11 The Investigation

The anchor held, but the strain was singing in the chain. Marko’s touch still brought its blessed blindness, but the desperation of our coupling had left a residue, a mutual awareness that we were using each other’s bodies as a bulwark against a siege we couldn’t name. In the quiet daylight hours, a new distance had crept in, born of exhaustion and unspoken fear. He spent more time on his laptop, his brow furrowed in concentration that felt different from his usual work focus. It was a hunter’s focus, taut and secretive.

I was too wrapped in my own survival to probe. The aftermath of Maja’s accident had made me a ghost in my own operations. I’d hired a local woman, Silvija, to handle guest check-ins and cleaning, instructing her to leave the keys in the rooms. I cited “burnout,” a word that felt truer than she knew. I became a behind-the-scenes presence, managing emails from the shadows, my physical contact with the world reduced to the necessary—food, the steering wheel, the warm, solid flesh of Marko at night.

One Tuesday, Silvija had the day off, and a last-minute booking arrived—a lone academic researching Byzantine coastal fortifications. I had no choice but to greet him. My hands, bare and feeling dangerously exposed, trembled as I pointed out the features of the Olive Room from the doorway. When he extended his hand in thanks, I pretended not to see it, turning quickly to flee. The avoidance was pathetic, obvious. He gave me a strange look. The villa’s reputation, I was sure, was curdling from “quaintly mystical” to “host is unhinged.”

I retreated to my private quarters, seeking the mindless solace of laundry. Marko was out, “getting air,” he’d said, which I knew often meant a long walk to the village bar to think. His laptop was on the small desk by the window, asleep but pulsing with a faint, white light. I never touched his things. The privacy between us was a sacred, fragile thing, the only normalcy left.

But as I passed the desk, a gust of wind from the open window stirred a pile of papers. A printed map of the local region, covered in tiny, precise handwritten notes, fluttered to the floor. Bending to pick it up, my eyes scanned it automatically. The notes weren’t about fortifications or tourism. They were names. Petrović. Kolar. Horvat. Circles around village names like Podgora and Orebić. Arrows connecting them. In the margin, in his tight script: Pattern of incidents? Or pattern of belief?

A cold drip of dread began in my chest. I straightened, the map in my hand feeling like contraband. The laptop’s light seemed accusatory. He’d killed the article. He’d said so. But the journalist, the investigator, couldn’t kill his own nature. The mystery of me, of the Sight, was the ultimate story. And he was back on the hunt.

I shouldn’t have. I knew it was a violation, a crossing of a line that would change everything. But the need to know what he knew, what he was piecing together about the curse that was devouring me, was stronger than ethics. I touched the trackpad. The screen bloomed to life, asking for a password. I hesitated for only a second before typing the one he used for everything non-critical—a combination of his old football jersey number and his mother’s name. It worked.

The desktop was a chaos of folders. Most were labeled for his legitimate work. But one, tucked between “Travel Expenses” and “Tax Docs,” was simply titled “O.” For Orebić? For Oracle?

My heart hammering against my ribs, I clicked it.

Inside were scanned documents, digital photographs, text files. I opened the most recent Word document. It was a timeline.

1998, June 17: Fire at isolated stone house outside Orebić. Sole occupant, Anka Petrović (38), perishes. Official cause: faulty wiring. Local obituary mentions survivor: infant daughter, Lina, visiting maternal aunt in Split at the time.

The year I was born. My mother’s name. The air left the room.

I scrolled down, my vision blurring.

*2009-2015: School records for Lina Petrović note “withdrawn disposition,” “frequent absences,” living with aunt, Desa Petrović, in Split. Graduates high school with high marks but does not attend university.*

2018: Property deed for Villa Vidrika (formerly Petrović family home) transferred to Lina Petrović from Desa Petrović.

*2023, September: Damir Horvat accident. Interview with attending physician notes Horvat claimed, in delirium, “the girl warned me.” No follow-up.*

2023, October: Interview transcript (source: baker’s wife, Magda). “The grandmother, Anka, she had the knowing too. Bad luck followed that family. The fire was no accident.”

2023, October: Audio file – conversation with retired police officer from Split. “The ’98 fire… we were told not to look too closely. The house was a shell. No wiring left to examine. The aunt was very… insistent. Wanted it closed.”

At the bottom of the document, a single line, highlighted in yellow:

Hypothesis: The “Sight” is a documented familial trait. Associated with trauma, isolation, and potentially, violent death. Current subject (L.P.) is manifesting symptoms with increased severity. Is the environment (villa) a trigger? Is she a risk to herself or others?

A risk to herself or others.

The words were a punch to the gut. I was a subject. A case study. My mother’s death was a data point. My grief, my terror, my curse—all were symptoms in his investigation. The anchor wasn’t just holding me; it was studying me, documenting my drowning.

A wave of nausea so intense it bent me double washed over me. I gripped the edge of the desk. The copper taste of interference was back, but mixed with the acid of betrayal. He’d promised. No article. But this… this was worse. This was a private inquisition. He was building a psychological profile, digging into the grave of my mother, all while holding me at night and quieting the screams in my head.

I heard the crunch of gravel on the drive. His car.

Panic, clean and sharp, cut through the sickness. I closed the document, the folder, shut the laptop. I arranged the map back on the desk, my hands shaking so badly I knocked a pen to the floor. I snatched it up, threw myself onto the sofa, and grabbed a book, opening it to a random page. The words were a senseless blur.

The front door opened. “Lina? I’m back.”

“In here,” I called, my voice miraculously steady.

He walked in, bringing the smell of outdoor air and coffee. He looked at me, and his journalist’s eyes missed nothing—the too-stiff posture, the death-grip on the book, the unnatural pallor of my face.

“You okay?” he asked, his tone careful.

“Just a headache,” I said, not meeting his eyes. “The wind.”

He nodded, but his gaze flicked to his laptop, then back to me. He knew. Or he suspected. A silent, terrible understanding passed between us in the sunlit room. The anchor was not just strained; it was corroded, poisoned by secrets.

“I’ll make you some tea,” he said, turning toward the kitchen, giving us both an out.

The next forty-eight hours were an excruciating pantomime. We moved around each other with exaggerated politeness. The desperate, sweaty refuge of our bed was now a place of tense silence. I couldn’t bear his touch, knowing what his mind was cataloging even as his hands soothed me. He, sensing my revulsion, withdrew. The one thing that had grounded me was now a source of acute pain.

Two days after I’d found the files, on a grey, windless afternoon that felt like the world holding its breath, another car came up the drive. Not a rental. An old, dented Renault Clio I recognized instantly.

My aunt, Desa, was not a woman who made social calls. Her visits were like seismic events—rare, presaging upheaval. She got out of the car, a stout woman in her late sixties with my mother’s eyes but none of her softness. Her face, usually set in lines of pragmatic endurance, was grim, a landscape of carved worry.

My heart, already battered, sank into my boots. I met her in the courtyard.

“Tetka Desa. This is a surprise.”

She didn’t offer a cheek to kiss. Her sharp eyes scanned me, from my unwashed hair to my socked feet, taking in the tremor in my hands, the shadows like bruises under my eyes. “You look like hell,” she stated, her voice raspy from a lifetime of cigarettes. “Where is he? The writer.”

“He’s out.” The defensiveness in my tone was automatic.

“Good. We need to talk. Inside.”

She marched past me into the main hall, her presence making the space feel small and shabby. She didn’t sit. She stood in the center of the room, her arms crossed, as if standing guard against the past.

“The village is talking,” she began, no preamble. “About the little girl who fell. They’re saying you knew. They’re saying you warned her, and it happened anyway, just differently. They’re whispering your mother’s name.”

The words were like stones dropped into a still pond, each ripple spreading the dread wider. “It was an accident. I just… I was worried about bicycles.”

“Don’t lie to me, Lina. Not about this.” Her gaze was relentless. “I’ve been waiting for this call. I knew it would come when you took this house back. The stones here have memory. They pull it out of you.”

“Pull what out?” I whispered, though I knew.

“The Sight. The curse. Whatever you want to call the poison in our blood.” She spat the words. “It’s awakening faster in you than it did in her. Than it did in me.”

“You?” I was stunned. My aunt was the most unsentimental, concrete person I knew. A retired postal clerk who believed in weather forecasts and pension plans, not visions.

A shadow of ancient pain crossed her face. “A little. Just enough to be a nuisance. A twinge when I touched someone who was lying. A bad feeling about a road before a trip. I learned to ignore it. To shut it out. Your mother… she couldn’t. It was a firehose for her. Not the future, but the present—all the hidden hurts, the secret hates in the people around her. It drowned her.” Desa’s voice broke, just for a second. “She was coming apart. She was talking about… about someone who wanted to ‘study’ her. To use her. She was paranoid, terrified.”

Someone who wanted to study her. The words from Marko’s timeline echoed in my head. The aunt was very insistent. Wanted it closed.

“The fire,” I said, the words barely audible.

Desa’s eyes hardened into flint. “The fire was a mercy and a cover. She set it herself, Lina. She poured lamp oil through the house and struck a match. She left you with me in Split because she knew what she was going to do. She called it ‘closing the door so it couldn’t get to you.’” A single, fierce tear tracked through the powder on my aunt’s cheek. “The gift killed your mother. It is not a gift. It is a cancer. And it is growing in you.”

The finality of her statement landed with the weight of a tombstone. My mother’s death wasn’t a tragic accident. It was a suicide, a self-immolation to escape the very thing that was now consuming me. The “faulty wiring” was a story Desa had fought to plant, to protect me, to bury the truth.

“Why are you telling me this now?” My voice was a child’s voice, small and lost.

“Because you’re at the edge,” she said, stepping closer, her scent of lavender and cold cream enveloping me. “I see it in you. The same look she had in the end. And now you have this man, this novinar, digging in the dirt. He’s been asking questions in the village. Old questions. He’s poking a hornet’s nest that was finally starting to settle. He’ll stir it all up. He’ll find the inconsistencies. And he’ll lead it right back to you.”

“He wouldn’t,” I protested, but the protest was weak, hollowed out by the files on his laptop.

“He’s a journalist. It’s what they do. They can’t help it. They see a story like a shark smells blood.” She grasped my arms, her grip surprisingly strong. “You have to make him stop. Or make him leave. This ends one of two ways, Lina. You learn to wall it off, like I did. You become a stone. Or…” She didn’t finish. She didn’t need to. The memory of the 1998 newspaper clipping, the words “mysterious fire,” hung between us.

“Or you end the bloodline,” I finished for her, the horror of it a cold, expanding void inside me.

She nodded, a grim, terrible affirmation. “This house, this life you’ve built… it’s feeding it. The constant stream of strangers, their futures buzzing around you. It’s too much. Sell it. Come back to Split. Live a small, quiet life. Marry a boring man who knows nothing. Have no children. Let it die with you.”

It was a prescription for a living death. A life of deliberate sensory deprivation, of hiding from my own skin.

Before I could answer, we heard a car. Marko’s.

Desa’s face shut like a trap. She released my arms. “Remember what I said. Your mother’s blood is on my hands. I won’t have yours join it.”

She brushed past me, nodding curtly to a confused Marko in the doorway, and left without another word. We heard her car start and rattle away.

Marko came into the hall, his eyes on my devastated face. “What did she want? What’s wrong?”

I looked at him, this man who was my anchor and my investigator, my refuge and my threat. I saw the concern in his eyes, and I saw, behind it, the relentless curiosity, the drive to piece the puzzle together. He couldn’t help himself. It was his nature, just as the Sight was mine.

The two investigations—his external, journalistic one, and my aunt’s internal, familial one—had converged on this point, on me. Both had reached the same terrifying conclusion: the Sight was a deadly inheritance. The only question left was whether I would be its next victim, or its final one. And the man standing before me, with his laptop full of clues and his arms that offered a false peace, was now at the very center of the storm.

12 The Unseen Future

The aftermath of Aunt Desa’s visit was a silent, creeping frost. Her words—“cancer,” “mercy,” “fire”—had crystallized the nebulous dread that had been swirling inside me. They gave it a name, a history, a terminal diagnosis. The villa no longer felt like a sanctuary or even a prison; it felt like a mausoleum built over my mother’s ashes, and I was the ghost pacing its halls.

Marko and I orbited each other in a tense, elliptical dance. The unspoken knowledge of his investigation lay between us like a sheet of cracked ice, too fragile to bear weight. We didn’t speak of it. We spoke of the weather, of a leaky tap, of the dwindling bookings for the winter. Our conversations were the dialogue of strangers sharing a lifeboat, avoiding any mention of the leaking hull.

The desperate refuge of our bodies was gone. The thought of his touch, now knowing his mind was simultaneously cataloging my symptoms for his private file, filled me with a cold revulsion. He sensed the withdrawal and, after a few tentative, rebuffed advances, retreated. The bed became a wide, cold plain. We slept back-to-back, the space between us charged with everything unsaid.

The visions from guests, now handled by Silvija, still leaked through. A handshake with a lost hiker asking for directions showed me his future successful summit, followed by a lonely descent into divorce. A brush against a waiter at the village konoba revealed his dream of emigrating to Germany, a dream that would curdle into homesick despair. The noise was constant, a low-grade psychic fever I could not break.

But it was Marko’s future that began to consume me. Or rather, the lack of it.

Ever since the first day, his touch had brought a strange blindness. Initially, it had been a respite. Now, in the cold light of my aunt’s revelation and his own betrayal, I needed to see. I needed to know what was coming for us. The heartache I’d glimpsed before was a general shape. I needed specifics. A date. A catalyst. An image of the other woman, the missed call, the final slammed door. I needed the pain charted, so I could perhaps navigate it, or at least brace for its impact.

One evening, a week after Desa’s visit, we found ourselves in a rare, fragile moment of détente. We were on the small terrace of my quarters, sharing a bottle of wine as a blood-orange sun melted into the channel. The tension had momentarily dissolved in the face of the breathtaking, indifferent beauty of the sunset. We weren’t talking, just watching. His hand rested on the table beside his glass.

My eyes were drawn to it. The strong, familiar hand with its journalist’s callus. The hand that had traced my spine, that had written notes about my mother’s death, that had offered both salvation and betrayal.

A reckless, desperate need seized me. I had to know. Now. In this calm before the storm.

Slowly, deliberately, I reached across the table. I didn’t look at him. I kept my gaze on the dying sun as my fingertips stretched towards his hand. My heart was a frantic bird in a cage of ribs. This was a violation—of our unspoken ceasefire, of the strange privacy of his own future. But the need to see, to know, overrode everything.

My index finger touched the back of his hand, just below the knuckles.

I braced for the hook. For the flood. For the heartache in all its vivid, cinematic detail.

Nothing.

Not a delayed reaction. Not a faint flicker. A perfect, absolute nothing.

It was a void. A silence more profound than any I had ever experienced. When I touched others, even with the most mundane futures, there was a texture—a feeling of substance, of a life being lived, be it in joy or sorrow. This was an absence. A blank screen. A hole in the fabric of what was to come.

I pressed my finger down harder, as if trying to jump-start a dead engine. I focused all my will, my cursed attention, on the point of contact.

Silence. Emptiness. A void.

It should have been a relief. The man who was both my anchor and my investigator, whose future was the source of my greatest personal dread, had none. No fall from grace. No heart-wrenching breakup. No triumphant success. Nothing. It was the ultimate blindness, more complete than before.

But it wasn’t relief that flooded me. It was a cold, terror so primal it froze the blood in my veins.

A void meant one of two things. The first, which I had always believed, was that the future was not yet written, a true blank slate. But the Sight had never shown me that. It showed likelihoods, probabilities, the strongest currents in the river of time. For there to be nothing… that was unprecedented.

The second possibility, the one that now crashed over me with the force of a tsunami, was the rule whispered in the darkest corners of my curse, the one my aunt had all but confirmed: A void means a death is imminent.

Not a future death. An imminent one. A cessation so absolute it erased the future from the tapestry before it could even be woven.

I snatched my hand back as if electrocuted. The wine glass toppled, spilling a dark red stain like blood across the weathered table, dripping onto the terrace stones.

Marko startled. “Lina? What is it?”

I couldn’t speak. I stared at my finger, the one that had touched him, as if it were now contaminated with this terrible knowledge. I looked at his face, alive, confused, beautifully, tragically present. I saw him writing at his laptop, walking the cliff paths, laughing with a bitterness that had recently softened. And I saw nothing beyond that. A wall of black.

“You’re white as a sheet,” he said, rising, reaching for me.

“Don’t!” I scrambled back, my chair scraping horribly. The void was around him, a corona of nothingness. His touch might confirm it, make it real.

He stopped, his hand hanging in the air, his face a mask of hurt and confusion. “What is wrong with you? First you won’t let me near you, now you look at me like I’m a ghost!”

You are, I wanted to scream. You’re a ghost waiting to happen. Your future is a stopped clock.

“I… I felt dizzy. The wine.” The lie was frail, transparent.

He looked at the spilled glass, then back at me, his journalist’s eyes seeing past the lie to the raw, unvarnished terror beneath. He didn’t believe me. But he also didn’t press. The distance between us had become a chasm, and we were both afraid to shout across it, lest the echo bring the walls down.

I spent the night awake, sitting in a chair by the window, watching him sleep. The rise and fall of his chest in the moonlight was a ticking metronome counting down to the void. Every soft snore, every shift under the blanket, felt precious and fleeting. The heartache I had feared was now a luxury I prayed for. Heartache meant a future. Heartache meant he was alive, somewhere, missing me or being missed.

The void meant an ending.

In the days that followed, I became a study in morbid vigilance. I watched him like a hawk for signs of illness, of danger. I scrutinized his coffee for odd smells, winced when he took the treacherous coastal road to run an errand, held my breath when he used a knife in the kitchen. I was a prisoner of the impending, a warden to a man condemned by my own sightless sight.

My behaviour, already frayed, became erratic. I insisted on driving him to the village. I “accidentally” unplugged his laptop charger, citing a fear of electrical fires that made his eyes narrow with painful understanding. I became a parody of a worried partner, my anxiety so acute it circled back into a cold, detached mania.

He confronted me three days later. “This has to stop, Lina.” We were in the kitchen. He had caught me staring at him as he swallowed an aspirin for a headache. “You’re watching me like I’m going to explode. What did you see?”

The directness of the question stunned me. “I didn’t see anything,” I whispered, which was the absolute, horrifying truth.

“That’s worse, isn’t it?” he said, his voice soft with a dawning, terrible comprehension. He’d read enough, hypothesized enough. “The void. Your aunt… she said something about that, didn’t she? When she talked about your mother.”

I didn’t answer. My silence was confirmation.

He sank into a chair, running his hands through his hair. “So that’s it. My future is a blank. And in your world, that means…”

“Don’t say it,” I begged, my voice breaking.

“It means I’m going to die.” He said it calmly, analytically, as if discussing the plot of a film. The journalist dissecting his own obituary.

A sob tore from my throat. I wrapped my arms around myself, rocking. The sentence had been passed in the private court of my curse, and now he had spoken the verdict aloud, making it real in the world of men.

He stood up and came to me, but didn’t touch me. He knelt in front of my chair so we were eye-level. His gaze was clear, free of the pity or fear I expected. There was only a profound, weary sadness. “Listen to me. You don’t know that. You’ve been wrong before. You tried to change the girl’s future and it happened anyway. This ‘void’ could be another mistake. A glitch.”

“It’s not a glitch!” I cried. “It’s a death sentence! My mother saw voids before people died! My aunt confirmed it! It’s the one thing that’s consistent!”

“Then we change it,” he said, his voice fierce now. He took my hands, and I was too devastated to pull away. The touch, again, brought only the chilling silence. “If it’s a future, it can be changed. We’ll be careful. I’ll be careful. I won’t take the coastal road. I’ll see a doctor for a full check-up. I’ll… I’ll leave if that’s what keeps me alive. If my being here is what triggers it.”

The offer was so selfless, so devastating, it shattered me completely. He was willing to walk away, to accept the heartache, to grant us both the pain of a living future, just to avoid the void.

But the void wasn’t around his presence. The void was him. It was in the touch of his skin. It wasn’t a future event I could avert; it was a condition of his being, as perceived by my curse. How do you run from a shadow that is cast from within?

I pulled my hands from his, the emptiness they carried now unbearable. “You can’t change a void,” I whispered, the fight gone out of me. “A void is an ending. It’s the period at the end of the sentence. You can’t write more after the period.”

He stood up, looking down at me, his face a battleground of emotions—fear, anger, determination, and a love so tangled with tragedy it was hard to look at. “I refuse to accept that,” he said, his voice trembling with conviction. “I am not a character in your vision, Lina. I am a man. And I will write my own goddamn future.”

He turned and left the room, leaving me alone with the perfect, empty silence that now filled the villa, a silence that felt less like an absence and more like a presence—the ghost of a future that would never be, a sentence waiting to be carried out.

13 The Omen

The void around Marko became the central fact of my existence, a black sun around which my terror and his stubborn defiance orbited. He refused to cower. He booked a full medical examination in Split—“Just to rule out the boring, physical causes of imminent death,” he’d said with a grim smile. He drove with exaggerated caution. He stopped drinking. He became a model of preventative health, a living rebuttal to my curse.

But every time our hands brushed—passing a plate, reaching for the same book—the silent nothingness screamed louder than any vision ever had. It was a negation. It told me that all his efforts, all his doctor’s appointments and careful driving, were just the frantic motion of a puppet before the strings were cut. The horror was no longer in what I saw, but in what I couldn’t see.

I drifted through my days as a ghost. Silvija ran the villa with quiet efficiency, a buffer between me and the stream of guests whose futures continued to bleed into my consciousness as faint, grey watercolors. I was a curator in a museum of melancholy, but the main exhibit was the empty plinth reserved for Marko’s future.

Then, the fisherman arrived.

His name was Josip. He wasn’t a tourist. He was from the next cove over, a grizzled man in his late fifties with a face like a weathered cliff and eyes the color of the deep channel. He came not through the booking platform, but on foot, knocking on the courtyard gate one steel-grey morning when a jugo wind was whipping the sea into a froth of white horses.

“I heard you have a room,” he said, his voice a gravelly rumble. He didn’t meet my eyes, staring instead at his worn boots. “My roof leaks. The wind last night took half the tiles. I need a place for a few nights while it’s fixed.”

This was unusual. Locals didn’t stay here. They either had family or thought the villa was for “foreigners with too much money.” But there was a raw, practical need in his stance, and a vacancy in the Fig Room. I nodded. “Of course. Come in.”

He had one small, damp duffel bag. He moved through the courtyard with the solid, rolling gait of a man used to the deck of a boat. He was a creature of salt and wind, his presence immediately altering the energy of the place, grounding it in something elemental. He paid in cash, counting out worn kuna notes with thick, calloused fingers.

When it came time for the key, the old dread rose in me. I’d been avoiding the transfer, but with him standing there, expectant and real, the habit was too strong. I held out the brass key for the Fig Room.

He took it. His hand was enormous, the skin like cured leather, warm and dry.

The hook was different. Not a snag, not a tear, not a gentle pull. It was a deepening, as if I’d dropped a plumb line into a still, cold well.

The vision was stark, simple, devoid of the emotional resonance that usually accompanied the flashes.

The sea at dawn, flat as a pewter plate. Josip in his small, blue fishing boat, Marija, hauling in a net. It comes up heavy, but not with the silvery thrash of fish. It’s a tangle of seaweed, old rope, and a single, smooth, black stone. The size of a man’s fist, polished to an obsidian gloss by centuries under the waves. He holds it in his palm, staring at it, his face not disappointed, but profoundly puzzled. He turns it over. It is just a stone. He tosses it back. It hits the water with a soft plok and disappears. The vision holds on the empty circle of ripples.

That was all. No emotional aftermath. No future consequence. Just a man, a boat, a net, and a stone where fish should be.

I came back to myself in the courtyard, the jugo moaning in the pines. Josip was looking at me, the key in his hand, his brow furrowed. He’d felt something—the intensity of my focus, the momentary absence.

“You alright, gospođo?”

The words, the truth of the vision, left my lips before I could think to stop them. They came out flat, oracular.

“The sea will give you a stone. Not a fish.”

I immediately flinched, expecting the scoff of Damir, the fury of Maja’s mother, the analytical curiosity of Marko.

Josip didn’t scoff. He didn’t get angry. He just stared at me, his deep-channel eyes narrowing slightly, as if trying to bring a distant object into focus. He gave a slow, considering nod, a man receiving a weather report for a strange, personal climate. “A stone,” he repeated, not a question.

“I’m sorry,” I blurted, the hostess reflex kicking in. “I don’t know why I said that. It’s just… a feeling.”

He shook his head, silencing my apology. “No. You said it. So it is.” He turned and walked towards his room, his duffel bag swinging, leaving me standing in the wind, bewildered by his calm acceptance.

He kept to himself. I’d see him leave at dawn, hear the putter of his boat engine fading into the morning mist. He’d return in the late afternoon, often empty-handed, his face serene. He didn’t join the other fishermen at the dock bar. He’d sit on the wall of my terrace, smoking a pipe, watching the light die on the water, a statue of quiet contentment.

Marko, embroiled in his own battle against the void, noticed him. “Who’s the old salt?” he asked one evening as we pretended to read in the living room.

“A local. His roof caved in.”

“He looks… peaceful.”

He did. In a house haunted by unseen futures and the specter of death, Josip was an island of present-tense stillness. His lack of curiosity about me, about the villa, about anything beyond the sea and his broken roof, was a balm.

The next morning, I was in the courtyard, wrestling with a wind-tossed laundry line, when Josip returned earlier than usual. He walked straight up to me, his heavy boots steady on the stones. In his outstretched hand, lying on his salt-creased palm, was a smooth, black stone.

It was exactly as I had Seen it. The size of a fist. Rounded by millennia of tides. Polished to a dark, watery gloss that seemed to swallow the grey morning light.

He held it out to me, his expression not triumphant, not fearful, but deeply, authentically confused.

“You were right,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “The net was heavy. I thought, finally, a good catch after three bad days. But it was only this.” He hefted the stone. “No fish. Just the stone.”

I stared at the object, a cold certainty seeping through me. This was no coincidence. The vision had been literal, precise, and it had come true with the clean, undeniable finality of a key turning in a lock. It was an omen. But for what?

I took the stone from him. It was heavier than it looked, cool and dense. It felt ancient, a piece of the world’s bones. “What does it mean?” I whispered, more to myself than to him.

Josip shrugged, a massive movement of his shoulders. “The sea gives what it gives. Sometimes fish. Sometimes stones. Sometimes nothing.” He looked at the stone in my hand, then at my face. “You knew it would give me a stone. So the knowing is yours, not mine.” He gave another slow nod, as if this settled the matter, and turned to go to his room.

“Wait,” I called after him. “Don’t you… want to know more? If it means something?”

He paused, looking back over his shoulder. “It means I caught a stone. The rest is just stories men tell because they are afraid of the quiet.” He tapped his temple. “The sea doesn’t tell stories. It just is.”

He left me holding the black stone, its weight a stark contrast to the terrifying void of Marko’s future. This was a concrete, tangible outcome of a vision. It had happened. It was real. It proved the Sight’s accuracy in a way that was neither tragic nor healing. It was neutral. A fact. The sea gave a stone.

Marko found me later, turning the stone over and over in my hands at the kitchen table. “What’s that?”

“A stone. Josip brought it to me.”

“Why?”

“Because I told him he would catch it instead of fish.”

Marko’s face went still. He pulled out a chair and sat down, his eyes fixed on the stone. “And he did.”

“Yes.”

We sat in silence for a long moment. The jugo sighed against the window.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Marko said finally, but his voice lacked its usual defensive conviction. “It’s a coincidence given shape by your prediction. He probably catches junk in his nets all the time. You gave him a narrative for it.”

“He didn’t know I’d said it until after he’d pulled it up,” I said quietly. “The net was heavy. He expected fish. He found this.”

Marko reached out and took the stone from me. Our fingers brushed. The void screamed its silent scream. He flinched, almost dropping the stone, but recovered, holding it up to the light. “It’s just a rock, Lina.”

“But I saw it. Exactly this. In his net. In his hand.” I met his eyes, desperate for him to understand the implication. “If I can see something that specific, that trivial, and it comes true… what does that say about the void? If the Sight is this precise, then the void isn’t a mistake. It’s a precise reading of… of nothingness.”

The logic was inescapable. The stone was the proof I never wanted. The curse was not a fuzzy, metaphorical thing. It was a scalpel. It could excise the image of a specific black stone from the future and deliver it to the present. If it could do that, then its report of nothing for Marko was not an error. It was the most terrifyingly accurate vision of all.

Marko put the stone down on the table with a definitive clack. “No. This is just reinforcing your fear. This is a… a party trick compared to a human life. You can’t equate them.”

But I could. The mechanism was the same. The omen of the stone was a drop of pure, distilled certainty that poisoned the well of all my hopes.

Josip left two days later, his roof repaired. He didn’t say goodbye. He simply left the key on the table and was gone, as solid and uncomplicated in his departure as he was in his presence. He left the stone. I kept it on the kitchen windowsill, a dark, polished eye staring out at the sea that had yielded it.

It became a touchstone for my despair. When I looked at it, I didn’t see a rock. I saw the infallibility of the curse. I saw the net hauling up the inevitable. I saw that the future was not a landscape of possibilities, but a series of fixed events, some trivial (a stone), some catastrophic (a void), waiting to be hauled into the present.

The omen of the stone didn’t calm me; it calcified my terror. It was the universe demonstrating, with cold, minimalist artistry, that the Sight was real, precise, and utterly indifferent. If it could be right about a fisherman’s strange catch, it was right about the void around Marko.

The stone sat there, a silent, heavy verdict. The sea had given me proof. And the proof was a sentence.

14 The Pact

The black stone sat on the windowsill, a taciturn judge presiding over the slow disintegration of us. Its presence was a constant, polished rebuttal to Marko’s defiant hope. See? it seemed to say with its dark, watery gloss. The net brings up what is there. The vision is the net. I was in it. The void is in it.

Marko’s medical results came back—a clean bill of health, aside from slightly elevated cholesterol, which the doctor in Split dismissed with a wave. “Eat less pršut, more fish,” he’d reportedly said. The news should have been a reprieve, a crack in the certainty of the void. Instead, it felt like a taunt. The void wasn’t about a bad heart or a lurking tumor. It was more fundamental. It was the story of his ending, and medical science couldn’t read that genre.

He returned from Split buoyant, armed with data to fight the metaphysical. He found me in the courtyard, staring at the stone.

“See?” he said, placing the folder of results on the table with a confident thump. “Nothing. I’m as healthy as a… well, as a slightly stressed-out journalist can be. The void is wrong.”

I didn’t look at the folder. I looked at him, at the eager light in his storm-cloud eyes. It wasn’t just relief I saw there. It was something sharper, more acquisitive. It was the glitter of a journalist who has stumbled upon the central thread of a labyrinth.

“You’re not just happy you’re healthy,” I said, my voice flat. “You’re excited.”

The light in his eyes didn’t dim, but it shifted, turning inward. “Of course I’m happy. This proves it’s not physical. Which means it’s psychological. A projection of your fear. Or… or a misinterpretation of the Sight.” He leaned forward, his voice dropping into the intimate, probing tone he used when he was circling a truth. “Don’t you see, Lina? This is the breakthrough. The void isn’t a prediction of my death. It’s a symbol. It could represent the death of my old career, my old self. The ‘me’ who was that arrogant journalist did die when I came here. Or it could be a blockage—your fear of losing me is so great it’s blinding you to my actual future.”

He was weaving a narrative, spinning the raw, terrifying wool of the void into a manageable, intellectual yarn. He wasn’t just trying to comfort me; he was editing the vision. Revising the curse. I could see the paragraphs forming behind his eyes, the structure of an article—or a book—taking shape: ‘Living with the Oracle: How Love and Logic Confront a Prophecy of Doom.’ My personal tragedy was becoming his professional, and deeply personal, breakthrough.

A cold fury, purer and sharper than any I had felt, rose in me. It cut through the despair, the terror, the love. “Stop it,” I hissed.

He blinked, pulled back. “Stop what?”

“Stop treating my life like a fucking case study!” I stood up, the chair scraping violently. “I am not your ‘breakthrough’! The void is not a ‘symbol’! It’s a death sentence I have to watch you walk around under every day, and you’re turning it into… into material!”

The mask of the concerned lover slipped, and for a fleeting second, I saw the journalist, cornered but not defeated. “I’m trying to understand it, Lina! To help us! What do you want me to do? Just sit here and wait to die because your curse says so? Should I start writing my will?”

“I want you to be afraid!” I screamed, the words tearing from my throat. “I want you to feel the fucking terror I feel every time I look at you! Instead, you’re… you’re analysing it! You’re collecting data on your own impending death! Don’t you see how sick that is?”

Now his anger rose to meet mine. “What’s sick is this fatalism! This absolute surrender to a… a feeling you get when you touch people! You’ve let this curse define you, and now you want it to define me too! You want me to play the doomed lover so your tragedy can be complete. Well, I won’t!”

The accusation was a lance through the heart. It was also horribly close to a truth I couldn’t face. Had the void become a perverse part of our bond? The ultimate, tragic intimacy?

“Get out,” I whispered, my voice trembling with rage and hurt.

“What?”

“Get out of my house. Go back to Zagreb. Go write your goddamn article. Use all your notes. Tell them how the crazy seer in Dalmatia prophesied your death and then drove you away with her hysterics. It’ll make a great ending.”

His face went pale. “Lina, don’t.”

“Why not? It’s the truth, isn’t it? That’s what you’re after. The truth. However it hurts. However it destroys.” I was crying now, hot, furious tears. “Well, here’s some truth for your files: I wish I’d never seen you. I wish your stupid, handsome face had never shown up here with your recorder and your skepticism. I was drowning in quiet before you came. Now I’m drowning in noise, and the loudest sound is this… this silence where your future should be!”

The words hung between us, cruel and irreversible. His eyes widened, not with anger now, but with a kind of horrified comprehension of the damage we were inflicting. He took a step towards me, his hand outstretched. “Don’t say that. You don’t mean it.”

“Don’t touch me!” I recoiled as if from a venomous snake. The thought of the void in that moment was unbearable. “Just go.”

He stood there, his hand still extended, his chest heaving. The battle between the man who loved me and the journalist who needed to solve me raged across his face. For a long, suspended moment, I thought he would turn and leave, and that would be the heartache I had foreseen—clean, sharp, born of words, not of the void.

But he didn’t leave.

With a sound that was half-growl, half-sob, he closed the distance between us. He didn’t try to touch my hands. He grabbed my face, his fingers tangling in my hair, and kissed me.

It was not a kiss of love or reconciliation. It was a collision. A battle fought with mouths and teeth and desperate, clinging hands. It was fury and fear and a terrible, clawing need all twisted into one. I fought him for a second, pounding my fists against his chest, but the resistance was a façade that crumbled instantly. I kissed him back with equal ferocity, biting his lip, tasting the copper tang of blood—real blood, real pain, something present and visceral to combat the awful abstraction of the void.

We stumbled through the courtyard door into the main hall, a tangle of limbs and ragged breath. Clothes were not removed but torn at, pushed aside. We didn’t make it to the bedroom. He pushed me against the cool, rough stone wall of the hallway, his body pinning me, his mouth moving from my lips to my throat. It was raw, primal, a frantic attempt to obliterate thought with sensation.

But it wasn’t enough. The stone wall was too solid, too reminding of the tomb-like silence ahead. I pushed him back, my eyes wild. “Not here.”

I led him, or we stumbled together, into the bathroom. It was a small, white-tiled space, clinical and real. I turned on the shower, not waiting for the water to heat. A blast of icy water hit us, shocking a gasp from both our throats. The cold was a brutal slap, shocking us out of the emotional frenzy into a pure, physical shock.

Under the freezing spray, the fight left us. The anger dissolved into a shared, shuddering misery. We clung to each other, not in passion now, but in a desperate, animal need for warmth and anchor. The water plastered our clothes to our skin, his shirt transparent, my dress a heavy, cold weight. We sank to the floor, the cold tiles a jarring contrast to the heat finally generating between our pressed bodies.

The kiss this time was different. Slower. Salted with tears and cold water. It was a kiss of utter defeat and mutual surrender. We helped each other peel off the sodden clothes, our movements clumsy, tender. Under the now-warming water, we explored each other not with fury, but with a sorrowful reverence, as if memorizing terrain soon to be lost.

The lovemaking that followed there on the hard, wet tiles was the opposite of our previous desperate refuges. It was quiet, slow, and unbearably sad. It was not an escape from the void; it was an acknowledgment of it. Every touch, every sigh, was haunted by the unspoken this may be the last time. The water cascaded over us, washing away the tears, the blood, the sweat, but it couldn’t wash away the knowledge.

Afterwards, we sat huddled together under the stream, spent and shivering, the steam finally fogging the mirror and the small window. He held me from behind, his chin on my wet hair, his arms locked around my chest, as if he could physically keep me from breaking apart.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered into the nape of my neck, his voice raw. “I’m so sorry. I don’t want to be that person. The journalist. Not with you.”

“But you are,” I said, the fight gone, leaving only exhaustion. “You can’t help it. It’s how you see the world. Stories to be uncovered.”

He was silent for a long time. The water beat down on us. “Then I’ll stop,” he said finally, the words heavy with promise. “I’ll delete the files. I’ll stop asking questions. I’ll stop trying to ‘understand’ the curse. I’ll just… be here. With you. However long we have.”

It was what I had wanted to hear since I’d found the timeline on his laptop. But hearing it now, in the aftermath of our nuclear fight, it felt fragile, a ceasefire signed on the edge of a cliff.

“And if ‘however long’ is… not long?” I asked, my voice small against the hiss of the shower.

He tightened his arms around me. “Then we have now. And I won’t waste ‘now’ digging up the past or dissecting the future.” He turned me to face him, his eyes earnest, washed clean of their professional gleam. “I promise. No more investigation. Just us.”

I searched his face, looking for the hidden qualifier, the journalist’s mental footnote. I saw only the man, wounded and sincere. The anchor, not the investigator.

I wanted to believe him. I needed to believe him. The alternative was living in a state of war with the one person who made the present bearable.

“And I promise,” I said, the words a vow extracted from the deepest, most terrified part of me, “to try to trust you. To… to believe that the void could be wrong. To not look at you like a ghost.”

It was a pact forged in steam and cold tiles, sealed with tears and the memory of fury. A promise to silence his curiosity and to suspend my dread. A mutual agreement to live, desperately, in the blinding, deafening, beautiful present, and to ignore the silent void and the scribbled notes that waited just outside the bathroom door.

We turned off the water and helped each other up, our bodies wrinkled and new. We didn’t speak as we dried each other with rough towels, a silent, intimate ritual. The fight had emptied us, and the pact had filled the hollow with a fragile, desperate hope.

But as I looked at our blurred reflections in the fogged mirror—two pale, haunted figures in a cloud of steam—I couldn’t shake the feeling. The journalist had promised to stop digging. But the story was already in him. And I had promised to trust. But the void was still in me. We had made a pact to ignore the very things that defined us. And pacts made in the heat of desperation, on cold tiles under a punishing spray, are the most fragile pacts of all.

15 The Tourist

The pact held, but it was a delicate, hothouse flower, requiring constant tending and a willful avoidance of drafts. Marko, true to his word, stopped his overt investigation. His laptop was used only for remote work, his notes on the village and my family conspicuously absent. He avoided conversations that veered toward the metaphysical, steering us instead toward the mundane: the price of olive oil, a new film at the Split cinema, the stubborn leak in the Fig Room sink. He was trying to be just a man, living with a woman he loved, in a beautiful, crumbling house by the sea.

I, in turn, fought a daily, grinding war against the void. When the terror rose—usually in the dead of night, watching the rise and fall of his chest—I would reach out and touch him, not to See, but to feel. The solid warmth of his skin, the steady pulse at his wrist, the scratch of his stubble. I would recite the pact to myself like a rosary: He is healthy. The void is a mistake. Trust him. Trust now. Some days, it almost worked.

We existed in this strained, peaceful bubble for three weeks. Then, the bubble was pierced.

He arrived on a Thursday, as the last of the autumn sun gilded the cypress trees. A tall, reclusive German man who had booked the attic room—the smallest, cheapest, and most isolated space in the villa, tucked under the eaves with a single, round window like a ship’s porthole. He’d made the booking under the name “Klaus Berger,” his communication terse and efficient, asking only for the exact GPS coordinates and a confirmation that there was a lock on the door.

I didn’t think much of it. We got all types. Recluses were a relief; they demanded little, saw less.

Marko was in Split for the day, finalizing some freelance contract. I was alone when the black Mercedes sedan, sleek and dust-free, whispered up the drive. The man who emerged was in his late fifties, with a lean, ascetic frame and hair the color of ash, cut short and precise. He wore a light beige trench coat despite the mild weather, and his eyes, a pale, watery blue, scanned the property with an unsettling, total absorption. He didn’t look at the view; he assessed the angles of the walls, the thickness of the gates, the lines of sight from the road.

“Frau Petrović?” he asked. His voice was soft, accentless, the kind of voice that carries without effort.

“Yes. Welcome. You’re in the attic room. It’s up the external stairs at the back.”

“I saw from the photographs. It will suffice.” He retrieved a single, expensive-looking leather suitcase from his trunk. No daypack, no camera. Just the one bag.

A prickle of unease, unrelated to the Sight, walked down my spine. This wasn’t a tourist. This was a man on a specific errand.

The check-in was a transaction. I handed him the old, iron key to the attic room. As I did, mindful of my promise to Marko and my own frayed nerves, I was careful to hold only the large, ornate bow of the key, dropping it into his waiting palm without contact.

But he moved with a sudden, fluid grace. As the key landed in his hand, his other hand came up, not to take it, but to close over mine in a gesture that might have been mistaken for politeness, ensuring the transfer. His skin was cool, dry, unnaturally smooth.

The hook that slammed into me was not the familiar snag, yank, or pull. It was an invasion.

My blood didn’t just run cold; it turned to ice, a sharp, crystalline freeze that locked my joints and stole my breath. The world didn’t bleach or blur. It shattered, and in the shards, I saw:

Not his future. Not a scene from his life. It was a reflection. A mirror held up to me. I saw my own face, but not as it was. Pale as moonlight, eyes closed, lashes dark against waxen skin. Utterly, terrifyingly still. The image was not in a bed, not in a coffin. It was against darkness, a void behind my head. And superimposed over my still face, faint but clear, was his—Klaus Berger’s—gaze. His pale blue eyes, watching my lifeless form with an expression of intense, clinical satisfaction. Not malice, not joy, but the pure, cold gratification of a collector who has finally acquired a long-sought specimen.

The vision lasted only a second, but the afterimage was seared onto my retinas. I gasped, wrenching my hand back as if from a flame. The key clattered to the stone steps between us.

He didn’t move. He stood perfectly still, watching me dispassionately as I stumbled back, one hand clutching my throat, the other braced against the rough wall. The ice in my veins was spreading, a paralyzing frost.

“You are unwell,” he stated, no question in his tone.

“I…” I couldn’t form words. My own dead face hung in the air between us.

He bent, picked up the key with a slow, deliberate motion. “The altitude, perhaps. Or the stress of hospitality. It is a draining profession, I imagine.” He gave a small, lifeless smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I will require no further assistance. Good day.”

He turned and walked up the narrow, winding stairs to the attic, his footsteps making no sound on the old stone. He moved like smoke.

I stood frozen in the courtyard long after he had disappeared, the autumn sun feeling like a lie. The void around Marko was a terrible abstraction. This was a concrete, personal horror. I had seen my own death. Not as a possibility, but as an image in another man’s gaze. He was not a bearer of my future; he was its architect. The vision carried the chilling certainty of a signed contract.

The rest of the day passed in a blur of suppressed panic. I locked the main doors. I drew the curtains in my quarters. I jumped at every creak of the old house. The black stone on the windowsill seemed to watch me with its dark, knowing eye. The net brings up what is there.

When Marko returned in the early evening, his face relaxed from a productive day, he found me huddled on the sofa, every light in the room blazing.

“Hey, what’s all this?” he asked, dropping his bag. His smile faded as he took in my posture, the wild look in my eyes. The pact, our fragile peace, was instantly forgotten in the face of raw, undiluted fear. “Lina? What happened?”

The words tumbled out in a choked, frantic rush. “The German. In the attic. He touched my hand. I saw… I saw myself. Dead. He was looking at me. He was… pleased.”

Marko’s face went through a rapid transformation—confusion, concern, then a hardening into something protective and fierce. The journalist was gone; this was the primal response of a mate. “What did he do? Did he threaten you?”

“No. Nothing. He just… looked. And I saw it.” I clutched his arm. “He’s not a tourist, Marko. He’s here for me.”

The logical, skeptical part of him warred with the man who had seen me unravel for months. The evidence was circumstantial—a look, a vision. But he had seen the aftermath of too many visions to dismiss this outright. “Okay. Okay. Tell me everything. From the beginning.”

I did. The assessing gaze, the cool touch, the invasive, reflective vision. The absolute certainty it carried.

Marko listened, his jaw tight. “Did he say anything else? Anything at all?”

“Just that I looked unwell. That it was a draining profession.” I remembered the words with a fresh chill. “He knew. He knew the Sight drains me.”

Marko stood up, pacing the small room. “We’ll call the police. Report a suspicious person. Get him removed.”

“On what grounds? That my psychic vision told me he’s dangerous? They’ll laugh. Or they’ll think I’m the dangerous one.” I thought of the files he’d deleted, the notes he’d stopped taking. “You saw what they wrote about my mother. ‘Mysterious fire.’ They don’t believe in this. They’ll think I’m hysterical, like my aunt said.”

He knew I was right. He stopped pacing, running his hands through his hair in frustration. “Then we leave. Tonight. We pack a bag and go to a hotel in Split. Let Silvija deal with him.”

The thought was tempting. To flee. But the vision hadn’t been of me dying somewhere else. It had been here, in this context, with him watching. Was the location part of the fate? If I ran, would the vision simply reform in a hotel room mirror?

And a darker thought: if he was a collector, as the vision’s satisfaction implied, would he simply follow?

“If we run, he’ll know we’re scared. It might force his hand,” I whispered. “Here, at least, we know the house. We have locks.”

Marko looked at me, seeing the resolve mixed with the terror. He nodded, accepting the brutal calculus. “Alright. Then we secure it. And I’m not leaving your side.”

We spent the next hour on a silent, tense lockdown. Marko checked every window latch, every exterior door. He found an old, heavy oak walking stick my grandfather had used and propped it by our bedroom door. It was a pathetic weapon, but it was something.

Night fell, a moonless, profound blackness that seemed to press against the windows. The villa was silent, but it was the silence of a held breath. We ate nothing. We sat in the living room, listening. The only sounds were the normal groans and sighs of the ancient stone house—sounds that now seemed laden with menace.

At midnight, we retreated to the bedroom. The pact was irrelevant now, replaced by a new, darker compact of survival. Marko checked the door—a sturdy, old wooden door with a solid lock. I watched as he turned the key, then engaged the deadbolt I’d had installed years ago but never used. The clunk of the bolt sliding home was the most satisfying sound I’d ever heard.

But it wasn’t enough.

The image of my still face, of his satisfied eyes, played on a loop behind my eyes. The attic was directly above us, separated by old beams and plaster. Could he hear us? Was he listening now?

“Double-lock it,” I whispered, my voice hoarse.

Marko looked at the door, then at me. “There is no double lock, Lina.”

“The chair.” I pointed to a heavy, straight-backed chair by the dressing table. “Under the handle. Like in the movies.”

He didn’t argue. He wedged the chair under the doorknob, tilting it back so the top of the chair back was jammed beneath the handle. It wouldn’t stop a determined assault, but it would make noise. It was a ritual, a spell of protection.

We got into bed, fully clothed. Marko held me, his body a tense wall against my back, his arm a vise around my waist. He was awake, listening. I could feel the alertness humming through him.

“Try to sleep,” he murmured. “I’m here. I’m awake.”

But sleep was impossible. Every tick of the old clock on the wall was a footstep. Every rustle of the olive tree outside was a hand on the latch. My heart pounded a frantic, uneven rhythm against my ribs, so loud I was sure it could be heard throughout the silent house.

Then, I heard it.

Not a groan of the house. Not the wind.

A soft, almost imperceptible creak from the hallway. Then another. Slow, measured, weight placed with deliberate care on the old floorboards to minimize sound.

Footsteps.

They were silent in intent, but the house betrayed them. They were on the main staircase, the one that led from the ground floor up to the landing outside our room and continued to the attic.

My blood turned to ice again. I clutched Marko’s arm, my nails digging in. He’d heard it too. His body went rigid.

The footsteps reached the landing. They paused.

The silence that followed was thicker, heavier than before. He was just outside our door. Listening. Waiting.

I stopped breathing. Marko’s arm tightened.

Then, the footsteps resumed. Soft, unhurried. They passed our door. They continued up the narrower, steeper flight of stairs that led to the attic.

He was just going to his room. Of course he was. It was past midnight.

But the path took him right by our door. A reminder. A demonstration. I can walk wherever I wish in this house.

We listened to the faint sounds of the attic door opening, closing. A final, definitive click.

A long, shuddering exhale escaped me. Marko relaxed his grip, but only slightly.

“He was just going to bed,” Marko whispered, but the reassurance sounded hollow, even to him.

I didn’t answer. I was seeing it again: my pale, still face, his satisfied eyes. The tourist wasn’t here for a holiday. He was here for a completion. And as I lay in the dark, locked in with the man I loved and a walking stick by the door, I knew with a certainty deeper than the Sight that the most terrifying visions aren’t of abstract voids, but of specific, knowing eyes watching you die. And knowing that those eyes were now sleeping, silently, directly above our heads.

16 The Research

The German’s footsteps faded into the attic’s silence, but the echo of them thrummed in my bones for the rest of the night. Marko, exhausted from the day’s tension and the adrenaline crash, eventually succumbed to a fitful sleep, his breathing deepening into ragged, unconscious rhythms around 3 AM. I lay beside him, a statue of watchful dread, every sense straining against the quiet.

My own dead face, pale against the dark, hovered behind my eyelids every time I blinked. The tourist’s cold, satisfied gaze was a brand on my soul. He wasn’t a random predator. The vision had the taste of purpose, of a long-held intention finally nearing its end. He knew what I was. And he wanted something from it.

As the first grey fingers of dawn probed the shutters, a new, desperate resolve hardened within me. Passivity was a death sentence. The pact with Marko was a luxury for a quieter terror. This was an active threat, and I needed to understand it. I needed my own investigation.

Carefully, I extricated myself from Marko’s embrace. He murmured, turned over, but didn’t wake. I padded silently into the main room of my quarters, the stone floor cold under my bare feet. I went to the small desk, the one where Marko’s laptop had once sat with its damning files. He’d kept his promise—the files were gone, the physical notes burned in the courtyard fire pit weeks ago. But the internet remained. And a name burned in my memory from the clipping I’d glimpsed over his shoulder: Anka Petrović. 1998.

I opened my own laptop, the glow of the screen a ghostly blue in the predawn gloom. My fingers, icy and clumsy, typed my mother’s name into the search bar.

The results were sparse, a testament to how thoroughly the story had been buried. A digitized archive of a local weekly, Slobodna Dalmacija, from June 20, 1998. The headline was small, tucked on page 7: Tragic Fire Claims Life of Orebić Woman.

My breath hitched. I clicked.

The article was brief, sterile.

“A fire in the early hours of Wednesday morning completely destroyed the isolated stone house of Anka Petrović (38) on the outskirts of Orebić. The sole occupant, Ms. Petrović, perished in the blaze. Firefighters from nearby Podgora contained the fire but were unable to save the structure. Preliminary investigation suggests the cause was faulty electrical wiring. Ms. Petrović is survived by an infant daughter. The community extends its condolences.”

Faulty wiring. The official story. The one my aunt had fought to plant. I read it three times, looking for a crack, a hint. There was nothing. It was a perfect, bland obituary for a death that was anything but bland.

But below the text was a photograph. Grainy, black and white, scanned poorly. It showed the shell of the house, a silhouette of charred timbers against a lighter sky. And in the foreground, being led away from the ruin by a woman whose face was turned from the camera, was a figure. A police officer, perhaps. And in his hand, held carefully in an evidence bag, was an object that even in the poor resolution, I recognized.

A necklace.

A silver pendant on a chain. The shape was indistinct, but I knew it. It was the necklace I now wore every day, tucked under my clothes. A simple, abstract curl of silver my aunt had given me on my eighteenth birthday, saying only, “It was your mother’s. The only thing that survived.”

I touched the cool metal under my nightshirt. It had survived a fire that reduced stone and beam to ash. That wasn’t just luck. Had she been wearing it? Had it been in a box? The article didn’t say. It just presented the necklace as a poignant detail of loss.

But seeing it there, in a police evidence bag in a 25-year-old newspaper photo, connected to my mother’s “accidental” death, made my skin crawl. The necklace felt suddenly heavy, a lodestone pulling me towards a truth I had been shielded from.

I opened a new tab. I typed “Petrović” and “seer” and “Orebić” in Croatian. Old forum posts from regional history buffs, snippets of folklore. Mentions of “the Petrović women” and “old knowledge.” Nothing concrete. Then I tried German. Something about the tourist’s precise, cold efficiency felt Central European. “Seherin Kroatien” (seer, Croatia). “Übersinnliche Fähigkeiten Erbe” (paranormal abilities inheritance).

The search yielded mostly tourist kitsch and paranormal enthusiast sites. But one link, on the third page of results, was to a PDF from a small, obscure German-language journal of “Anthropological Esoterica.” The article was titled “Blutlinien des Wissens: Mündliche Überlieferungen von Seher-Familien im Adriaraum” (Bloodlines of Knowledge: Oral Traditions of Seer-Families in the Adriatic Region).

My heart hammered against my ribs. I opened it. It was an academic paper, dry and footnoted. It spoke of isolated families along the Dalmatian coast and islands where “non-standard perceptive faculties” were reported, often passed matrilineally. It mentioned heightened sensitivity, prophetic dreams, and in rare cases, “tactile precognition”—knowledge gained through touch. The tone was skeptical but respectful, treating the subjects as cultural artefacts.

Then, in a footnote, I saw it.

*“The most frequently cited example in local testimonies (see interviews from Orebić region, 1995-97, conducted by the author) is the Petrović line, specifically Anka Petrović (b. 1960). Informants described her ability as ‘knowing the heart’s weight’ of anyone she touched. Her death in 1998, officially accidental, is viewed locally as a ‘silencing.’ Notably, interest in this case has persisted among certain private European collectors of esoterica, who reportedly believe such abilities are tied to physiological or psychic ‘residue’ that can be… isolated.”*

The words blurred. Private European collectors. Isolated.

The tourist. The collector.

My breath came in short, sharp gasps. I scrolled to the top of the PDF to see the author’s name. Dr. Felix Graf. A German name.

The screen seemed to pulse with malevolent light. This wasn’t just village gossip anymore. It was documented. Studied. And it had drawn a collector who believed the power could be isolated. Taken. What did that even mean? A lock of hair? A vial of blood? The necklace?

The necklace.

My hand flew to my throat again. Had it survived because it was a focus? A conduit? Was that what he was after?

As if summoned by the direction of my thoughts, my phone vibrated on the desk, a stark, shocking sound in the silent room. The screen glowed with my aunt’s name. It was 5:17 AM.

A call at this hour could only mean catastrophe.

I snatched it up, my voice a dry croak. “Tetka?”

Her voice was unlike anything I’d ever heard from her—a trembling, brittle wire of pure fear. “Lina. Are you alone?”

“Marko is sleeping. What’s wrong?”

“A man. A foreigner. He came to my building in Split yesterday. Asked the neighbors about me. About the family. He knew names. Anka. You.” She took a shuddering breath. “He found me at the market this morning. Before dawn. He… he was polite. Too polite. He asked about the inheritance. Not the house. The other inheritance.”

Ice water flooded my veins again. “What did he look like?”

“Tall. Grey hair. Eyes like a winter lake. He spoke Croatian perfectly, but… cold. No soul in it.” Her description was unmistakable. “He said he was a scholar. Interested in ‘phenomena.’ But Lina, he wasn’t asking like a scholar. He was asking like a… a buyer. He talked about ‘verifiable manifestations.’ He asked if there were any… any objects that had been passed down. Things that might ‘retain a charge.’”

The necklace burned against my skin.

“What did you tell him?” “I told him nothing! I played the confused old woman. Said it was all superstitious nonsense. But he knew I was lying. He just smiled that empty smile and said, ‘The blood tells the truth, even when the mouth lies.’” Her voice broke. “He’s a collector, Lina. I’ve heard of such men. From my mother’s time. They believe the power can be taken. Studied. Maybe even transferred. They think it’s in the blood. In the bones. In things that were loved.” A sob escaped her. “He’s not there for a story. He’s there for you. For what’s inside you.”

The confirmation of my worst fear was no relief. It was a confirmation of the death sentence.

“You have to run,” she pleaded, her voice desperate. “Now. Don’t pack. Don’t tell anyone. Just take the car and go. North, into Slovenia, anywhere. Disappear.”

My eyes went to the bedroom door, behind which Marko slept. “I can’t just leave.”

“You can! You must! This is how it starts! The questions, the pressure, the… the taking! Your mother, she felt it closing in. This obsession. This hunger from people who see you as a thing, not a person. It broke her. It will break you, or worse.” Her voice dropped to a terrified whisper. “He mentioned fire. He said, ‘Fire purifies, but it can also release.’ I think… I think he knows how your mother really died. And he might think it’s the key.”

The world tilted. The collector knew about the fire. He knew it wasn’t an accident. And he had theories about it. Fire can release. Release what? The power? The soul? Was that what he planned for me? A controlled burn to harvest what he wanted?

“Lina, please,” my aunt wept softly. “You are the last of the line. Let it end in hiding, not on a collector’s shelf. Run.”

I looked at the laptop screen, at the academic article, at my mother’s burned house. I looked at the closed bedroom door. I felt the weight of the silver pendant between my breasts.

Running meant leaving Marko. It meant abandoning the villa, my life. It meant becoming a ghost to save my skin, and perhaps condemning him if the collector turned his frustration on the man who had been close to me.

But staying… staying meant waiting for the net to haul up its inevitable catch. The stone had proven that.

“I’ll… I’ll think about it,” I whispered, a hollow promise.

“Don’t think! Act!” The line went dead.

I sat in the greying dawn, the silence now screaming with new, specific horrors. The research had given the monster a name, a history, a methodology. He was a collector. My mother’s death was a point of study. My necklace was an artifact of interest. My ability was a commodity to be isolated.

And he was sleeping above me, patient as a spider, because collectors know that the most valuable specimens are often those who have been allowed to live in their natural habitat until the moment of perfect, ripe extraction.

The tourist wasn’t a guest. He was a curator. And I was the exhibit, soon to be catalogued, acquired, and rendered still—just as I had seen.

17 The Collector Revealed

The dawn after the phone call was a mockery. Light seeped into the world, exposing a reality that felt more like a nightmare. The research, my aunt’s terrified warning—they had transformed the attic room from a guest quarters into a cage holding a predator. I moved through the villa like a ghost in my own home, every creak a footfall, every silence a held breath.

Marko, sensing the new, sharper edge to my fear, had become a shadow. He was no longer just my lover or my anchor; he was a sentry. He positioned himself between me and the path to the attic stairs. He insisted on answering the door, on checking the garden before I went out. The pact was forgotten, replaced by a silent, grim understanding: we were under siege.

The German, Klaus Berger, gave no sign. His door remained shut. No sounds came from above. It was the silence of a trap being set, the stillness of a predator who has marked its territory and now waits for the prey to exhaust itself.

I avoided the garden. It felt too exposed, too far from the house. But on the second morning of his silent vigil, a practical need overrode my fear. The rosemary bush by the kitchen door, the one I used for cooking, was withering. It needed water from the old stone well at the garden’s edge, a relic from a time before plumbing.

Marko was on a work call in our quarters, his voice a low, tense murmur. The morning was bright, deceptively peaceful. I told myself it would take thirty seconds. I grabbed the copper watering can and slipped out the back door.

The air was cool, scented with damp earth and pine. I hurried across the flagstones, my eyes darting to the shuttered attic window. Nothing moved. I reached the well, its mossy stones cool under my palm as I lowered the bucket. The familiar, rhythmic creak of the pulley was the only sound.

I was hauling the bucket up, the muscles in my arms straining, when I felt him. Not a sound, but a presence, a shift in the quality of the air, a cooling of the sun on my neck.

I turned, the bucket swinging, water sloshing over the rim.

He stood five feet away, between me and the house, having materialized as silently as mist. He wore the same beige trench coat, unbuttoned. His hands were in his pockets. His pale blue eyes were fixed on me with an absorption that was utterly devoid of human warmth.

“Good morning, Lina,” he said. His voice was the same soft, precise instrument. “The rosemary appreciates your care. A resilient plant. Like your family.”

My heart was a trapped bird beating against my ribs. I dropped the bucket, the water soaking my feet, a cold shock. I took a step back, my hip hitting the rough stone of the well. There was nowhere to go.

“What do you want?” My voice was a thin, tight wire.

“A conversation.” He took a casual step forward, closing the distance. He wasn’t blocking my path to the house anymore; he was making it clear that any attempt to run would require going through him. “You have been researching. I know you have. The article by Dr. Graf. A bit dry, but the fundamentals are correct.”

He knew. He knew about the search. He must have some way of monitoring, or he was simply that good at reading fear and deduction.

“You knew my mother,” I stated, not a question.

“I studied her case, yes. From a distance. Anka Petrović was… fascinating. But unstable. The gift manifested in her as an empathic overload. She felt the hidden pains of the present so acutely it was a form of torture. A weak, diffuse form of the power.” He tilted his head, studying me like a botanist examining a rare bloom. “Yours is different. More focused. Teleologically oriented—towards futures. Ripe. Potent.”

The clinical terms in his soft voice were more terrifying than any threat. He had a taxonomy for us. We were specimens with varying strengths and weaknesses.

“My aunt told me to run from you,” I said, trying to inject defiance into my trembling voice.

“Desa is a practical woman. Fearful. She chose willful blindness, a form of self-lobotomy. A waste.” He took another step. I could smell him now—a clean, antiseptic scent, like a hospital corridor. “Running is unnecessary. I am not here to harm you. I am here to offer you a partnership.”

A disbelieving laugh, harsh and brittle, escaped me. “A partnership?”

“Indeed. You see your ability as a curse. A source of noise and pain. I see it as an untapped resource. A form of perception that can be harnessed. Controlled.” His eyes glittered with a fanatic’s light. “Imagine it, Lina. No more unwelcome visions. No more terror for the children on bicycles. You could choose what to see. You could use it, rather than it using you.”

The offer was a serpent’s whisper, so perfectly tailored to my deepest longing it felt like a violation. To leash the visions. To have control. It was the fantasy I’d clung to in my darkest hours.

“How?” The word was out before I could stop it.

A small, satisfied smile touched his lips. “The mechanism is… physical. The gift resides in the bloodline. It leaves a trace, a unique psychic signature in the cellular memory, amplified by trauma and intention. Your mother’s final act—the fire—was a catastrophic release of that energy, untapped and wasted.” He withdrew his right hand from his pocket. In it, he held a small, elegant object: a slim, silver case, the size of a cigarette lighter. He clicked it open with his thumb. Inside, nestled in black velvet, was a tiny, surgical-looking lancet and a vial no bigger than my thumbnail, made of dark glass.

“A drop,” he said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur. “Freely given. Not taken. The willing transfer is key. With it, I can analyze the signature. I have resources—laboratories, colleagues who understand the intersection of the subtle and the material. We can develop a suppressant. A filter. You would be free. And in return, you would be wealthy beyond your needs. You could keep this villa, travel, live a normal life. Your cooperation would fund a new branch of understanding.”

He extended the case towards me, the lancet glinting in the sun. A drop of blood. That was all he asked. It seemed so little. So absurdly little for the promise of salvation.

But my aunt’s voice screamed in my head. A collector. He believes the power can be taken.

This wasn’t about analysis. This was about acquisition. The “willing transfer” was a ritual of ownership. Once he had my blood, a part of me, he would own a piece of the curse. What would he do with it? Replicate it? Sell it? Would the vial become part of some grotesque collection alongside my mother’s necklace?

I looked from his earnest, fanatical face to the tiny, menacing vial. The vision of my own still face rose before me. Was this the moment? The transaction that led to the void behind my head?

“No,” I whispered, shaking my head. “No.”

His smile didn’t falter, but it froze. “You are making a mistake. The uncontrolled power will destroy you, as it destroyed your mother. It does not have to end in fire. I am offering you a civilized alternative.”

“It ends when I say it ends,” I said, finding a shred of steel. “Not when you harvest it.”

The word harvest made his eye twitch, the first crack in his polished façade. “Such a crude term. This is science. Liberation.”

“It’s theft!” I spat.

Before he could reply, a shout ripped through the garden’s tense silence.

“LINA!”

Marko. He stood at the back door, his face a mask of fury and fear. He must have finished his call, found me gone, seen us through the window.

He was across the courtyard in seconds, moving with a speed I didn’t know he possessed. He placed himself squarely between me and the Collector, his back to me, a human shield.

“Get away from her,” Marko snarled, his voice low and dangerous.

Klaus Berger’s expression shifted from persuasive to politely annoyed, as if interrupted during an important lecture. “This is a private conversation, Mr. Vuković. It does not concern you.”

“Everything about her concerns me.” Marko took a step forward, forcing the Collector to retreat a step towards the well. “You’re leaving. Now. Or I’m calling the police and having you removed for harassment.”

The Collector’s pale eyes flickered from Marko to me, and back. A calculation was made. The journalist was an obstacle. An unpredictable, emotional variable. He sighed, a sound of profound inconvenience. “You operate from a place of sentimental ignorance. You are in the way of progress.”

“Get. Out.” Marko emphasized each word, shoving his finger towards the gate.

It was the shove, the aggressive invasion of his space, that did it. The Collector’s hand, still holding the silver case, snapped up, not to strike, but to bat Marko’s accusing hand away with a sharp, dismissive motion.

The contact was minimal. A brush of wrist against wrist.

But for me, it was a trigger.

A flash, blinding and instantaneous:

Marko, off-balance from the bat-away, stumbling backwards. His heel catching on the uneven flagstone at the well’s edge. His arms windmilling, a look of startled shock on his face. The sickening, meaty crack of his skull against the mossy, unforgiving stone coping of the well. His body folding, slumping to the ground, utterly still. A dark, swift bloom of blood against grey stone.

“NO!” The scream tore from my lungs before the vision had even finished dissolving. I lunged forward, not towards the Collector, but towards Marko, to pull him back.

But I was a second too late.

It happened exactly as Seen.

Marko, reacting to the Collector’s bat-away, took an off-balance step back. His foot twisted on the loose stone. He flailed, his eyes wide. Time seemed to slow, then snap forward with cruel speed. The back of his head connected with the rounded edge of the well with a sound that was both dull and horribly final.

He crumpled.

A choked cry escaped me. I was on my knees beside him in an instant. His eyes were open, staring at the sky, but they saw nothing. A trickle of dark blood seeped from his hairline, tracing a path through the dust on the stone. His chest moved, but the breaths were shallow, ragged.

The Collector stood over us, looking down. His expression was not one of triumph or malice, but of mild irritation, as if a valuable experiment had been contaminated by an unsterile element. He clicked the silver case shut and returned it to his pocket.

“A regrettable escalation,” he said, his voice devoid of remorse. He looked at me, my hands hovering over Marko’s still form, my own face surely a mirror of the pale, lifeless one from my vision. “The offer remains, Lina. But time, like blood, is a resource. Do not waste it.”

He turned and walked away, not towards the house, but down the garden path that led to the pine forest and the coast road, his trench coat flapping softly. He didn’t run. He simply departed, his errand incomplete but his point made with brutal clarity: he could reach me. He could remove obstacles. And the future, at least this terrible fragment of it, was fixed.

I barely registered his leaving. My world had shrunk to the man on the stones, the blood, the terrible, shallow sound of his breathing. My hands, which had caused so much trouble, fluttered uselessly. I couldn’t touch him, couldn’t risk a vision, couldn’t do anything but scream for help into the empty, sun-drenched garden where only the rosemary bore witness.

18 The Blood

Time fractured. There was the before—the shout, the shove, the crack—and the after, which was a white-noise scream of pure panic punctuated by the wet, ragged sound of Marko’s breathing. I was on my knees, the rough stone biting through my thin trousers, the spilled water from the bucket soaking into them, mixing with the dark, spreading stain from Marko’s head.

My hands hovered above him, trembling violently. I couldn’t touch him. The void, the terrible nothingness of his future, was one thing. But touching him now, with his life literally bleeding out onto the stones, felt like a final, grotesque invasion. What if I Saw the moment his heart stopped? What if the last thing I ever Saw of him was the still, silent aftermath I’d already witnessed in my own death-vision?

But I had to stop the bleeding. Logic, a distant, shrieking voice in the storm of my fear, insisted. I ripped the hem of my shirt, a sharp, tearing sound that seemed obscenely loud. With the clean cotton wadded in my hands, I pressed it gently against the wound at the back of his skull. The contact was unavoidable.

His blood was warm. Slick. It seeped through the fabric instantly, coating my fingers, my palms.

And the touch, saturated with his blood and my terror, triggered a vision. But it was not of the future.

It was a violent, unspooling reel of the past.

Not my past. His.Marko, months ago, before he ever booked a room at Vila Vidrika. He is in a small, overgrown cemetery on the outskirts of Split, the one where my mother is buried. The light is the grey of late afternoon. He is not a tourist here. He moves with purpose, a small trowel in his hand. He is not desecrating the grave; he is digging carefully at the base of the headstone, in the narrow space between my mother’s plot and the next. His face is set in lines of intense concentration, the journalist on the scent. He unearths a small, metal box, rusted and locked. He doesn’t open it there. He brushes the dirt off, wraps it in a cloth, and places it in his backpack. He looks around, furtive, then leaves. The vision holds on the disturbed earth at the base of Anka Petrović’s headstone.

The vision dissolved, leaving me gasping, my hands still pressed to his bleeding head, now stained with the metaphorical blood of his betrayal as well as the physical. He had been digging—literally—into my mother’s grave before he ever met me. His initial arrival wasn’t just a cynical journalist chasing a story; it was the culmination of a targeted investigation. He had been hired. Or he had been searching for something specific. The box. What was in it? My mother’s notes? Another artifact? Proof of the ‘curse’ for his collector client?

The betrayal was so profound, so calculated, it momentarily eclipsed the terror of his injury. He had lied. From the very first moment. His skepticism, his eventual ‘conversion,’ our pact, his anchor-like presence—all of it was built on a foundation of grave dirt and secrets.

A sound broke through my spiraling shock—a low, pained groan from Marko. His eyelids fluttered. “L… Lina?” His voice was a slurred whisper, thick with confusion and pain.

“Don’t move,” I choked out, the words raw. “Just don’t move.”

He tried to focus on my face, his eyes struggling to track. “The… the German?”

“Gone.” The word was flat. You dug up my mother’s grave. The accusation sat on my tongue, a bitter poison, but I couldn’t give it voice. Not now. Not with his blood on my hands and his brain possibly scrambled against the well stone.

With my free hand, I fumbled my phone from my pocket. My blood-slick fingers left smears on the screen. I dialed the European emergency number, 112, my voice surprisingly steady as I gave the address, described a head injury, a possible skull fracture.

The wait was an eternity measured in the shallow, terrifying rhythm of his breaths. I kept pressure on the wound. The sun climbed, beating down on us, a cruel spectator. I watched his face, the face I loved, the face of the man who had lied to me with every tender touch. The blood on my hands was a sticky, cooling testament to both his physical peril and the rotten core of our relationship.

Finally, the sound I both longed for and dreaded: the distant wail of sirens, cutting through the peaceful olive groves, growing louder, a screaming announcement of calamity. They neared, then stopped at the bottom of the lane. Doors slammed. Voices.

Two paramedics, a man and a woman, appeared at the garden gate, carrying a bulky kit and a folded stretcher. Their professional calm was a lifeline thrown into my personal maelstrom.

“What happened?” the female paramedic asked as they knelt beside Marko, gently moving my hands aside to assess the wound.

“He… he fell,” I said, the lie automatic, rehearsed in the seconds after the Collector left. “He tripped on the stones. Hit his head on the well.”

It was a child’s lie, thin and obvious. The positioning, the force of the impact—it didn’t look like a simple trip. But they didn’t question me. Their focus was on their patient. They worked with swift, efficient movements, stabilizing his neck, checking his pupils, talking to him in low, reassuring tones. Marko mumbled incoherently.

As they prepared to lift him onto the stretcher, the male paramedic looked at me, at my blood-soaked hands and shirt. “You’re coming with us?”

I nodded mutely.

The ride in the back of the ambulance was a surreal, jolting dream. Marko was strapped down, an oxygen mask over his face, monitors beeping with alien serenity. I sat on a small jump seat, my hands held out in front of me, sticky and accusing. The female paramedic tried to clean them with antiseptic wipes, but the stain felt permanent.

At the hospital in Split, a different kind of chaos took over. He was wheeled away through swinging doors marked “Hitna Pomoc” – Emergency. I was left in a harshly lit waiting area that smelled of antiseptic and stale coffee. A police officer arrived, young and tired-looking. He asked for my statement.

I repeated the lie. A trip. A fall. No, there was no one else there. Yes, I was the only witness. I was the owner of the villa. He was my… partner. My voice was a monotone, a hollow recital. I saw the doubt in the officer’s eyes, but without another witness, without Marko able to contradict me, there was nothing to pursue. He took down my details, told me they might follow up, and left.

Hours bled into each other. I called Silvija, my voice eerily calm, and told her there had been an accident, to manage the villa, to cancel the upcoming booking in the attic room. I didn’t mention the German. I didn’t mention the blood or the vision of the grave.

A doctor finally emerged, his scrubs a cheerful green that clashed with his grave expression. “Ms. Petrović? Mr. Vuković has a severe concussion and a skull fracture. There’s some swelling, but no significant bleeding in the brain, which is very fortunate. He’s unconscious but stable. We’ll be monitoring him closely in the ICU for the next 24 hours. He’s lucky. A centimeter to the left, or a harder impact…”

He’s lucky.

The words echoed in the sterile corridor. The paramedic had said it too. Lucky.

But I knew luck had nothing to do with it.

The vision I’d had when the Collector shoved him—it had shown the crack, the fall, the blood. It had shown a specific outcome. And it had come true. The Collector’s act had made it true. But the vision hadn’t shown death. It had shown this: the fracture, the swelling, the unconsciousness. The void around Marko’s future was still there, a separate, greater terror. But this specific, violent event had played out exactly as foreseen, just as the stone in the fisherman’s net had.

This wasn’t luck. This was fate accepting a minor revision. The script had called for a blow to the head. It didn’t specify death. So he lived. For now. The void still loomed, a larger, more final act.

And the other vision, the one triggered by his blood… that was a truth of a different kind. A revealed past that rewrote our entire present.

I was allowed to see him briefly. In the ICU, surrounded by blinking machines and the hiss of oxygen, he looked small and breakable. A white bandage wrapped his head. Tubes snaked from his arms. The strong, sharp-featured journalist was gone, replaced by a vulnerable stranger.

I stood by the bed, my clean hands clenched at my sides. The love I felt was a tangled, mangled thing, woven through with lies and grave dirt and the metallic scent of his blood. He had come to me as a predator, a digger in the dark. And I had fallen in love with the performance.

But he had also stayed. He had fought the Collector. He had placed himself between us. He had promised to stop digging. And he had almost died for it.

Which man was real? The investigator or the anchor? Or were they the same man, whose professional hunger had somehow, against all odds, transformed into a genuine love that now lay fractured on a hospital bed?

I had no answers. Only the blood on my hands—both real and symbolic—and the chilling knowledge that the Collector was still out there, his silver case waiting. And the void, the great, silent void around Marko’s future, remained, undisturbed by the chaos of the present, waiting for its cue. Luck was a fairy tale. We were all just actors following a script I could sometimes read, but never, ever change.

19 The Hospital Vigil

The Intensive Care Unit was a kingdom of regulated beeps and hushed urgency, a place where time was measured not in sunsets over the channel, but in the steady drip of IV fluids and the cycling of ventilator sighs. Marko lay in the epicenter of this sterile world, a pale island in a sea of white sheets and chromed rails. The bandages around his head were a stark white turban, making his face seem younger, more vulnerable, and utterly foreign.

For the first day, they let me in only for ten minutes every hour. I would sit on the hard plastic chair they provided, my hands folded in my lap, and watch him. He didn’t move. His chest rose and fell with the machine’s rhythm, not his own. The vibrant, skeptical, sometimes infuriatingly alive man was gone, replaced by this silent effigy. The void I had felt around his future was, in this moment, manifest in his present. He was a blank.

On the second day, the swelling subsided enough for them to downgrade his sedation. He wasn’t awake, but he was swimming closer to the surface—a twitch of a finger, a flutter under his eyelids, a faint, guttural sound in his throat that wasn’t quite a word. The doctor called it “encouraging.” I called it torture.

The nurses, seeing me as the shell-shocked, loyal partner, grew more lenient. “You can hold his hand,” one said, a kind-eyed woman with streaks of grey in her dark hair. “Sometimes they can feel it. It can help anchor them.”

The suggestion sent a jolt of pure dread through me. Touch him? After the blood-vision of the grave? After the void? My hands, now scrubbed clean of his physical blood, felt permanently stained.

But I was desperate for any anchor myself. The villa felt like a crime scene. Silvija was handling it, but the thought of returning to the garden, to the well with its dark stain, to the attic room that held the Collector’s sterile scent, was impossible. The hospital, for all its grimness, was a neutral space. A place of aftermath, not of looming threat.

So, on the third afternoon, with the pale Slovenian light filtering through the slatted blinds, I reached out. Slowly, as if approaching a sleeping animal that might bite, I slipped my hand under his. His fingers were cool, dry, inert. I curled my own around them, a gentle cage.

I braced for the hook. For the void. For another bloody flash of betrayal.

But there was nothing.

No yank into emptiness. No violent snap of the past. Just the cool, smooth skin of his knuckles, the faint ridges of his fingerprints, the solid, real weight of his hand in mine.

The void was gone.

The realization was so shocking I almost pulled my hand back. For months, his touch had been defined by that terrifying absence, that silent scream of non-future. Now, there was… a texture. A presence. Not a vision, but a simple, tactile reality. It was as if the blow to his head had not only fractured his skull but had also shattered the psychic seal that had surrounded him.

Or had the void never been about his death at all? Had it been a blockage—my own terror, as he’d theorized, blinding me? Or was it that his future had been so fundamentally altered by the crack of his skull against the well that the old path—the one leading to the void—was erased, and a new, unknown one was being written?

Tentatively, I focused. Not seeking a vision, but… listening. With the part of me that was the Sight.

A faint impression began to form. Not a scene, not a flash. More like the afterimage left by a bright light. It was dim, monochrome, static.

A hospital room. This one, but not now. He is in the bed, awake, propped up on pillows. His face is drawn, the sharp handsomeness softened by pain and confusion. He is looking at a door—this door. His expression is not one of anticipation, but of a hollow, weary resignation. And the feeling that accompanies the image is not love, not relief, but a cold, quiet sorrow. A betrayal so deep it has settled into his bones.

The impression faded, leaving me colder than the void ever had. The void had been terrifying in its abstraction. This was horrifying in its specificity. I wasn’t seeing his death. I was seeing him waking to the knowledge of my betrayal—the lie I had told the police, yes, but more than that. The lie I was living by his bedside, holding his hand while the truth of his grave-robbing past festered inside me like a poison.

He would wake up, and I would have to face him. And the man who woke would not be the Marko I knew. He would be a man with a fractured memory, a broken trust, and a future I could now dimly perceive—one painted in the grey tones of hospital walls and a love turned to ash.

The vigil became a different kind of torture. Each time I held his hand, the same impression returned, a silent loop: him, awake, alone, feeling betrayed. My presence was a lie. My touch was a hypocrisy. I was keeping vigil not for the man I loved, but for the death of what we had been, and I was the one holding the knife, waiting for him to open his eyes so I could finally plunge it in.

Nurses came and went, checking vitals, adjusting drips. Doctors made rounds, using words like “neural response” and “cognitive function.” They spoke to me, and I nodded, a mute puppet. The world outside—the Collector, the villa, the black stone on my windowsill—felt like a distant, grotesque dream. The only reality was this room, this bed, this silent accusation taking shape in the space between our clasped hands.

On the fourth day, his grip changed. It was subtle. A faint pressure. His fingers didn’t curl around mine, but they seemed to grow heavier, more present. Later that afternoon, his eyes opened.

They were unfocused, clouded with pain and drugs, but they were open. They roamed the ceiling, the machines, before landing on me. There was no recognition at first. Just a blank, animal confusion.

Then, a slow focusing. The slate-grey eyes, once so sharp, now dulled, settled on my face. A frown creased his brow, pulling at the bandages.

“L… Lina?” His voice was a dry rasp, barely audible over the hum of the equipment.

A sob, equal parts relief and anguish, lodged in my throat. I squeezed his hand, the hand that now showed me only hospital sorrow. “I’m here.”

He blinked slowly, trying to piece together the universe. “What… what happened?”

This was the moment. The first test of the lie. The vision of his future betrayal demanded I speak the truth. You were digging up my mother’s grave. A collector pushed you. I lied to the police.

But I looked at his broken face, the vulnerability in his confused eyes, and the words turned to dust.

“You had an accident,” I said, my voice surprisingly steady. “In the garden. You fell and hit your head on the well.”

His frown deepened. He tried to shake his head, a tiny movement that made him wince. “I don’t… remember. The garden…” His eyes drifted shut again, the effort too much.

“It’s okay,” I whispered, the hypocrite. “Don’t try to remember. Just rest.”

He slipped back into a drugged sleep. The nurse came in, cheerful. “He woke? That’s excellent! His brain is re-booting. The memories might be spotty for a while. Don’t press him.”

I wouldn’t. I had my own reasons for not pressing.

Over the next two days, he surfaced more frequently. Each time, he was a little more there. The confusion remained, but the core of him—the intelligence, the watchfulness—began to flicker back to life. He asked about the villa. About Silvija. He didn’t ask about the German. The Collector, the confrontation, the shove—it seemed to be lost in the shattered tile of his memory.

But he watched me. Even through the haze of painkillers, the journalist’s instinct was returning. He saw the shadows under my eyes, the way I flinched when a door closed too loudly, the careful distance I kept even as I sat by his bed. I held his hand less often now, afraid of the sorrowful future-image it reinforced.

One evening, as a purple twilight settled over the city visible from his window, he was more alert than he’d been. He was managing soft food. The worst of the tubes were gone.

“Lina,” he said, his voice still weak but clearer. “Tell me… about the accident. Everything you remember.”

My heart stalled. This was it. The interrogation would begin not from a place of strength, but from the vulnerability of his broken mind. And I was trapped between the truth that could destroy him and the lie that was destroying me.

I gave him the same hollow recital I’d given the police. The trip. The fall. Me finding him. The blood. I kept my eyes on my hands, clenched in my lap.

When I finished, there was a long silence. I forced myself to look at him.

He was staring at me, his gaze no longer cloudy, but sharp with a dawning, horrified lucidity. It wasn’t the look of someone trying to remember. It was the look of someone recognizing a lie.

“That’s not what happened,” he whispered.

My blood ran cold. “What do you mean?”

“I… I see a face. A man. Pale eyes.” He winced, pressing the heels of his hands to his temples. “He was there. In the garden. You were talking to him.”

The memories were returning, breaking through the dam of concussion. The Collector was coming back to him.

“Marko, you hit your head very hard. The doctors said you might have confusing memories, fragments that don’t fit—”

“He had a case,” Marko interrupted, his voice gaining strength with the conviction of recovered truth. “A silver case. He wanted something from you.” His eyes locked onto mine, and in them, I saw not just the returning memory, but the journalist connecting dots. “The German. From the attic. He wasn’t a tourist.”

There was no point in denying it further. The lie was crumbling. “No. He wasn’t.”

“What did he want?” Marko’s voice was urgent now, demanding.

And here, I faced another choice. Tell him about the blood? About the offer? Or continue the half-truths?

“He… he knew about the Sight. He wanted to study it. He offered to help me control it.” It was a version of the truth, sanitized.

Marko’s face hardened. “And the fall? Did he push me?”

The direct question hung in the antiseptic air. I could lie. I could protect the fragile narrative I’d built for the authorities. But looking into his eyes, seeing the man re-emerging from the wreckage, I couldn’t do it.

“Yes,” I said, the word a barely audible exhale. “He pushed you. Or… he made you fall. I saw it happen before it did.”

The admission—of the push, of my foresight—landed between us. I saw him process it. The danger I’d been in. His own role as a shield. And my failure to prevent it, despite the warning.

But then his eyes narrowed, going to a place I dreaded. “Why did you lie to the police?”

I had no good answer. “I was scared. He was… powerful. Connected. I thought it would make things worse.”

It was a weak excuse, and he knew it. His journalist’s mind, even addled, was sniffing the inconsistency. The lie was about more than fear. It was about protecting something. Or hiding something.

He leaned back against the pillows, exhaustion and pain and newfound suspicion warring on his face. He closed his eyes, not in sleep, but in retreat. “I need to rest,” he said, his voice flat, final.

I was dismissed.

I stood up, my legs weak. The vigil was over. The silent, comatose partner had been replaced by a waking, questioning man who was starting to see the cracks in my story, and perhaps, sense the grave dirt buried beneath the surface of our love.

As I walked out of the hospital into the cool night air, the vision I got from holding his hand felt more true than ever. The hospital room. The betrayal. It wasn’t just about the lie to the police. It was about the deeper, older lie he had told me, and the new, protective lie I was telling him. We were both betrayers, circling each other in a room of sterile white, waiting for the next truth to draw blood. The void was gone, but what had taken its place was a desolation I knew how to navigate all too well.

20 The Revelation

The hospital vigil was over, but the sentence continued. I left Marko sleeping, or pretending to sleep, in his white, beeping cell. The air between us had thickened into something viscous and toxic—a mixture of his returning memories, my exposed lies, and the unspoken, rotting truth of the grave. I couldn’t stay in that room another minute with the ghost of my mother’s desecrated resting place hanging between us.

The drive back to Orebić was a blur of asphalt and gathering storm clouds. The jugo was building again, a sirocco from Africa that scraped the sea into a nervous, metallic grey and set the pine forests hissing. It matched the tempest inside my skull.

I didn’t go to the villa. The thought of its empty rooms, the silent attic, the bloodstain by the well—it was a physical repulsion. Instead, I turned the car onto the narrow, climbing road that led out of town, toward the old cemetery on the hill. The one from Marko’s blood-vision.

I had avoided this place since my aunt brought me here as a child, a dutiful annual visit to a slab of stone that meant nothing to me. My mother was an idea, a tragedy, a cautionary tale—not a person who lay in the ground. Now, she was a secret, and her grave was a crime scene.

The cemetery was windswept and ancient, clinging to the hillside with a view of the angry channel below. Cypress trees bent and groaned in the gathering gale. The older part, where the Petrović plot was, was a jumble of weathered stone crosses and ornate, soot-stained angels. My family’s marker was simple: a slab of local limestone. *Anka Petrović. 1960-1998. Počivaj u miru.* Rest in peace.

Peace. The word was a obscenity.

I approached slowly, the wind whipping my hair and dress around me. My heart was a cold, hard knot. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Proof? Absolution? A way to scream at the ghost of the woman whose curse I now carried?

I reached the stone. And I saw it immediately.

The earth at the base of the headstone, on the side away from the path, was disturbed. Not wildly, not like a grave robbery. But the grass was patchy, the soil darker, looser than the packed earth around the other plots. It had been done with care, but recent rains had settled it differently, exposing the lie of its tranquility.

Marko’s vision had been exact.

I fell to my knees, the damp earth soaking through the fabric. The rational part of me said to leave, to call the police, to treat this as the violation it was. But the Sight, and the desperate need to know what he had taken, overruled everything. If there was something here, something my mother had left, something the Collector wanted, I had to find it before he—or Marko, upon his release—came back for it.

I dug with my bare hands. The soil was cold and heavy, thick with clay and the roots of opportunistic weeds. My nails tore, dirt packed under them. I didn’t care. I dug like an animal, driven by a compulsion deeper than reason. The wind screamed in the cypresses, covering the sounds of my frantic scraping.

About eight inches down, my fingers struck something hard and smooth that wasn’t a root or a stone. I cleared the earth away with feverish haste.

It was a metal box, roughly the size of a large book. It was made of tarnished steel, with rusty corners. A small, sturdy padlock held it shut. It was exactly as I had Seen in Marko’s vision. It looked like a wartime relic, something meant to survive burial.

I hauled it out of the earth. It was heavier than it looked. I sat back on my heels, cradling the muddy box in my lap, my breath coming in ragged gasps. The wind tore at me, but I was in a pocket of absolute stillness.

The lock was rusted but solid. I had no key. I looked around for a rock, found a heavy chunk of broken headstone, and with a violence that shocked me, I brought it down on the lock. Once, twice, three times. The metal screeched, buckled, and finally gave way with a snap.

I dropped the rock. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely lift the lid.

Inside, protected from the damp by the steel, was a bundle wrapped in oilcloth. I lifted it out. It was light. Unwrapping the stiff cloth revealed two things.

The first was a necklace. Not the silver curl I wore, but a older, heavier piece—a pendant of dark, polished jet or onyx, set in tarnished silver, shaped like a teardrop. It felt cold, even through the cloth, a dead weight.

The second was a small, leather-bound journal. The cover was blotched with mildew, the pages warped with humidity that had seeped in over a quarter-century.

I opened it. The handwriting was my mother’s—I recognized it from a few old cards my aunt had kept. But it was not the neat script of those brief notes. This was frantic, sprawling, the writing of a woman coming apart. The ink was faded to brown in places, water-blurred in others.

I turned to the first legible page, the wind whipping the fragile leaves, forcing me to shield it with my body.

“He knows. The one who writes the letters. Dr. Graf. He calls it ‘research.’ He sends polite, persistent questions. About sensations. About triggers. About blood. He is not the first, but he is the most… scientific. He thinks he can map it. Contain it. He believes it is in the blood. A thing to be isolated, like a virus or a mineral.”

I turned a page, my heart hammering against my ribs.

“The visions are no longer just feelings. They are pictures. Clear as day. I touch the postman and see the letter from his son in Germany, the one that will arrive tomorrow telling him of the grandchild he will never meet. I touch the baker’s wife and see the lump in her breast she has not yet found. It is a torrent. I cannot hold the door shut. It is drowning me.”

Another page, the writing growing more chaotic.

“Graf writes again. He proposes a meeting. A ‘benign examination.’ He offers money. A great deal of money. He says he can help me ‘manage the flow.’ He is lying. I have Seen it. In his future, I am not a patient. I am a specimen. In a room with white tiles. He has tools.”

A sob caught in my throat. The Collector’s predecessor. The same hunger, just a different generation.

I flipped towards the end of the journal. The entries became shorter, more desperate, the dates skipping weeks, then months.

“I have told Desa. She does not understand, but she will take Lina. She must take Lina. The baby must be kept away. From this place. From the stones that remember. From me.”

“The fire is the only door that locks from the inside. It purifies. It severs. They think the power is in the blood, in the flesh. They are wrong. I will show them it cannot be taken. It can only be destroyed.”

The final entry was not dated. The handwriting was almost illegible, a spider’s crawl across the page, the letters breaking apart.

“He is coming. Graf. Or another like him. They always come for the bloodline. They think our sight is in the blood. They are wrong.

It is in the sorrow.

The sorrow of knowing. The sorrow of being known. The sorrow that pools in the hollow places of the world and we, the women of this line, are the vessels that cannot help but drink. It is not a gift to be passed. It is a burden of empathy so vast it becomes a window into what was, what is, and what might be. They look for a key in our veins. The key is in our breaking hearts.

To my daughter, if you ever read this: I am so sorry. I left you the sorrow. I tried to take it with me. Forgive me. And if they come for you… remember. The fire is a lock. But so is love. A different kind of fire. Find it. Let it burn you clean. Do not let them have your sorrow. It is yours. It is all we ever truly own.”

The words ended. The last sentence trailed off the page, unfinished.

I sat in the mud at my mother’s graveside, the journal open on my lap, the dark teardrop pendant glinting dully beside it. The wind howled, but I heard nothing. The world had shrunk to the frantic script on the mildewed page.

The revelation was not about a conspiracy, though one existed. It was not just about Marko’s betrayal, though it was profound. It was about the fundamental nature of the curse.

It wasn’t a psychic power. It wasn’t a genetic flaw. It was sorrow. A profound, inherited sensitivity to the sadness woven into the fabric of existence. The Sight wasn’t seeing the future; it was perceiving the potential for pain, for loss, for the inevitable melancholy at the core of all things. The visions of joy, like the honeymooners’, were the rare exceptions that proved the rule—the absence of sorrow in a sea of it.

My mother hadn’t been killed by a random fire or a mysterious collector. She had been driven to self-immolation by the unbearable weight of the world’s sorrow, amplified by men who wanted to bottle and sell it.

And Marko… He had been a tool. For Graf? For the current Collector? Had he been hired to find “the source,” to get close to the last Petrović vessel? His initial skepticism, his investigation—it all made a terrible, logical sense. He had dug up this box. What had he done with its contents? Had he shown them to his employer? Had he taken photos? Was the journal’s existence the reason the Collector was now so certain, so eager for my “ripe” power?

The betrayal was a layer cake of horror. But beneath it all lay my mother’s terrible, beautiful truth. The Sight was in the sorrow. And the only way to rob the collectors of their prize was to refuse to let them own that sorrow. To either lock it away with fire, as she did, or… to transform it with love, as she’d hoped I could.

But what love could survive this? The love I had for Marko was built on a grave. It was poisoned.

I carefully rewrapped the journal and the pendant in the oilcloth, placed them back in the metal box. I stood, my legs numb, the box heavy under my arm. I looked at the disturbed earth, the hole I’d made. I couldn’t leave it like that. It was a screaming advertisement of what I’d found.

With a dull, mechanical sense of duty, I pushed the soil back into the hole with my foot, patting it down, scattering loose grass and leaves over the top. It wouldn’t fool anyone who looked closely, but it would have to do.

I turned and walked back to the car, the box a cold, dead weight against my side. The storm was breaking, the first heavy drops of rain splattering on the dusty ground, mixing with the tears I hadn’t realized I was crying. I had gone to the graveyard seeking answers about a man. I had found the last testament of a prophet.

My mother’s final words echoed in the wind and in my soul: It is in the sorrow. I carried the box, and I carried the revelation. And I knew, with a certainty deeper than any vision, that the final confrontation was no longer just about surviving a collector. It was about deciding what to do with an inheritance of infinite, crushing grief.