a dry, self-deprecating way now that the armor was off. He spoke of growing up in Zagreb, the pressure to be the brilliant only son, the escape he found in words. I spoke carefully, of losing my parents, of the struggle to keep the house, of the quiet satisfaction of making something work with my own hands. I did not speak of the Sight. He did not ask.

The wine unspooled the tension, replacing it with a different kind of heat. The space between us on the sofa diminished. I was aware of every point of his body: the line of his thigh, the curve of his shoulder, the way his fingers cradled his wine glass.

He reached out and touched a strand of my wind-tangled hair that had escaped my braid. The contact was electric, but no vision came. The wine, the intent, the sheer force of our mutual focus had built a dam against the flashes. In this moment, we were just a man and a woman.

“You are the most beautiful contradiction I have ever seen,” he murmured, his voice husky. “Strength and vulnerability. Ancient stone and… wild, living fire.”

It was a line. It should have sounded like one. But in the charged, storm-lashed dark, with his eyes reflecting the flickering light of my single lamp, it felt like the truest thing anyone had ever said to me.

I didn’t answer with words. I leaned in and kissed him.

It was not a gentle first kiss. It was the ignition of the vision. It was hunger meeting hunger, loneliness meeting loneliness. The taste of him—wine and winter air and want—was an intoxicant stronger than any brandy. His hands came up to cradle my face, his touch possessive, questioning, desperate.

The rational world, the world of warnings and weights and inevitable heartache, dissolved. There was only the feel of his mouth on mine, the solid plane of his chest under my palms, the overwhelming, terrifying rightness of being wanted for something other than my cursed sight.

We stumbled from the couch, a frantic, clumsy migration to the bedroom. Clothes were not so much removed as negotiated away in bursts of feverish impatience. The cold air from the rattling window met the heat of our skin, raising goosebumps that his hands soothed and his mouth followed.

And then we were on the bed, and the vision unfolded in reality. The tangle of limbs. The dim light from the living room slicing across his back, revealing the tense muscles, the curve of his spine. The desperate, wordless sounds. My fingers did clutch his hair. He did bury his face in my neck, his breath hot against my skin. It was a furious, beautiful battle, a mutual attempt to outrun our own demons, to find a moment of pure, unthinking sensation in the prison of our knowing minds.

When it was over, we lay tangled in the wreckage of sheets, breathing in ragged unison, the storm still howling outside. The heartache the vision had promised was there, a silent third presence in the bed, but it was distant, held at bay by the warm, living reality of his skin against mine.

He turned on his side, propping his head on his hand. His eyes, in the half-light, were unreadable. He traced the line of my jaw with a fingertip, a touch so tender it made my throat tighten.

“Tell me what you see now,” he whispered.

The dam broke. The touch, laden with post-coital intimacy, triggered it.

A flash, but not of the future. A past. His past. Marko, younger, at a desk in a newsroom, on the phone. His face is animated, triumphant. He’s just broken a big story. A story that ruined a powerful man. There is no guilt in his eyes, only the fierce, clean joy of the hunt. The thrill of the kill. It is the man he was before he came here, before his certainty cracked.

The vision faded, leaving me with a profound understanding. The fall I had seen wasn’t just about a missed article. It was about this man losing the core of that identity—the ruthless, righteous hunter. My silence had been the first pebble in that landslide.

“I see a man who doesn’t know who he is without the chase,” I said softly, the truth slipping out.

He flinched as if struck. The tenderness in his eyes hardened for a second, defensively. Then it melted into a weary acceptance. “And what do you see for us?”

That was the question. The heartache. The crash.

I looked at our intertwined legs, the contrast of his dark hair against my pale skin. I saw the fleeting joy and the coming pain. I saw the impossibility of it. And I saw my own desperate choice to walk into it anyway.

“I see tonight,” I said, evading. I turned my face into his palm and kissed it. “That’s all I want to see right now.”

He accepted the evasion, pulling me closer, his body a warm fortress against the screaming wind. In his arms, the weight was not gone, but shared. For a few stolen hours, in the eye of the storm, I was not the Oracle of Orebić. I was just Lina. And he was just Marko. And the only future that mattered was the next breath, the next heartbeat, the next touch that promised not a vision, but simple, human warmth.

But as I drifted into a troubled sleep, the wind’s howl seeped into my dreams, twisting into the sound of cracking glass, and I knew, with the certainty that was my curse and my compass, that the invitation I had just accepted was not just to a drink, or to a bed. It was an invitation to the fall. And I had said yes.

7 Skin on Skin

Morning arrived not with the usual gentle seep of light through the shutters, but with a muted, grey stillness. The Bora had finally exhausted itself, leaving behind a world washed clean and breathless. The silence in its wake was profound, a vacuum filled only by the distant, rhythmic sigh of the sea and the slow, steady cadence of another heart beating against my back.

Marko’s arm was a solid, warm weight across my waist, his hand splayed possessively over my ribs. His breath stirred the hair at the nape of my neck, a soft, intimate rhythm. I lay perfectly still, caught in the liminal space between sleep and waking, between the night’s frantic collision and the day’s inevitable reckoning.

The memories of the night before returned not as a flood, but in vivid, tactile snapshots: the taste of wine and skin, the desperate clutch of fingers, the arch of a back, the raw, shuddering release that had felt less like pleasure and more like exorcism. It had been a conflagration, burning away pretense and caution, leaving us here in these ashes, strangers and accomplices.

Slowly, so as not to wake him, I shifted. The sheet slipped down to my hips. The cool morning air kissed my bare shoulders. And then I felt it. His hand, still asleep perhaps, or operating on some deeper instinct, began to move.

It was a languid, exploratory touch. His fingertips, calloused from typing but surprisingly gentle, traced the notches of my spine, starting at the base of my neck and descending, vertebra by vertebra, in a slow, deliberate pilgrimage. They mapped the subtle curve of my lower back, the rise of my hip, before retracing their path upward.

I stopped breathing.

It wasn’t the touch itself, though it sent a shiver of pure, undiluted sensation through me, a live wire of awareness. It was the absence.

For the first time since the Sight had sharpened into a curse, skin-on-skin contact brought no vision. No hook snagged in my solar plexus. No ghostly future flashed behind my eyes. There was no echo of Damir’s crash, no whisper of Sonja’s garden, no foreshadow of Marko’s fall. There was only the exquisite, present-tense reality of his touch. The slight roughness of his fingertips. The warmth of his palm. The faint pressure as he learned the landscape of my body.

I was blind.

Blissfully, terrifyingly blind.

The relief was so profound it was vertigo. For years, touch had been a violation, a theft of privacy, a burden. It had been a doorway I was forced through into other people’s secret tomorrows. Now, with this man—this cynical journalist who had seen my pity and returned for me anyway—the doorway was closed. The gift was suspended. In the quiet of this rumpled bed, I was just a woman being touched by a man. The simplicity of it was a miracle.

But the terror was its twin. This blindness was an illusion, a temporary ceasefire. The Sight was not gone; it was merely dormant, overwhelmed perhaps by the sheer physical and emotional saturation of the night. It was a dam holding back a reservoir of futures, and it would not hold forever. To enjoy this blindness was to be a sailor delighting in the calm at the eye of the hurricane. The other side of the storm was still coming, and it would be more violent for the respite.

His tracing fingers reached the base of my skull, tangled in the mess of my hair. He made a soft, satisfied sound against my neck, still mostly asleep. His arm tightened, pulling me closer against the solid heat of his body. The movement was possessive, instinctive. A claim staked in the drowsy vulnerability of dawn.

I let myself sink into it. For these stolen moments, I chose the bliss over the terror. I focused on the sensation: the weight of his arm, the tickle of his breath, the slow, steady thump of his heart against my back. I committed it to memory—this rare, unmediated experience of touch.

He began to wake. I felt the change in his breathing, the slight tensing of his muscles. His tracing fingers stilled, then resumed their exploration with a new, waking consciousness. They drifted from my spine to my side, skating over the dip of my waist, coming to rest on the plane of my stomach. His palm was warm, heavy. Anchoring.

“Lina,” he murmured, his voice sleep-roughened, a vibration against my skin.

“Hmm.”

“You’re real.” It was a statement of wonder, tinged with relief.

A pang went through me. He, too, had been living in a world of abstractions—of stories, angles, hypotheses. Last night, and now this quiet morning, I had become terrifyingly, wonderfully concrete to him. “So are you.”

He shifted, turning me gently onto my back so he could look at me. The morning light was kind, softening the sharp angles of his face, highlighting the faint stubble shadowing his jaw. His storm-cloud eyes were clear, unguarded. He studied my face as if reading a newly discovered text.

His hand lifted from my stomach to brush a wild curl from my forehead. Again, just sensation. The slight catch of his fingerprint on my skin, the coolness of the air where the curl had been.

“Last night…” he started, then stopped, searching for words. The journalist, for once, was speechless.

“It happened,” I finished for him, a small, wry smile touching my lips.

He smiled back, a real one that reached his eyes and transformed his face. “It certainly did.” He leaned down and kissed me. It was a soft, searching kiss, devoid of last night’s frenzy, full of a quiet, dawning wonder. It, too, brought no vision. Only the taste of sleep and him, and a slow, sweet heat uncoiling in my belly.

The kiss deepened, and his hands began to move again. This time, it was not exploration but worship. They skimmed over my shoulders, down my arms, learning the shape of me. They cupped my face, my neck, the slope of my breast. Everywhere he touched, the Sight remained silent. I was a map without legends, a country he was discovering solely through touch and taste and sight.

It was liberating. It was intoxicating. I responded in kind, my own hands relearning the language of touch without translation. I traced the line of his eyebrow, the curve of his ear, the surprising softness of his lower lip. I followed the ridge of his collarbone, the taut muscles of his shoulders, the fine, dark hair on his forearms. He was all warm skin and solid muscle and whispering breath, a universe contained in the space of my bed.

When we made love again, it was different. Not a battle, but a conversation. A slow, deep dialogue conducted with bodies instead of words. The morning light painted gold stripes across his back as he moved above me. I watched his face, the play of concentration and pleasure, the moment his eyes lost focus and saw only me. There were no ghosts in the room. No futures pressing in. There was just the two of us, building a fragile, temporary present out of sensation and breath.

Afterward, wrapped around each other in a sweaty, satiated tangle, the real world began its insistent tap at the window. The sun was higher. A bird called from the olive tree. The villa, my responsibility, awaited.

“I have to…” I began, gesturing vaguely toward the door that led to the rest of the house.

“I know.” He kissed my shoulder, then released me. “Go. Be the hostess. I’ll be here.”

The phrase I’ll be here sent a complex thrill through me—part comfort, part trap.

I slipped from the bed, pulling on my robe, feeling the cool air on my newly sensitized skin. As I walked to the door, I glanced back. He was lying on his back, one arm behind his head, watching me. The sheet was pooled at his waist. He looked utterly at home in my space, in my bed. The sight was as unsettling as it was beautiful.

The day passed in a surreal dichotomy. I performed my hostess duties on autopilot—checking supplies, answering emails for future bookings, watering plants. But my mind, my body, remained in that sun-streaked bedroom. My skin felt hyper-aware, as if still imprinted with the memory of his hands. Every mundane task was underscored by a low, throbbing hum of awareness: He is here. In your home. In your bed.

I brought us coffee and pastries on a tray, a strangely domestic act. We ate on my small terrace, wrapped in blankets against the lingering chill, not speaking much, just existing in the quiet. He didn’t ask about the Sight. He didn’t probe. He just was. And in his simply being, he gave me the continued, precious gift of blindness.

In the afternoon, he dressed and said he was going for a walk. “To clear my head. To remember how to be a person, not a journalist on a story.”

I nodded, understanding. The space he gave me was another gift.

Alone, the silence of the villa was different. It was no longer empty; it was pregnant with his absence. I tried to read, to clean, but my focus was shattered. I found myself standing in the middle of a room, just feeling. Feeling the echo of his laughter from the terrace. Feeling the ghost of his touch on my spine. Feeling the terrifying vulnerability of having let someone in.

The terror began to outweigh the bliss. This blindness was a drug, and I was getting addicted. What happened when it wore off? What happened the next time we touched and a vision did come? Would it be of his continued fall? Of our impending heartache? Would the act of seeing shatter this fragile, sightless intimacy we’d built?

And worse—what if the blindness wasn’t about saturation? What if it was about him? What if, for some reason I couldn’t comprehend, his touch uniquely blocked the Sight? The implications were staggering. He wouldn’t just be a lover; he’d be a sanctuary. A human talisman against the curse. The temptation to cling to him for that reason alone was a dark, shameful undercurrent beneath my genuine attraction.

He returned as the sun began to dip, his cheeks flushed from the wind, his eyes bright. He carried a brown paper bag. “I found a fisherman selling yesterday’s catch down at the dock. Thought we could cook.”

Another simple, normal act. A couple making dinner. It was a fiction, but one I desperately wanted to believe in.

We worked side-by-side in my small kitchen. He cleaned the fish with a surprising competence. I chopped vegetables. Our elbows brushed. Our hands reached for the same knife. Each incidental contact was noted, tested. Still no visions. Just the warm, mundane friction of coexistence.

Over dinner—simple grilled sea bass with lemon and herbs, eaten at my little table by the window—the conversation turned, inevitably, to the edge of the abyss we were skirting.

“This can’t last,” I said softly, not looking at him, pushing a piece of fish around my plate.

“What can’t?” He knew what I meant, but he made me say it.

“This. You and me. This… normalcy.”

“Why not?”

I finally looked up. “You know why. I’m not normal. And you… you came here to prove a point. You stayed because you saw your own reflection in my eyes and it frightened you. That’s not a foundation. That’s quicksand.”

He put down his fork, his gaze steady. “You’re right. That’s how it started. But it’s not what this is now.” He reached across the table, his hand covering mine.

And there it was.

A flinch. A tiny, instinctive recoil before I could stop it. The fear of the hook. The fear of the vision returning and poisoning this perfect, blind connection.

He felt it. His eyes darkened with understanding, and a flicker of hurt. But he didn’t let go. He held my hand firmly, his thumb stroking my knuckles. “See?” he said, his voice low. “Nothing. Just you and me. And sea bass.”

He was right. The touch remained just a touch. The dam held. The blissful, terrifying blindness persisted.

Tears pricked my eyes, hot and sudden. I wasn’t crying from sadness, but from the overwhelming relief and terror of it. This man, with his probing mind and his damaged pride, had somehow become the only person on earth who could touch me without opening a door to tomorrow.

Later, in the deep blue of twilight, we found ourselves on the living room floor, wrapped in a blanket, sharing a glass of wine. The conversation had lapsed into a comfortable silence. He was behind me, his back against the sofa, me between his legs, my back to his chest. His arms were around me, his chin resting on the top of my head.

His hands began to move again. Not sexually, but thoughtfully. One hand splayed over my stomach, holding me close. The other lifted to my hair, gently unraveling the remains of my braid. He combed his fingers through the curls, slowly, methodically, as if untangling knots in a story.

I closed my eyes. The sensation was exquisite. The gentle pull on my scalp, the whisper of hair against my neck, the solid, safe circle of his arms. The world narrowed to this point of contact, this silent, sightless communion.

In that moment, I understood the true terror of the blindness. It wasn’t just the fear of the vision’s return. It was the fear of losing myself in it. Of becoming so dependent on this singular, sightless connection that I would do anything to preserve it. Of letting Marko Vuković become not just a lover, but my only link to a world without ghosts.

His lips brushed the shell of my ear. “Whatever this is,” he whispered, his voice a vibration I felt through my whole body, “however it ends… this, right now, is real. Let that be enough.”

It was a journalist’s plea for a primary source, a man’s plea for a reprieve. And it was my own desperate wish.

So, in the gathering dark, I surrendered to the blindness. I let his hands on my skin, his breath in my hair, his presence in my silent house, be the only truth I knew. And for a few more hours, in the sanctuary of his touch, I was blissfully, terrifyingly, and completely lost.

8 The Honeymooners

They arrived on a Tuesday, a splash of pure, undiluted joy against the quiet, complicated tapestry of my life with Marko. Their names were Petra and Luka, from a small town in the north, and they radiated the giddy, slightly overwhelmed energy of newlyweds for whom the phrase “coastal honeymoon” was still a dizzying dream.

I saw their rental car bounce up the drive, heard their laughter before I saw them. When they emerged, they were exactly as they’d looked in the pixelated passport photos they’d uploaded for booking—Petra, a rosy-cheeked brunette with a wide, infectious smile; Luka, tall and lanky, with an awestruck expression as he took in the view, his arm permanently anchored around his wife’s shoulders. They were young, maybe twenty-two, their happiness so new it still had its protective film on.

Marko was in Zagreb for three days, dealing with what he vaguely called “career recalibration”—the first aftershocks of his killed article and the crumbling of his old, arrogant certainties. His absence was a physical ache, a silence in the villa that felt different from the silence before him. It was an emptiness that expected to be filled. But it also meant the gift, the Sight, was once again the dominant force in the house, waiting at my fingertips, un-muffled by his confounding presence.

I braced myself as I welcomed Petra and Luka. Their happiness was so palpable it felt like a third guest, and I feared touching it, feared my curse would find some hairline crack in their perfect joy and show me a future where it tarnished.

I led them to the Sage Room. The air was thick with the scent of their anticipation and the salt breeze. They exclaimed over everything—the vaulted ceiling, the handmade quilt, the tiny balcony with its sliver of sea view. Their hands were constantly linked, their eyes constantly seeking the other’s for shared delight.

“It’s perfect,” Petra breathed, her eyes shining. “Just like the pictures. Only better.”

“This is our first real trip together,” Luka added, his voice full of pride. “Just us.”

The moment had come. I held out the key, the brass cool and accusing in my palm. “Welcome. The key is yours.”

Petra reached for it. Her hand was warm, slightly damp with excitement. As our fingers met around the cold metal, the hook descended. But it was not the violent snag of Damir’s crash or the sorrowful pull of Sonja’s grief. It was a gentle, golden tug, like a ribbon being drawn from a spool of light.

The vision unfolded like a sun-drenched film reel.

I saw them in a small, chaotic kitchen, years from now. Toys were underfoot. Petra, her hair in a messy bun, was stirring a pot on the stove, a toddler clinging to her leg. She was laughing, shooing away a playful dog. Luka walked in, loosening a tie, his face tired but soft. He went straight to her, didn’t say a word, just wrapped his arms around her from behind and buried his face in her neck. She leaned back into him, her eyes closing in a moment of pure contentment. The scene shifted: a sunlit garden, a wooden table crowded with relatives, an older Petra and Luka, their faces lined with laughter and time, toasting with their grown children. Then, a final, quiet image: two old hands, wrinkled and spotted, intertwined on a knitted blanket on a sofa, a fire crackling in a hearth. A deep, wordless, lifelong companionship. It was a symphony of ordinary, beautiful moments—the minor keys of arguments and worries were there, implied in the tired eyes, the messy house, but they were woven seamlessly into a melody of profound, enduring love.

It was the purest, most unequivocally good vision I had ever Seen. It had no shadow. It was a promise, written in the language of everyday miracles.

The key was fully in Petra’s hand. I was back in the room, the echo of their future happiness ringing in me like a bell. I felt light, as if the vision had scoured some of the residual darkness from my own soul.

Petra was looking at me, her head tilted. “Are you okay? You had the funniest smile just then.”

I realized I was beaming. A real, unforced smile that stretched my cheeks. “I’m more than okay,” I said, my voice thick with an emotion I couldn’t name. “It’s just… you two. You bring a wonderful energy.”

Luka puffed out his chest comically. “That’s us! Good vibes only!”

I couldn’t help it. The words, the truth of what I’d seen, spilled out. Not as a prophecy, but as a blessing. A gift to match the gift their joy had given me.

“You will have a beautiful life,” I said, the certainty ringing in my voice. “A long, messy, wonderful life together. Full of noisy kitchens and quiet moments. It’s written all over you.”

They stared at me, their young faces first surprised, then melting into radiant, touched delight. Petra’s eyes filled with happy tears. Luka squeezed her hand so tight his knuckles whitened.

“Hvala vam,” Petra whispered, her voice choked. “Thank you. That’s… the best wedding present anyone could give us.”

Their joy was a balm. It seeped into the ancient stones of the villa, into the corners of my own lonely heart. For the three days they were there, the place felt different. Lighter. Their laughter echoed in the courtyard. They left cheerful notes of thanks with little chocolates on my doorstep. They asked for recommendations not for fancy restaurants, but for the best place to get cheap, delicious pizza and watch the sunset.

I watched them from my window sometimes, walking hand-in-hand down the path to the cove, their heads close together. They were a living embodiment of the future I’d Seen—not the end point, but the glorious, hopeful beginning. Their happiness was a shield against the lingering dread of Marko’s complicated return, a counterpoint to the weight of all the other visions.

On their last morning, they checked out early to catch a ferry to an island. Petra hugged me tightly, a spontaneous burst of affection. “Thank you for everything, Lina. This place is magic.”

Luka shook my hand with both of his. “If we’re ever rich, we’re coming back for a month!”

I waved them off, their car disappearing in a cloud of dust and goodwill. The courtyard felt emptier, but the residue of their joy lingered, a sweet perfume. I clutched that vision to my chest, a mental talisman. See? I told the curse. You can show beauty too. You can be a bearer of good news.

It felt like a turning point. Perhaps the Sight wasn’t inherently a curse. Perhaps it was a mirror, and I had simply been surrounded by broken glass for too long. The Honeymooners had shown me a whole, perfect reflection.

That optimism lasted precisely until the next guest arrived, two days later.

His name was Goran. He was a sallow man in his fifties, with the pinched, anxious face of someone who has spent a lifetime expecting the worst. He’d booked a single night, a stopover on a business trip. He barely grunted a greeting, his eyes darting around the villa not with appreciation, but with a kind of paranoid assessment.

The ritual felt hollow after the effortless exchange with Petra and Luka. I was still riding the balm of their happiness. I handed Goran the key to the Olive Room.

His touch was dry, cold, reluctant.

The hook was a rusty nail, tearing in.

An office, fluorescent-lit and grim. Goran sitting at a desk, his head in his hands. A pile of papers before him—legal documents, I think. The seal of a court. The feeling is one of utter, final defeat. Not a dramatic downfall, but a slow, grinding erosion that has finally reached the foundation. A lifetime of cautious, fearful choices culminating in a loss so complete it has left him empty. He looks up, and his eyes are voids. There is no future in them. Just a hollow present that stretches into a barren forever.

The vision was like a plunge into icy sludge after the golden warmth of the honeymooners’. It left me shivering, the balm of their joy instantly evaporated, replaced by a chill that went to the bone.

Goran took his key and shuffled to his room without a word. He was gone before dawn the next morning, leaving the room eerily untouched, as if he’d been a ghost. But the void from his vision lingered, a stain on the air.

The next guest was a woman, a poet from Rijeka named Irena. She had fierce eyes and a beautiful, sorrowful mouth. Her touch, as I gave her the Fig Room key, brought a vision of a published book, lauded by critics, sitting on a shelf in an empty apartment. The applause was there, but the chair by the window where a lover should have sat was vacant. A triumph laced with the poison of loneliness.

Then came the retired couple from Germany, polite and distant. Their touch revealed not companionship, but two parallel lives lived in the same house, a chilling quietude between them in their future lakefront home, their communication reduced to schedules and shopping lists.

One after another, they came. A student filled with existential dread about a career that would indeed become a soul-crushing trap. A middle-aged woman seeking solace after a divorce, whose future held only a series of increasingly disappointing, fleeting affairs. A father and son on a bonding trip, their touch revealing the son’s future estrangement, a phone call that would never be made.

The purely good vision of Petra and Luka receded, becoming a distant, glowing memory in a gathering storm of quiet despair, muted tragedies, and joyless futures. The balm was gone, washed away by a tide of grey. The Sight was not a mirror reflecting the person; it felt, now, like a x-ray, seeing only the broken bones beneath the skin. The gift had shown me one perfect painting, then forced me to spend weeks in a gallery of grim, unforgiving sketches.

Marko returned in the middle of this onslaught. His presence, which had once granted blindness, now seemed to have no effect. The dam had broken. The visions came with every guest, relentless and dark. His touch still brought me personal respite, a temporary blindness to his future, but it could not protect me from the torrent from others.

I began to dread the sound of a car on the gravel. My hands, once scrubbed raw to erase echoes, now felt perpetually cold, anticipating the next chilling touch. I moved through my days like a sleepwalker, performing the hostess role by rote, my smile a stiff mask.

“What’s wrong?” Marko asked one evening, finding me staring blankly at the computer screen, an unpaid invoice blinking. He came up behind me, his hands on my shoulders, kneading the tension. For a blessed moment, there was only the feeling of his strong fingers on my knotted muscles.

“Nothing,” I murmured, leaning back into him. “Just tired.”

“It’s more than that.” He turned me to face him, his journalist’s eyes missing nothing. “You’ve been… distant. Since I got back. Is it me?”

I looked into his concerned face, the face of the man who was both my sanctuary and my impending heartache. How could I explain? That I was drowning in the sorrows of strangers? That the one bright vision I’d been given felt like a cruel taunt? That his touch was the only thing that didn’t show me a ruin, but being with him felt like waiting for a different kind of avalanche?

“The guests,” I said finally, the truth a pale shadow of the reality. “They’ve been… a difficult bunch. Needy. You know how it is.”

He didn’t look convinced, but he let it go, pulling me into a hug. In his arms, the visions of the empty poet, the defeated Goran, the lonely German couple, receded. But they waited, just outside the circle of his embrace, a hungry gallery of shadows.

That night, as we lay in bed, I finally confessed in the safety of the dark. “The young couple. The honeymooners. I Saw their future. It was… perfect. All of it. A lifetime of happiness.”

He was silent for a moment. “And that’s a bad thing?”

“It was the last one,” I whispered, the words like stones dropped into a well. “Weeks ago. Since then… it’s all been variations on loss. On quiet disappointments. It’s like I’ve been shown heaven, then sentenced to haunt the antechambers of hell.”

He held me tighter. “You don’t know they’re certain. You’ve said it yourself—they’re possibilities.”

“They feel certain,” I said, my voice small. “And they’re all so… grey.”

He had no answer. There was no journalistic insight, no cynical quip, no profound wisdom that could change the nature of my curse. He could only offer the temporary blindness of his own body, a hiding place that was becoming less and less effective against the creeping despair.

The Honeymooners’ visit had been a beacon, but it had also recalibrated my senses. Having Seen such unadulterated joy, every subsequent vision felt like a deeper betrayal, a clearer confirmation of the world’s essential melancholy. Their blissful prediction was not a promise of more to come; it was the exception that proved a terrible, grinding rule.

The gift I never wanted had shown me its full, capricious range. It could bestow a blessing so sweet it brought tears. But it seemed its true nature, its overwhelming tendency, was to chart the myriad ways the light faded, the love cooled, the dreams shrank. Petra and Luka’s lifelong happiness was the last purely good vision. And in its beautiful, aching aftermath, I was left alone in the gathering dark, waiting for the next touch, fearing the grey it would bring, and mourning the balm that was now just a memory, fading like their taillights down the dusty road.

9 The Crack

The grey procession of futures had settled into a grim rhythm, a metronome of muted disappointment that ticked inside my skull. Marko’s presence was a buffer, but it couldn’t silence the tick-tock. He’d become a semi-permanent fixture, working remotely from my terrace, his laptop humming beside the potted geraniums. We existed in a fragile, liminal state—not quite living together, but no longer host and guest. We were co-conspirators in a temporary truce, dancing around the heartache we both knew was coming, while I drowned in the sorrows of the strangers who passed through my doors.

The family arrived on a Saturday, a unit of three radiating a different kind of energy than the honeymooners. Not giddy joy, but the focused, slightly frayed purpose of a middle-class holiday. The parents, Ivana and Tomislav, were in their late thirties, with the tired eyes of professionals on a forced break. Their daughter, Maja, was about ten, a wiry girl with serious eyes and a defiant set to her jaw, already bristling against the boredom she anticipated.

They’d booked the Sage and Fig rooms, parents in one, daughter in the other—“She needs her own space, or we’ll all go mad by day three,” Ivana confided with a wry smile as I showed them around.

Maja was unimpressed. She kicked at a loose pebble in the courtyard, her gaze fixed on her phone. “There’s no pool,” she stated, not asked.

“There’s a sea, mala,” her father said, ruffling her hair. She ducked away.

I went through the motions. Ivana’s touch, as I gave her the Sage Room key, yielded a vision of a future promotion at her accounting firm, the thrill undercut by the chronic back pain that would come with the extra hours at her desk. Tomislav’s revealed a secret, stress-related heart medication he would begin taking in two years, hidden from his wife. The grey tapestry continued.

Then it was Maja’s turn. She stood before me, dragging her small, wheeled suitcase, her hand outstretched with the impatient air of someone receiving a toll ticket. I held out the Fig Room key.

“This is yours. The view is the best.”

She grabbed the key. Her hand was small, warm, surprisingly strong for a girl her size. The touch was a spark.

The hook was not a slow pull or a rusty tear. It was a crack of lightning, blinding and instantaneous.

A narrow, sun-dappled village lane, cobblestones worn smooth. Maja on a bicycle, a bright red one, her hair flying behind her. She’s laughing, head thrown back, the earlier boredom gone, lost in the simple thrill of speed. She doesn’t see the tourist car backing out of a hidden driveway. A screech of brakes, too late. A sickening thud of metal on metal, of plastic and bone. The red bicycle crumples like a discarded candy wrapper. Maja’s small body is flung, a rag doll in pastel shorts and a t-shirt, landing in a still, wrong-looking heap on the rough stone. The laughter is gone, replaced by a ringing silence, broken by a woman’s scream from the car.

The vision was so violent, so specific, it didn’t fade—it exploded behind my eyes. I gasped, a sharp, involuntary intake of air that was almost a cry. I jerked my hand back as if the key had burned me, but the vision was already branded onto my consciousness.

Maja stared at me, her serious eyes now wide with alarm. “What?”

Ivana and Tomislav, who had been discussing parking, turned at the sound.

I looked at Maja, at her alive, whole, bored face. I saw the crumpled bicycle, the still heap. The grey futures were one thing. This was a sharp, primary-colored horror. A child’s broken body on a sunlit street.

The system was ash. The rule of silence was a luxury for adult sorrows. This was a child.

Before I could think, before I could weigh the consequences, the words were out of my mouth, raw and desperate, aimed at her parents but my eyes locked on Maja.

“The bicycle. If she rents a bicycle. Make her wear a helmet.” My voice was a strained rasp. “A proper one. Not just… please. Make her wear it.”

The courtyard went very still. The only sound was the distant buzz of a boat on the channel.

Ivana’s face transformed from polite curiosity to confusion, then to a flash of maternal offense. “I’m sorry?”

Tomislav stepped forward, his friendly demeanor cooling. “What’s this about?”

Maja looked from me to her parents, her lower lip jutting out. “I’m not a baby. I don’t need a stupid helmet.”

I was shaking. The taste in my mouth was coppery, like blood, and sour with the unmistakable flavor of sin—the sin of interference, of breaking the natural order, of trying to reach into the gears of fate with my bare, trembling hands. “Just… please. The roads here, the tourists… they don’t look. It’s not safe.”

Ivana’s eyes narrowed. She put a protective arm around Maja’s shoulders, pulling her away from me. “We appreciate your concern,” she said, her voice clipped, formal. “But we’ll decide what’s safe for our daughter. Come on, Maja.”

They moved away, a tight, defensive unit, shooting wary glances back at me. Maja’s last look was not of fear, but of a kind of fascinated disgust, as if I were a strange insect that had just spoken.

I stood rooted to the spot, the key for the Fig Room lying on the stone where I’d dropped it. The copper taste filled my mouth. I had done it. I had tried to bend the future. The crack wasn’t just in the vision of the bicycle; it was in me. I had fractured my own resigned observance.

The next two days were agony. I was a ghost in my own villa, avoiding the family. I heard Maja’s voice in the courtyard, complaining about the lack of kid-friendly activities. I saw Tomislav studying a map of bike rental shops. My heart would seize every time.

Marko noticed my state. “What happened with that family? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I have,” I whispered, but couldn’t elaborate. The sin of interference felt too private, too monstrous to share. He’d think I was mad, or worse, dangerously narcissistic.

On the third morning, I heard the unmistakable sound of a bicycle being wheeled across the courtyard cobbles. Peering from my kitchen window, I saw them. Maja, astride a shiny red bicycle—the exact red from my vision. My blood turned to ice. But then I saw it: on her head, lopsided and clearly resented, was a bright blue bicycle helmet. Her father was adjusting the strap, saying something stern. Maja’s face was a thundercloud.

Relief, acute and dizzying, washed over me. I had done it. I had changed it. The helmet was there. The vision was of a head injury, surely. The helmet would prevent it. The crack I’d made had diverted the river of fate. The copper taste receded, replaced by a wild, trembling hope. Perhaps this was the purpose. Not just to see, but to shield. To use the cursed knowledge for good.

I avoided them the rest of the day, my guilt transformed into a secret, giddy triumph. When they returned in the late afternoon, the bicycle was back, Maja was unharmed, though still sulky. The helmet had done its job. I slept that night, a deep, dreamless sleep for the first time in weeks.

They were due to check out the next morning. At 7 AM, my phone rang, shattering the peace. It was a local number I didn’t recognize.

“Ms. Petrović?” It was Ivana’s voice, but it was stripped of all its earlier clipped politeness. It was raw, shaking with a fury so intense it vibrated down the line.

“Yes? Is everything—”

“How dare you?” she hissed. “How dare you fill my child’s head with your… your hysterical fantasies!”

The world tilted. “What? I don’t—”

“Maja is in the hospital. She fell from a cliff path yesterday afternoon. She was looking for sea glass, a path she never would have taken if she hadn’t been so upset, so terrified of the bicycle after your little performance! She was so anxious, so fixated on the ‘dangerous roads’ you put in her head, she begged to go hiking instead. She slipped. She has a concussion, a broken wrist, and cuts all over her legs from the rocks.”

Each word was a hammer blow. The hospital. The cliff path. The broken wrist. Not the bicycle. A different disaster. The vision had not changed; it had pivoted.

“Is she… will she be…” I couldn’t form the words.

“She will recover, physically,” Ivana spat. “But she’s terrified. She woke up screaming about the lady who knew she would get hurt. You poisoned our holiday. You terrified my daughter with your psychotic predictions. We are leaving today, and I will be reporting you to the rental platform and anyone else who will listen. You are a sick woman. Stay away from us.”

The line went dead.

I stood in the middle of my kitchen, the phone slipping from my numb fingers to clatter on the tiles. The copper taste flooded back, a hundred times stronger, mixed with the bile of absolute failure. I stumbled to the sink and vomited.

I hadn’t changed the future. I had merely redirected its malice. The accident was inevitable. The universe, or fate, or the terrible mechanics of the Sight, had demanded its price of pain, and I had just handed it a different tool. The bicycle, the cliff—the instrument was irrelevant. The outcome was fixed. My interference wasn’t a noble act; it was a childish attempt to cheat a system that could not be cheated. And in trying, I had made it worse. I had inserted myself into the story, becoming the source of the fear that drove Maja onto the dangerous path. I was not the preventer; I was a causative agent.

The crack I had opened in my own resolve had not let in light; it had let in a deeper, more profound darkness. The knowledge that the visions were not just possibilities, but likely certainties, was bad enough. The new knowledge was catastrophic: that in trying to alter them, I could warp the path to the same terrible destination, and add my own guilt to the wreckage.

Marko found me there, on the floor by the sink, my forehead against the cool cabinet, empty and shuddering.

“Lina. Bog, what is it?” He knelt beside me.

I told him. In broken, jagged sentences, I told him about the bicycle, the helmet, my warning, the phone call. The taste of copper and sin.

He listened, his face growing graver with each word. When I finished, he didn’t offer empty comfort. He was silent for a long time, his journalist’s mind processing the terrible data.

“You can’t know that,” he said finally, but his voice lacked conviction. “It could have been worse on the bike. The helmet might have saved her from something fatal.”

“But the vision was of the bike,” I moaned. “It was specific. And it came true, just… transmuted. The core of it—the child’s pain, the parental terror—that was the same. I didn’t stop it. I just… reshaped it. And made myself a part of the horror.”

He had no argument. The logic was airtight and devastating.

The family left while I was still catatonic. I heard their car, the slamming of doors, the angry spin of tires on gravel. They left the keys on the courtyard table without a word. The bright blue bicycle helmet, I noticed later, had been left behind, discarded on a chair, a stark, mocking symbol of my futile, meddling arrogance.

In the days that followed, the crack within me widened into a chasm. The grey visions of other guests now felt like taunts. What was the point of seeing if I could not act? And if I acted, I risked becoming the very instrument of the tragedy I sought to avoid. I was damned if I did, damned if I didn’t.

The weight of the Sight was now compounded by the weight of responsibility and the crushing guilt of failed responsibility. My hands felt not just like conduits for futures, but like potential weapons. Every time I reached out with a key, I flinched internally, wondering if this touch, this glimpse, would compel me to speak, and if speaking would somehow twist the knife.

The villa, my sanctuary, had become a laboratory of fate, and I was the reckless scientist, tampering with forces I could not comprehend and only making the explosions worse. The purely good vision of the honeymooners was now a distant, almost mythical memory, overshadowed by the brutal lesson of Maja: that the Sight was not a gift, a curse, or even a mirror. It was a trap. And I had just sprung it on myself and an innocent child. The crack was in the world, and it ran straight through the center of my soul.

10 The Anchor

The crack that had started with Maja’s crumpled bicycle did not heal. It propagated, a fissure spreading through the bedrock of my sanity. Every guest who arrived became a potential carrier of a future I was now terrified to see and even more terrified to acknowledge. My hands developed a tremor. I started wearing thin linen gloves when gardening, when cleaning, a feeble barrier against the world. I took to leaving keys on the check-in table with a brittle smile and a hurried, “It’s in the door, make yourselves at home,” avoiding the fatal transfer of metal from my skin to theirs.

But the visions didn’t stop. They became more insidious, leaking through accidental grazes—a brush passing a salt cellar at breakfast, a moment of contact while pointing out a water leak in the Fig Room tap. They were shorter, more fragmented, but no less vivid: a man’s future bankruptcy papers, a woman’s positive but unwanted pregnancy test, a teenager’s letter of college rejection. The noise in my head was no longer a gallery of sorrows; it was a cacophonous train station of other people’s impending disappointments, all announcing their arrivals and departures on a loop.

I stopped sleeping. I would lie rigid beside Marko, who now spent most nights in my bed, and listen to the phantom sounds of crashing bikes, weeping women, and tearing paper. My own thoughts were drowned out. I was a seashell held to the ear of the future, and all I could hear was its relentless, crashing surf.

Marko watched my disintegration with a helpless, growing alarm. He tried to talk, to reason. “Lina, you have to see someone. A doctor. This isn’t sustainable.”

“A doctor for what?” I’d snap, my nerves frayed to filaments. “To cure me of seeing the truth? To medicate away a gift that is also a curse? They’ll lock me up.”

“Then talk to me.”

But how could I? The vocabulary of my torment was visions and echoes, a language he could intellectually grasp but never viscerally feel. My silence pushed him away, even as my body clung to him more desperately.

His touch became the only thing that grounded me. It was the sole point of sensory input that didn’t come with a psychic download. With him, the dam of blindness, though weakened, still mostly held. In a world where every surface was electrified with potential futures, his skin was a dead zone, a blessed nullity.

Our lovemaking, once a collision of curiosity and heat, transformed. It was no longer about discovery or even pleasure. It became a desperate, physical refuge. A wild, sweaty escape from the noise in my head.

It would start with a look—my eyes, wide and haunted, meeting his across a room cluttered with the invisible baggage of other lives. He would see the static panic in my gaze, the way my hands fluttered like trapped birds. Without a word, he would cross the space. He wouldn’t kiss me first. He would simply take my face in his hands, his thumbs pressing into my temples, as if he could physically hold my fracturing mind together.

“Look at me,” he’d command, his voice low and firm. “Just me.”

And I would. I’d focus on the slate-grey of his irises, the faint scar on his brow, the set of his mouth. The other images—the bicycle, the bankruptcy papers, the weeping—would recede, pushed back by the sheer, present-tense reality of him.

Then the kiss. It was never gentle. It was a claiming, an assault on my senses designed to overwhelm the psychic ones. His mouth was demanding, his hands urgent as they pushed aside the linen of my dress, the cotton of my shirt. He handled me with a focused intensity, as if he could scrub the visions from my skin through friction alone.

I responded in kind. My nails would dig into his shoulders, my back arching, not in passion but in a frantic need to feel something—anything—other than the ghostly presences in my mind. I would bite his lip, his shoulder, leaving marks, a primitive way of asserting I am here, this is now, this is real.

We made love in silence, usually, the only sounds our ragged breathing, the creak of the bed, the slap of skin on skin. It was a furious, athletic battle against the intangible. We didn’t make love in the bed so much as we wrestled our demons upon it. The room would become a steam-filled capsule, the windows fogged, the air thick with the scent of sex and desperation.

One afternoon, a particularly grim vision—a guest’s future diagnosis of a slow, degenerative illness—sent me reeling into the bedroom, shaking. Marko found me curled on the floor, my arms wrapped around my knees, rocking. He didn’t ask. He simply lifted me, laid me on the bed, and began undressing me with a methodical calm that was more terrifying than anger.

This time, it was slow. Devastatingly, excruciatingly slow. He used his mouth, his hands, his entire body to map every inch of me, to anchor every particle of my being to the physical plane. He lingered in places until I sobbed from the overload of sensation, until the clinical, cold fear of the vision was burned away by a hotter, more immediate fire. When he finally entered me, it was with a deep, relentless cadence that felt less like sex and more like a direct infusion of reality. I came apart not with a cry of pleasure, but with a wail of release, as if he were physically pulling the haunting images out of me.

Afterward, drenched in sweat, trembling in the aftermath, he would hold me. Not with soft words, but with a fierce, full-bodied embrace that pinned me to the earth, to him. My face pressed into the sweat-damp hollow of his throat, I could hear his heart, a steady, rhythmic drumbeat against the chaotic static in my skull. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. A metronome for the present. An anchor.

“I’m here,” he’d murmur into my hair, his voice rough. “You’re here. This is all that is.”

And for those suspended moments, in the sweaty, tangled aftermath, I would believe him. The noise would diminish to a distant hum. The crack in my world would seem to seal, held together by the mortar of his arms. He was my anchor in the storm-tossed sea of other people’s tomorrows, the only weight heavy enough to keep me from drifting into that psychic abyss.

But anchors are not escapes. They are tethers. And a tether implies you are trapped in the storm, not delivered from it.

The reliance became its own kind of terror. I needed his touch like a drug. The blindness it offered was my only respite. I started to fear his absences with a primal dread. When he went to Zagreb for two days to meet with his editor, the villa became a haunted house. I wore gloves constantly. I jumped at shadows. A friendly wave from a neighbor, Mrs. Gavran, sent me scurrying inside, fearing a touch, a vision. I slept in his t-shirt, surrounded by his scent, but it was a poor substitute for the nullifying force of his actual body.

When he returned, I fell upon him at the door, kissing him with a frantic hunger that had little to do with desire and everything to do with survival. He understood. He backed me against the wall in the hallway, his hands under my thighs, lifting me, taking me right there, a quick, brutal reassertion of the anchor. The desperation in my response frightened us both.

One night, after a particularly violent bout of lovemaking that left us both breathless and marked, he propped himself on an elbow and looked down at me. In the moonlight, his face was all shadows and seriousness.

“This can’t be the only way, Lina,” he said, his voice quiet. “Using me to silence the noise. It’s… it’s eating you. And it’s turning this into something else.”

“It’s the only thing that works,” I whispered, tracing a bruise on his collarbone, a badge from our battle.

“But for how long?” he pressed. “What happens when it stops working? What happens when my touch… isn’t enough anymore?”

The unspoken question hung in the air: Or when I’m not here?

I had seen our heartache. I knew an end was coming. But in my current state, the thought of losing the anchor was more terrifying than the heartache itself. The heartache was a future pain. The noise was a present hell.

“Don’t,” I said, my voice breaking. I rolled into him, pressing my body flush against his, seeking the anchor, seeking the blessed silence. “Just don’t talk. Just hold me.”

He did. But the tension in his arms was different. He was holding me together, but he was also holding a question, a fear of his own. He was becoming not just a lover, but a caretaker. A human silencer for a psychic storm. The weight of that role was starting to show in the new lines around his eyes, in the way he sometimes looked at me when he thought I was asleep—not with desire, but with a worried, clinical assessment.

Our lovemaking was a lifeboat on a raging sea. But the boat was leaking, and we were both bailing furiously, too terrified of the water to notice we were exhausting ourselves. He was my anchor, but I was dragging him down into the depths with me, into the cold, silent world beneath the noise where only our two desperate hearts beat, a frantic, fading rhythm against the coming dark.