The kiss had been a cataclysm, a fracturing of the world she knew. It was not the predatory act of a monster but a desperate, searing connection that had bypassed every wall she had ever built. When Lena shoved Rhysand away, the air crackled with the aftershock, thick with the scent of dust, old canvas, and a charge of ozone that felt ripped from a lightning strike. The charcoal stick, fallen from her fingers, lay broken on the floorboards like a snapped bone.
She was breathing in harsh, ragged gasps, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. Her hand flew to her lips, not in disgust, but in a kind of horrified wonder. They still tingled, branded by his touch. In that single moment, a lifetime of training, of unwavering conviction, had been annihilated.
“What was that?” she demanded, her voice a low, dangerous tremor. It was the voice of a hunter, but the question was that of a lost woman.
Rhysand stood perfectly still, his dark eyes holding a universe of pain and something that looked terrifyingly like hope. He didn’t move to close the distance she had created. He simply watched her, his expression one of profound, centuries-old sorrow. “It was the truth,” he said, his voice soft, yet it resonated in the silent studio, vibrating through the floor and up into her bones.
“The truth?” Lena let out a harsh, broken laugh. “You call that the truth? You lure me here, you fill my head with poetry and phantoms, you trick me into… into this!” She gestured wildly at the unfinished portrait, at the charcoal dust on her own fingers, at the space between them that still hummed with impossible energy. “This is manipulation. A game.”
“It is no game, Isabeau.”
The name struck her like a physical blow. Her knees weakened. The scent of old parchment and charcoal from the library flooded her senses again, stronger this time, a memory so potent it felt like a drowning.
“Stop calling me that,” she snarled, forcing strength back into her limbs. Her hand instinctively drifted towards the silver knife sheathed at her thigh. It was a reflex, an anchor in the storm of confusion. “My name is Lena. Lena Petrova. Hunter of the Order of Luminos.”
“That is the name they gave you in this life,” he said, taking a careful step forward. “It is a cage they built around your soul, but it is not who you are.”
Lena’s mind raced, scrambling for the logic her training provided. Vampires lie. They weave illusions from half-truths. They prey on emotional weakness. Voronin’s voice was a steady drumbeat in her head, a mantra of indoctrination. But it was fading, drowned out by the thunder of her own heart.
“I want the truth,” she said, the words torn from her throat. It was not a request. It was a demand, the last desperate plea of a woman standing on the edge of an abyss. “All of it. No more riddles, no more poetry. Tell me what this is, or I swear by the Light, I will end you right here.”
The threat was hollow, and they both knew it. She could have killed him a dozen times over by now.
Rhysand’s shoulders sagged, not in defeat, but in weary resignation. He looked ancient in that moment, the weight of ages pressing down on him. “You are Isabeau de Valois,” he began, his voice imbued with a raw, aching reverence. “You were an artist, a dreamer, a woman with a soul so bright it defied the darkness of the world. You were born in this city, five hundred years ago. And you were my love. My wife.”
Every word was a chisel, chipping away at the foundations of her reality. Lena shook her head, a violent, jerky motion of denial. “No. That’s impossible.”
“We loved each other with a depth that transcended life and death,” he continued, his gaze unwavering, pinning her in place. “When you died, I made a vow. I swore I would find you again. I didn’t understand how, only that I must.”
He gestured to the room around them, to the canvases shrouded in white cloths. “And I did. Your soul… it always comes back. It is reborn, again and again, into a new body, a new life, with no memory of what came before. Reincarnation.”
Lena stared at him, her mind reeling. Reincarnation. A concept from forbidden texts, dismissed by the Order as vampiric propaganda designed to sow confusion. But the word resonated with a terrifying familiarity.
“I have watched over you in every lifetime,” he confessed, and the vulnerability in his voice was devastating. “As a scholar in Florence. A musician in Vienna. A revolutionary here in Paris. Each time, I tried to reach you. Sometimes, you remembered small things. A piece of a song, the feel of my hand in yours. But you always lived a mortal life, and I always lost you.”
His eyes clouded with a pain so deep it seemed bottomless. “This life, however… this life is different. They found you first. The Order.”
“The Order saved me,” she spat, the words tasting like ash in her mouth. “They found me as an orphan, gave me a purpose.”
“They found Isabeau’s soul in the body of a hunter and saw the perfect weapon,” Rhysand corrected, his voice hardening with a cold fury. “They twisted your light into a tool for their darkness. They indoctrinated you, conditioned you, turned you against the very thing you once loved above all else.” He looked at her, his expression breaking. “They turned you against me.”
The air left Lena’s lungs. The entire studio seemed to tilt, the moonlight slanting at a sickening angle. It was too much. A 500-year love. Reincarnation. A vow. A lie that was her entire life. Her mind refused to process it, choosing instead to fight.
“You’re a liar!” she screamed, the sound echoing in the rafters. She finally drew her knife, the silver gleaming in the pale light. The familiar weight of it was a comfort, the only solid thing in a world that had turned to smoke. “This is a master manipulation! You found records, you researched me, you planted every clue for me to find! The library, the château, this… this shrine!”
She advanced on him, the blade held forward, her body falling into a combat stance honed by a thousand hours of practice. “You want me to believe I’m your long-lost love so I’ll hesitate? So I’ll drop my guard? You monsters will do anything to survive.”
Rhysand didn’t flinch. He didn’t raise his hands to defend himself. He simply stood there, letting her close the distance until the tip of her blade was a mere inch from his heart.
“Look at your hand, Lena,” he whispered.
Her eyes flickered down. Her right hand, the one not holding the knife, was still dusted with charcoal. The ghost of a memory surfaced—the feel of the stick in her fingers, the familiar scrape against the paper, the instinct that guided her hand to complete the stroke on his portrait. An instinct that was not her own.
“Did I manipulate that?” he pressed, his voice gentle but relentless. “Did I guide your hand across the paper? Did I put the end of that poem on your tongue? Did I force you to feel my heart break when you kissed me?”
Her resolve crumbled. The knife in her hand felt impossibly heavy. The arm holding it began to shake. Her indoctrination was at war with the undeniable evidence of her own senses, her own soul. The memories weren’t his implants; they were her own, bubbling up from a place too deep to deny. The scent of parchment. The color of a gown. The phantom touch of fabric. The raw, gut-wrenching certainty that she knew him.
She could no longer ignore it, but she was not, could not be, ready to accept it. To accept his truth would mean her entire life—her purpose, her mentor, her very identity—was a lie. It would mean she was bound to one of the creatures she had vowed to exterminate. It was an impossible choice, a paradox that threatened to tear her mind apart.
With a strangled cry of anguish and rage, she let the knife fall. It clattered onto the floorboards, the sound unnaturally loud in the suffocating silence. She couldn’t kill him. But she couldn’t stay.
She backed away, stumbling over a discarded canvas. Her eyes, wide with terror, were locked on his. “Stay away from me,” she whispered, the words a fractured plea.
Then she turned and fled.
She burst out of the studio and into the cold Parisian night, running without direction, without thought. She didn’t notice the cobblestones beneath her feet or the distant sounds of the city. Her entire world had been reduced to the chaotic, screaming war inside her own head.
Rhysand was a monster. Rhysand was her love.
Voronin was her mentor. Voronin was her liar.
She was a hunter. She was a ghost.
She ran until her lungs burned and her legs ached, but she couldn’t escape the truth she now carried. She was at a point of no return. She could never go back to the Order and pretend she didn’t know. She could never go back to Rhysand and accept who she might be. She was utterly, terrifyingly alone, trapped between a life that was a lie and a truth that was impossible to bear. She was no longer a hunter. She was a ghost, haunting the ruins of her own life.