Rain blurred the city like a half-remembered dream. Streets shimmered with reflections that didn't belong, and neon signs flickered like half-spoken spells. Ayla moved through it unnoticed, just another figure in the storm—soaked, silent, and invisible.
The scream still echoed in her bones.
That thing in the alley—it hadn't just been a ghost. It had been wrong. A thing with too many mouths and not enough memory. A parasite in smoke. She had seen it. She had stopped it.
She had broken her rule.
No more pretending not to see. No more turning away.
She should have felt proud. Or powerful. Or at the very least—relieved.
Instead, she felt exposed.
Because something had looked back.
For three days, she avoided the street where it happened. Crossed the road if she got too close. Kept her eyes away from mirrors. Skipped sleep because the dreams came whispering again, more vivid now, more awake.
She thought maybe it would fade.
Maybe it had been one more strange ripple in a life full of them.
Then he returned.
Not in a vision. Not in a dream. But in daylight, wearing polished shoes and carrying something colder than certainty.
Damian Rae came to her school.
The principal interrupted math class, called Ayla to the front. Said someone from a "youth outreach foundation" wanted to speak with her. No details. Just a name.
When she stepped into the office hallway, the air changed.
There he was.
The man she had saved. No longer trembling. No shadow clinging to him. Dressed in a charcoal-gray suit, silver tie pin flashing like a weapon when it caught the light. His hair combed. His posture sharp. He looked like someone who had never fallen apart.
But when he turned and saw her, his eyes softened—not with pity, but with something else. Recognition. Gratitude. Respect.
"I wanted to thank you," he said, voice low enough that no one else could hear.
Ayla's eyes narrowed. "I didn't do it for you."
"I know," he replied, and smiled faintly. "That's why I trust you."
Their next meeting wasn't an accident.
It was at a café tucked between the old city walls and the new skyline, where the espresso tasted like ash and the staff never asked questions. Damian brought a book with him—bound in cracked leather, written in two languages that hadn't been spoken aloud in over a hundred years.
He slid it across the table.
She didn't open it. Not yet. Just stared at him.
He told her the truth. Or enough of it.
The building he'd been in—his own company's tower—had been built on cursed land. He hadn't known. But he'd paid the price. Missing time. Visions. Nightmares he couldn't explain. And when she looked at him that night in the alley, she had seen all of it.
"You knew," he said.
Ayla said nothing.
She sipped her tea, eyes drifting past him, toward a bench just outside the window where a girl with hollow cheeks sat weeping. No one else saw her.
Damian followed her gaze but said nothing.
"Most people fear what they don't understand," he continued. "But you didn't flinch. You saw it. You acted."
"I didn't destroy it," she murmured. "I moved it."
He paused.
And nodded.
Even that didn't scare him.
"I think we could help each other, Ayla."
Their meetings became regular after that. Quiet. Untraceable. Always on her terms.
He brought her books—on symbols, ruins, dead gods, ancient rituals, the architecture of memory and haunting. She devoured them all. Not for him. For herself.
He never asked to test her. Never tried to control her. And eventually, he made her an offer.
One night, on the rooftop of the Rae Global Tower, where the garden grew in perfectly symmetrical rows of herbs and iron-thorned flowers, he stood beneath a clear sky and said:
"Buildings remember. They trap echoes. Pain leaves residue. Death leaves a door."
Ayla nodded.
"And you want to build over them."
"I want to cleanse them first," he said. "Not destroy. Not silence. Just… release."
A pause.
"I want to fix what other men ruined. And I want you to help me."
Ayla didn't trust suits. Or contracts. Or clean, careful words wrapped around hidden hunger.
But Damian Rae was different.
Not empty. Not arrogant.
Haunted.
Not by spirits—but by guilt.
So she said yes.
At fourteen, Ayla Serin began cleansing the dead from the bones of the living world.
There were no newspapers. No documentaries. No titles. She worked in silence, in secret, always with him at a distance, guarding her name.
He took her into places most would not enter.
Collapsed hospitals, ancient schools, mansions where children had disappeared. Places where history had sunk into the walls like mold.
And she listened.
Not with ears.
With everything.
She didn't chant. Didn't wear robes. No incense, no rites, no crosses.
Just chalk. Salt. Spirals drawn by steady fingers. Doors marked with crushed bloodroot. Her voice, clear and low.
She called them.
And one by one—they came.
Some were angry. Others lost. Some had forgotten what they were.
She spoke to them. Bargained with them. Banished them, if she had to. And when she couldn't save them, she walked away—eyes burning, hands trembling, but unbroken.
Most of the time—she won.
And Damian kept his promise.
Every place she cleared, he offered her part of it.
A room. A floor. A deed.
"You cleansed it," he said. "You own it."
By fifteen, Ayla Serin had keys to seven apartments and one cursed art gallery no one dared visit.
By sixteen, she owned a tower.
And no one knew her name.
She remained a myth. A whisper in the dark corners of corporate rumor. A girl seen only in reflection, in stories passed between those who believed in haunted land and bleeding walls.
But power draws attention—even in shadow.
And others began to notice.
The men whose buildings would not sell.
The cults who thrived on cursed places.
The ghosts who didn't want to be freed.
Not everyone wanted her rising.
And far below the streets—beneath the concrete, under the rusted tunnels no map dared show—something began to stir.
It had felt her power.
And it remembered her mother's blood.
End of Chapter 3