The silence in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal was a living thing. It was thick and heavy, smelling of decaying paper, cracked leather, and the patient dust of centuries.
For three nights, Lena had stalked this place, a ghost in the hallowed halls of knowledge, learning its rhythms, its shadows, its very breath.
She had tracked Rhysand de Valois across half of Paris, from the opulent haunts of the city’s elite to the forgotten crypts beneath its streets.
Every trail, every whisper, every kill he made—precise, almost surgical—led her here. To this secluded sanctuary of sleeping words.
It was the perfect hunting ground.
From her perch on a narrow gallery overlooking the main reading room, Lena surveyed her work with cold satisfaction. The room was a cathedral of books, its soaring walls lined with shelves that disappeared into the gloom above.
Moonlight, filtered through a high, arched window, cut a swath of silver across the floor, illuminating motes of dust dancing in the still air. It was beautiful, she supposed, in a dead, sepulchral way.
But to her, it was simply a kill box.
Her trap was an elegant fusion of ancient lore and modern technology. Micro-filament tripwires, nearly invisible in the dim light, crisscrossed the floor below.
They were laced with silver and connected to a series of compact UV projectors hidden within the ornate woodwork of the shelves.
A triggered wire would not only activate the searing ultraviolet light—anathema to his kind—but also release spring-loaded stakes of consecrated ash wood from hidden recesses in the floor. It was a web of death, designed to cripple, disorient, and contain.
She was the spider at its center, her silver-plated knives gleaming softly at her hips, her custom-made handgun holstered snugly beneath her arm.
She had studied the archives on Rhysand de Valois for months.
Ancient. Powerful. A creature of intellect and strategy, not just brute force.
The Order’s files painted him as a plague, a shadow that had stretched across Europe for over five hundred years.
Master Voronin called him the ultimate test. Lena called him her purpose. He was a monster wearing the skin of an aristocrat, and she would unmask him.
A subtle shift in the air, a drop in the ambient temperature so faint a normal human would miss it, signaled his arrival. Lena’s breath hitched, her heart giving a single, hard thump against her ribs.
She melted deeper into the shadows, her body taut, every sense screaming with anticipation.
He materialized not from the grand entrance, but from the deepest shadows at the far end of the room, as if the darkness itself had given birth to him. He didn’t stalk or creep; he simply was.
He moved with a liquid grace that defied his tall, imposing frame, his long dark coat swirling around him like smoke. He stopped in the center of the room, directly in the path of the moonlight, and tilted his head back, his gaze sweeping the vaulted ceiling.
Lena’s finger twitched near the manual trigger for the trap. Not yet. Let him step further in. Let him feel secure.
But he didn’t move. He stood perfectly still, his profile etched in silver and shadow. There was a profound stillness about him, a melancholy that seemed to radiate into the cold air.
He wasn’t scanning for threats. He was… listening. Remembering.
Lena felt an illogical pang of irritation. This was not the behavior of a cornered beast.
He took a single, deliberate step forward.
Now.
Lena’s thumb slammed the trigger.
The response was instantaneous. A chorus of clicks echoed in the vast room as the mechanisms engaged.
The UV projectors roared to life, flooding the chamber with a harsh, violet glare that made the shadows writhe. The stakes shot up from the floorboards with vicious, pneumatic hisses.
It should have been a storm of light and wood and silver he could not possibly escape.
But he was already gone.
Lena watched, her mind struggling to process the sheer impossibility of his movement. He hadn’t just dodged.
He had flowed through the trap, a river of shadow navigating a field of stones. He sidestepped a wire an instant before it tightened, his hand brushing past a stake that erupted where his heart had been a fraction of a second earlier.
He twisted, his coat flaring, evading a beam of UV light with an acrobat’s grace that was too fluid, too perfect.
And through it all, something inside Lena screamed in recognition. It wasn’t a thought; it was a primal, physical sensation, a ghost of muscle memory.
The way he shifted his weight, the precise angle of his turn, the economic arc of his evasion—it was all unnaturally familiar. It was the counter-move to an attack she hadn’t yet made, the parry to a thrust she hadn’t yet thrown.
It felt like watching a reflection of her own combat style, honed and perfected over a thousand lifetimes.
Before she could fire her weapon, he was gone from the kill box, standing untouched on the other side. He moved towards the gallery, not with aggression, but with an unhurried, inexorable purpose.
He wasn’t running; he was closing the distance.
Lena dropped silently from her perch, landing in a crouch on the polished floor ten yards in front of him. She rose slowly, drawing the matched silver blades from her hips, their edges humming in the charged air.
“Impressive,” she said, her voice a low, steady threat. “But the show is over.”
Rhysand stopped.
The moonlight caught the sharp planes of his face, illuminating eyes that were not red, as the legends claimed, but a dark, haunted gray. There was no malice in them.
Only a profound, shattering weariness and something else… something that looked unnervingly like recognition.
He didn’t raise his hands to fight. He simply watched her, his gaze tracing the lines of her face as if memorizing a beloved piece of art.
“You are as fierce as I remember,” he said, his voice a low baritone that resonated not in her ears, but in her bones.
It was a voice from a half-forgotten dream, rich with an accent she couldn’t place.
“I’m the last thing you’ll ever remember,” she snarled, shifting into a combat stance.
“No,” he said softly, a flicker of pain crossing his features. “I will remember you for eternity. I always have.”
He took another step, utterly defenseless, his hands open at his sides. He was ignoring the blades, ignoring the threat.
He was focused solely on her. “I will not fight you.”
Lena’s resolve wavered for a fraction of a second.
This was wrong. Monsters fought back.
They snarled and clawed and revealed their true, demonic nature. They didn’t stand before you with the quiet despair of a saint facing his executioner.
It was a trick. A psychological ploy.
“Then you will die,” she promised, preparing to lunge.
He shook his head slowly. “You won’t kill me. Not yet.” And then he said the word that broke the world.
“Isabeau.”
The name struck her with the force of a physical blow.
It wasn’t just a sound. It was a key turning a lock deep within her, a lock she never knew existed.
The world tilted on its axis. The air grew thick, and the scent of the library—the dusty paper and aging leather—was suddenly, violently replaced.
She smelled charcoal. Rich, earthy, and sharp.
She smelled old parchment, a clean, fibrous scent that was different from the decay around her.
For a dizzying, terrifying second, she wasn’t Lena Petrova, hunter of the Order, standing in a Parisian library. She was someone else, somewhere else.
A phantom sensation ghosted across her fingertips—the rough, gritty texture of a charcoal stick. A sliver of an image flashed behind her eyes: a man’s jawline, strong and shadowed, taking form on a heavy sheet of paper under the guidance of her own hand.
The scent was everywhere, in her hair, on her skin, the intimate perfume of creation.
The vision shattered as quickly as it came, leaving her gasping, her head reeling. The silver knives in her hands felt impossibly heavy.
Her stance, a second ago so perfect, was broken. Her muscles had forgotten their purpose.
What was that? A psychic assault? A glamour meant to disorient her?
But it had felt too real. Too intimate.
It felt like a memory. Her memory.
Rhysand saw it.
He saw the flicker of confusion in her eyes, the minute faltering of her grip. His expression softened with a sorrow so profound it was almost beautiful.
“It is still there,” he whispered, more to himself than to her. “Buried beneath all of this.”
That moment of déja vu, that sliver of a second when her entire identity had fractured, was all he needed.
He didn’t run. He simply receded.
One moment he was there, a solid presence in the moonlight; the next, he was dissolving into the deep shadows pooling at the base of the towering shelves. He moved with the silence of the grave, and in two heartbeats, he was gone.
Lena stood frozen, her blades still held in a useless offensive posture. The projectors hummed, casting her in their sterile purple light.
The sprung stakes stood from the floor like a field of broken teeth. Her perfect trap was a ruin, and her target had escaped without a scratch.
And she had let him.
A wave of fury, hot and cleansing, washed through her, chasing away the last vestiges of the phantom memory. She straightened up, her knuckles white on the hilts of her knives.
She was furious at him for his tricks, for his impossible grace, for the name he had dared to speak.
But a deeper, colder rage was directed at herself. She had hesitated.
She, Lena Petrova, the Order’s sharpest weapon, had frozen on the field of battle because of a sound, a scent.
She had failed.
She forced her muscles to relax, sheathing her blades with a decisive snap. She stood alone in the vast, silent library, the smell of dust and old paper returning, now tainted by a phantom scent of charcoal she couldn’t erase.
The name he had called her echoed in the hollow spaces of the room and, more terrifyingly, in the new, hollow space inside of her.
Isabeau.