The office smelled like burnt coffee and toner. Kael Valdris, twenty-seven, tied half-mast, stared at the email he typed three times and deleted twice.
Subject: *I think I love you.*
His thumb hovered.
Send.
The elevator dinged. Mia from accounting stepped out. Ponytail flicked like a cat's tail. She smiled the same smile that killed him six times before. Six crushes. Six confessions. Six heart attacks that felt like lightning in his ribs. This was the seventh.
He hit send.
The world tilted.
His chest caved inward. A fist of pressure crushed lungs that forgot how to breathe. The monitor blurred. Mia's reply popped up. *Meet me on the roof?* The letters swam red as arterial spray. He stumbled. He knocked over the water cooler. Cold soaked his slacks.
Seventh time. Same curse.
He remembered the first. High school. Sakura under cherry blossoms. Second. College bar. Lena laughed at his dumb joke. Each death is faster. Sharper. Each reincarnation is a blank slate. Until the women found him again. Older. Ageless. Eyes burning with recognition.
The stairwell door banged. Mia's heels clicked closer.
"Kael?"
He tried to stand. Blood dripped from his nose. It pattered on the carpet like rain. The pain was exquisite. Love as a blade twisting slowly.
She knelt. Her perfume hit him like a drug. Jasmine and ozone. "You're bleeding."
"I love you," he rasped. The words scraped his throat raw.
Her face changed. No surprise. Memory.
The lights flickered. The building groaned. Somewhere, reality tore open a seam.
Kael's vision tunnelled. He saw the Tower. Endless spires of cloud and brass. A staircase of worlds spiralled into starless dark. At the apex, a veil shimmered. Thin as silk. Thick as fate.
Mia's hand touched his cheek. Her skin was cold. Immortal.
"You always say that," she whispered. "And you always die."
His heart stuttered. Boom. Boom. *Stop*.
The office dissolved into white.
---
He woke screaming in a cradle of sky.
Wind howled. Brass gears the size of city blocks ground overhead. They turned slowly. An airship loomed above. *The Storm Kraken*. Sails crackled with bottled lightning.
A woman's voice, rough as sailcloth. "Quit yer bawlin', cabin boy. Swab the deck or I'll feed ye to the clouds."
Kael blinked. Tiny hands. Bare feet on cold iron. He was one year old. Maybe two. The curse's cruel joke. Always reborn younger. Always climbing.
The woman leaned over the crib. Scarlet coat. Eyepatch. Hair wild as stormsurf. Captain Ravenna.
His first Immortal Lady.
She didn't recognise him yet. Not with these eyes. But the kraken tattoo on her wrist pulsed faintly. A brand he left lifetimes ago.
Kael gripped the cradle's edge. His voice came out in a squeak. "Up."
Ravenna snorted. "Bossy runt." She hoisted him against her hip. The motion pressed his face to the curve of her breast. Warm. Salt-slick. Alive. His infant body stirred in ways it shouldn't. The curse laughed in his blood.
Below, the sky cracked open into an abyss. Floor 1 had begun.
He would grow fast. Curse-fueled puberty in weeks. He would seduce her again. Fuse their souls in thunder and sweat. He would die in her arms under the aurora.
The Tower would wait.
108 veils. 108 women. One shattered heart at a time.
Ravenna set him on the deck. "Name's Ravenna. You'll earn yours, boy."
Kael smiled. The teeth are too sharp for a child.
"I already have."
The air tasted of rust and ozone. Silence thick as wool wrapped the gears.