The cold stone of the gargoyle was a familiar comfort against Rhysand’s back. From his perch high on the southern façade of Sainte-Chapelle, the city of Paris unfurled below him like a tapestry of light and shadow.
For five centuries, this city had been his hunting ground, his sanctuary, and his prison. Tonight, it was merely a backdrop for his vigil.
His gaze was fixed on a lone figure moving with disciplined grace through the labyrinthine streets of the Île de la Cité.
Lena Petrova. The Order of Luminos’s finest.
A phantom in tactical gear, she moved with an economy of motion that was both beautiful and terrifying. He saw the hunter in the straight line of her spine, the constant, methodical sweep of her eyes, the way her hand never strayed far from the silver-bladed knife sheathed at her thigh.
But he also saw Isabeau.
It was there in the subtle cant of her head as she listened to the city’s nocturnal whispers, a gesture so achingly familiar it felt like a physical blow
It was in the stubborn set of her jaw, the same expression his Isabeau wore when she wrestled with a difficult brushstroke or argued politics with condescending courtiers.
These were not mere coincidences; they were echoes of a soul he knew better than his own. Faint, distorted, and buried under layers of brutal indoctrination, but they were there.
A sigh, thin as a ghost, escaped his lips. The air he drew in was thick with the scent of rain-washed cobblestone and the distant sweetness of a patisserie closing for the night.
He remembered a time when this very spot, this specific view, had been a source of shared joy. He and Isabeau had climbed the scaffolding during the chapel’s restoration, long after the original builders were dust, their laughter swallowed by the vastness of the night sky.
She had traced the constellations with a charcoal-smudged finger, her eyes shining with more brilliance than any of the celestial bodies she named.
“Promise me, Rhysand,” she had whispered, her breath warm against the chill of the evening. “Promise you will always find me.”
It was a lover’s fanciful plea, born from the mortal fear of an ending he would never have to face. He had made the promise with the casual certainty of an immortal who believed their time together was infinite.
A foolish, arrogant vow.
He had not understood the cruelty of fate, the viciousness of a world that would rip her from him, not once, but over and over again.
He had kept his vow.
He had found her as a scholar in Renaissance Florence, a fiery revolutionary in Saint-Domingue, a quiet nurse in the trenches of the Somme. In every life, some fragment of her soul recognized his.
A flicker of déja vu, a shared dream, an inexplicable pull. And in every life, he had lost her again to sickness, to accident, to the simple, brutal erosion of time.
But this time was different. This time, fate had twisted its knife. It had not just returned her to him in a mortal shell; it had forged her into his antithesis.
A hunter. A weapon designed to destroy his very existence.
“You are courting oblivion, old friend.”
The voice was a velvet rasp at his side, pulling him from the depths of his melancholy. Annelise materialized from the shadows, her form as elegant and deadly as black glass.
Her crimson hair was a slash of defiance against the muted tones of the cathedral, her ancient eyes holding a wisdom that predated the stones they stood upon.
“She is down there,” he stated, his voice low, not taking his eyes off the distant figure. “I can feel her.”
“You can feel an obsession,” Annelise corrected, her tone sharp but not unkind. She leaned against the parapet beside him, her gaze following his.
“You see a ghost. I see a hunter from the Order, armed with enough silver and sanctified weaponry to turn this entire city block into a monument of ash and regret. Our ash.”
“Her name is Lena,” Rhysand said, the name feeling foreign and wrong on his tongue. “And Isabeau is inside her.”
Annelise let out a soft, exasperated hiss.
“Isabeau died in a fever ward in 1918. Before that, she was lost to a carriage accident in Vienna. Before that—must I go on? Rhysand, you have mourned her a dozen times over. This… this is an abomination of fate. A cruel cosmic joke. To put her soul, if it even is her soul, into the vessel of our sworn enemy? It is a trap.”
“It is a test,” he countered, turning to face her fully. The stained-glass windows of the chapel behind him cast fractured jewels of ruby and sapphire light across his pale features.
“And I will not fail it.”
“Fail?” Annelise’s laugh was devoid of humor.
“You speak as if this is some chivalric quest. Look at her. She moves like a machine. Voronin has had her since she was a child. Her mind is a fortress of dogma and hatred. There is nothing of your artist left in that killer, Rhysand. Nothing.”
He knew she was right, logically. He had watched Lena Petrova for months, ever since his network had flagged her as a rising star within the Order.
He had seen her cold efficiency in Prague, the dispassionate way she had dispatched a nest of fledglings.
There was no hesitation, no remorse. Only the chilling perfection of her training.
The Order had done its work well, scouring her mind and replacing it with their doctrine. They had taught her to see him not as a man, but as a soulless monster.
“You are wrong,” he insisted, his voice a low growl of conviction.
“I have seen it. In her eyes, just for a moment, when she thought no one was watching. A flicker of… confusion. Of sorrow. The soul is still in there, Annelise. It is trapped. It is calling out.”
“Or you are projecting your own desperate hope onto a blank slate,” she shot back, her patience wearing thin.
“She is dangerous. More dangerous to you than any hunter before her, because you will hesitate. You will hold back, searching for a ghost in her eyes, and she will put a silver stake through your heart without a second thought. You cannot win this.”
“I am not trying to win,” he said, his voice softening with the weight of his ancient pain. “I am trying to awaken her. To remind her of who she is.”
Annelise moved closer, placing a cool, slender hand on his arm. Her touch was a rare gesture of comfort.
“And what if there is nothing to awaken? What if the indoctrination is total? What if this Lena Petrova is all that is left? You would be throwing away your existence for a memory. For a woman who, in this life, would see you burn with the rising sun and call it a victory.”
He looked down at her hand, then back to the street below. Lena had stopped beneath a gas lamp, its golden light illuminating the determined set of her face as she checked a map on a small, glowing device.
For a breathtaking instant, the light caught her profile, and the image of Isabeau at her easel, brow furrowed in concentration, superimposed itself over the hunter. The two women, the two lives, merged into one, and his resolve hardened into adamantine.
He remembered the feel of Isabeau’s hand in his, the scent of linseed oil and charcoal that always clung to her skin. He remembered the fierce intelligence in her eyes, her unyielding spirit.
The Order could train the body, poison the mind, and forge a weapon, but they could not extinguish a soul like hers. It was impossible. It had to be.
“Then I will die for a memory,” he said softly, turning his gaze back to Annelise. The resignation and deep-seated fear in her eyes pained him, but it did not sway him.
“She is my vow, Annelise. In this life and every other. I will not abandon her to them. Not now.”
Annelise held his gaze for a long moment, her own internal battle plain to see. She was a pragmatist, a survivor.
She had stood by him through revolutions, wars, and the quiet, agonizing decay of centuries. She saw his quest as a form of suicide, a madness born of grief.
But she also saw the unshakeable conviction in his eyes.
Finally, she withdrew her hand, a profound sadness settling over her features.
“You were always a romantic fool, Rhysand de Valois. It is what she loved in you. And it is what will get you killed.”
She said nothing more.
With a final, lingering look of warning, she dissolved back into the shadows she had emerged from, leaving him alone once more with the whispering wind and the weight of his impossible choice.
Below, Lena Petrova folded her device and continued her patrol, her path taking her toward the older, more winding streets of the Latin Quarter. She was a hunter on the prowl, searching for monsters in the dark.
Rhysand watched her go, a dangerous, fragile hope blooming in the barren wasteland of his heart.
Annelise was right. This was a trap. It was madness.
But for the first time in a very long time, he felt a flicker of purpose beyond mere survival.
He would not let the Order of Luminos have her. He would break their conditioning.
He would make her remember. He had to.
His vow demanded it. His soul depended on it.