Chapter 262: Encountering Yvette
Owen's POV
The streets of the human world always felt heavier somehow. Not in gravity—but in weight of memory. Of regret. Of stories that should've stayed fiction but somehow bled into the very skin I now wore.
I wasn't Owen Yates.
Not the one who walked this world before me. Not the one who fell in love, got betrayed, divorced, and disappeared.
But everyone here believed I was him. And I planned to keep it that way.
The wind whipped against my coat as I stepped onto the familiar cracked sidewalk leading to what used to be Owen's childhood home. It was long abandoned, the paint on the fence peeling like dead skin, the garden overgrown. But hidden beneath the debris was what I came for—a stash of old journals the original Owen had buried beneath a loose floorboard in the back shed. I uncovered them with careful hands, each page holding fragments of the man I now had to pretend to be.
His pain. His dreams. His failures.
He was a good man. Too good for the fate he was dealt. And now, it was my burden to finish what he started—but on my own terms.
As I closed the last journal, footsteps echoed behind me.
I froze.
A presence I hadn't felt in months flooded the air—familiar, sharp, dangerous.