The horses in the stable went wild; they knew of the coming storm. Their hooves slammed against the wooden planks of their stalls, splinters falling like brittle rain. Snorting, rearing, the whites of their eyes gleamed in the flickering oil lamp light. The sky outside had been sullen all day, the kind of gray that felt more like a bruise than a color, and now the air reeked of copper and wet dirt.

But the storm wasn’t in the sky—not yet.

I stood at the stable door, leaning on the frame, feeling the cold wind pull at my collar like a hand. My cigarette was a stub now, the ash crumbling into the mud. She hadn’t come yet, but I knew she would. She always came when the storms did.

Her name was Isolde. Like the kind of name someone gives you when they expect you to break things. She’d told me once she was named after a dead queen who drank poison for love. I told her she drank too much herself, and she smiled like the devil had kissed her cheek. I don’t know what it was about her—if it was her or just the shadow of her, the weight of her presence that made everything feel like the first line of a murder confession.

The horses felt it too. She was the storm in their blood, the one they couldn’t outpace.

I heard her before I saw her. The click of boots on gravel. Then she was there, a shape cut from the night, hair wild, eyes sharper than glass. She wasn’t dressed for the cold, but Isolde never seemed to notice the things that could hurt her. “They’re restless,” she said, nodding toward the horses.

“They know you’re here.” My voice came out rough, like bark peeling from a tree.

She stepped closer, and the wind carried the smell of her—rain and the leather jacket she always wore, the one torn at the sleeve like it had survived a fight with something ancient and mean. She moved like the world owed her space, like every step she took was an apology from the earth.

“I need to ride,” she said, her voice low but steady. There was something in her eyes tonight, something darker than the usual defiance, sharper than her laugh that could cut through bone.

“Ride where?” I asked, though it didn’t matter. She never told me where she went. I never asked because the answers wouldn’t have been enough. The storm wasn’t outside, and it wasn’t coming. It was her, and it had been here all along.

“Anywhere.” She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Nowhere. Does it matter?”

I wanted to stop her, to say something that would tether her to this moment, to me, but I never knew how. Isolde was like smoke—always slipping through your fingers, always making you choke.

She reached for the reins of the black mare, the wildest of them all, the one no one dared to ride but her. The horse stomped and snorted but didn’t resist. They were kindred spirits, bound by whatever lived in the marrow of storms.

“Don’t go,” I said, though it came out like a whisper, like the last breath of a drowning man.

She swung up into the saddle, her body fluid, her movements sharper than a blade. She looked down at me, her face shadowed and unreadable, the way clouds hide the sun just before lightning strikes.

“Come with me,” she said.

I froze, the words catching in my chest like thorns. I thought of the world outside—vast, endless, cruel. And then I thought of her. She was all those things too.

But I was afraid. Afraid of storms I couldn’t outrun. Afraid of Isolde, of what it would mean to be close enough to touch her but never hold her.

She shook her head like she could see the war in my eyes. “You’re always afraid, aren’t you?”

The words hit like a whip. Before I could answer, she kicked the mare into motion, galloping out into the night. The stable doors swung wide, and the wind roared through, scattering hay and ash.

I stood there as the storm swallowed her whole.