Chapter 1 THE WEIGHT OF GLOVES

Elara Voss had not touched another person with bare skin in six years, three months, and eleven days.

She knew the number the way some people knew their own birthday. It was the last clean date she still owned.

The gloves were black, thin, and always on. She owned seven pairs. Two were already wearing thin at the fingertips. She checked them every morning the same way other people checked the weather. A single hole was enough to ruin everything.

Blackmere in late autumn was a city that specialized in cold rain and older secrets. The kind of place where people learned not to ask questions if they wanted to keep their teeth. Elara fit in the way a shadow fit under a door. She rented a room above a closed bookstore on the east side, paid in cash, and used a name that wasn’t hers. The landlady thought she was a night-shift cleaner at the hospital. The hospital thought nothing at all, because she had never stepped inside it.

Her real work was quieter.

She read people without touching them. The tilt of a shoulder, the way someone’s eyes flicked when they lied, the small tells that most of the city was too loud to notice. Sometimes she sold that information to the right kind of quiet buyer. Never enough to be noticed. Never enough to stay in one place longer than a few months.

The ability itself she treated like a loaded gun she had no choice but to carry.

One touch of bare skin and the future opened like a wound. She saw the exact moment a person would die. Not the years leading up to it. Not the reasons. Just the final frame: the blood, the fall, the last expression. Some deaths were quiet. Most were not. She had learned early that knowing the ending of a stranger’s story did not make her safer. It only made her responsible for a truth no one had asked her to carry.

The last time she had slipped, six years ago, a man in a winter coat had grabbed her wrist on a crowded train platform. The vision hit before she could pull away. She saw him six months later, on his knees in a parking garage, a bullet opening the back of his head. She had staggered. People had stared. The man had asked if she was all right. She had lied, pulled free, and run.

Three days later she left the city she had been living in and never used that name again.

Since then the rules had been simple.

Gloves. Distance. Movement.

Tonight the rain was heavier than usual. It came sideways, driven by a wind that smelled of the river and something older. Elara finished the small job she had taken (a quiet confirmation that a certain warehouse guard was skimming), collected the envelope of cash, and started the long walk back toward the east side. She kept to the narrower streets. Fewer cameras. Fewer people.

The old cathedral rose on her left, black against the wet sky. The alley behind it was a shortcut she had used before. Dark, quiet, and usually empty after midnight.

She paused at the mouth of it, checked the gloves one more time, and stepped in.

The rain was louder here, trapped between high walls. Her boots found the shallow river running down the center of the cobblestones. She kept her hands in her pockets and her head down.

She did not see the man until he was already standing in her path.