The rain over Paris was a persistent, chilling whisper, turning the narrow alleys of the Latin Quarter into slick, obsidian mirrors. Lena Petrova moved through them like a wraith, her senses honed to a razor’s edge.
The dissonance from the library encounter still coiled in her gut, a cold knot of confusion she couldn’t unravel.
Every shadow seemed to hold the silhouette of Rhysand de Valois, every gust of wind seemed to carry his name: Isabeau.
She pushed the memory down, burying it with the force of her training. Doubt was a poison, Master Voronin had taught her, a weakness that monsters exploited. To cleanse it, she needed to reaffirm her purpose.
A simple patrol, he’d suggested.
A way to clear her head, to remind herself of the filth that festered in the city’s dark corners. And so she hunted, not for the ancient one, but for the lesser creatures, the rabble that preyed on the unsuspecting.
She needed a clean, righteous kill to silence the turmoil in her soul.
The air grew heavy, thick with the cloying stench of rot and stale blood. It was a familiar scent, the signature of feral vampires—those who had lost the last vestiges of their humanity to an insatiable thirst.
They were less cunning than their elder brethren, but more vicious, driven by a singular, rabid impulse.
Perfect. There was no moral ambiguity in destroying a rabid dog.
She flattened herself against the cold, damp brick of a dilapidated tenement, her twin silver-inlaid daggers feeling like natural extensions of her hands. Ahead, in a small, forgotten courtyard littered with overflowing refuse bins, she heard them.
Low, guttural snarls and the wet, tearing sound of flesh.
Four of them.
They were hunched over a fresh kill, their forms twisted and animalistic, shoulders hunched and spines curved.
This was her element. This was clarity.
Lena moved without a sound, a predator closing in. She dropped from the wall into the courtyard, landing in a crouch that barely disturbed the loose gravel.
The closest feral snapped its head up, blood dripping from its chin, its eyes a milky, vacant white. It hissed, baring elongated fangs, and lunged.
Lena met its charge with cold precision. She sidestepped, her left blade slicing across the creature’s hamstring.
As it stumbled, her right hand drove upward, the silver dagger plunging through its jaw and into its brain. It convulsed once and collapsed, already beginning to crumble into ash.
One down.
The other three turned, their feeding forgotten. They were faster than she had anticipated, a wiry, desperate strength in their emaciated limbs.
They swarmed her, not with tactics, but with overwhelming ferocity. She ducked under a wild slash of claws that screeched against the brick wall behind her, spun, and embedded a blade in another’s chest.
It staggered back, snarling, the silver burning it from within, but it wasn’t a killing blow.
She was good, but she was outnumbered. A clawed hand caught her shoulder, ripping through her tactical gear and drawing blood.
She grunted, the sharp pain a galvanizing shock. She kicked off the wall, using the momentum to dislodge the creature and create space, but she was being herded, backed into a corner where the alley dead-ended.
The acrid smell of their decay filled her lungs. Her heart hammered against her ribs—a steady, disciplined rhythm, but faster than she liked.
This was a mistake. A miscalculation.
They were stronger, more desperate than the usual strays. A cold sliver of genuine fear, an emotion she hadn’t felt in years, pierced through her training.
As two of them lunged in unison, a shadow detached itself from the rooftops above. It landed between her and her attackers with a silence that defied physics.
It was a fluid, impossible movement, a drop of ink falling into water.
It was Rhysand.
He wasn’t dressed in the archaic finery of the library. He wore modern, dark clothing that allowed for effortless movement, yet he still possessed an aura of timeless nobility.
He didn’t even glance at Lena. His entire focus was on the feral creatures, his expression one of weary, disdainful authority.
“Leave,” he commanded, his voice low and resonant, cutting through the hissing and snarling. It was not a plea; it was a royal decree.
The ferals, driven by raw instinct, were beyond reason.
They saw only another obstacle, another source of warm blood. The largest of them charged him.
What happened next was a blur of terrifying grace. Rhysand didn’t move like a brawler; he moved like a master swordsman, a dancer of death.
He sidestepped the feral’s clumsy attack, his hand shooting out to grip its throat. There was a sharp, final crack, and the creature fell, its neck bent at an unnatural angle.
He didn’t use a weapon. He didn’t need one.
Lena stood frozen for a half-second, her mind struggling to process the scene. Her target, the monster she was sworn to destroy, was defending her.
The remaining two ferals, enraged by the death of their packmate, attacked him together. Rhysand met them with an elegant, brutal economy of motion.
He was a whirlwind of controlled violence, his hands and feet striking with blinding speed. Yet, as he fought, Lena felt that same unnerving familiarity from the library.
It was in the way he pivoted, the way he anticipated an enemy’s lunge. It was a fighting style she instinctively understood.
Without conscious thought, her body reacted.
As Rhysand dispatched one feral, the other spun to attack his exposed back. Lena surged forward, her daggers a silver flash.
She drove her blade into the creature’s spine, while Rhysand, without looking, swept its legs out from under it. They had moved in perfect, deadly sync, as if they had fought side-by-side for a thousand years.
The last feral dissolved into a cloud of gray dust that the rain quickly turned to mud.
Silence descended upon the courtyard, broken only by the patter of the rain and Lena’s ragged breathing.
She stood a few feet from Rhysand, her daggers held ready, her knuckles white. Her mind was a battlefield.
He saved you.
He’s a monster. He fought with you.
He’s your target. He protected you.
Rhysand turned to face her. His dark eyes held no malice, only a deep, ancient sorrow.
He was breathing steadily, his composure absolute, but she saw a flicker of something else—vulnerability. He had deliberately placed himself in this position, she realized.
This wasn’t a chance encounter. This was a message.
And then she saw it.
A dark, ragged tear in his side, oozing a black, viscous fluid. As he had spun to face the final feral, Lena’s own blade, the one she’d plunged into the creature’s back, had sliced through it and caught him.
He had shielded her, and in doing so, had taken a wound from her own silver.
He pressed a hand to the injury, a grimace of pain finally breaking his stoic mask. Silver poisoning was agonizing for his kind, a slow, burning decay.
“Why?” Lena’s voice was a harsh rasp, barely audible. “Why did you help me?”
He took a half-step toward her, then stopped, as if held by an invisible leash. The rain plastered his dark hair to his forehead, and in the dim light, he looked less like a predator and more like a tragic, fallen prince.
“Because it is my nature,” he said softly, “to protect what is mine.”
Her hunter’s instinct screamed at the possessive claim, but another, deeper part of her—the part that had recognized the scent of parchment and charcoal—stirred in response.
He winced, leaning against the damp brick wall for support. His strength was fading. The wound was worse than it looked. He met her gaze, and the intensity in his eyes held her captive.
He whispered, his voice faint, laced with pain. “The stars remember what the dawn forgets…“
The words struck her not as a sentence, but as a key turning a lock deep within her mind. The phrase was achingly familiar, a phantom on the tip of her tongue.
Without volition, without even understanding why, she heard her own voice, soft and strange, complete the verse.
“…but we were born of twilight.”
The moment the words left her lips, the world tilted on its axis. It wasn’t a memory, not like the flash in the library.
It was a feeling—an absolute, unshakeable certainty. She knew those words.
She knew them in her bones, in the very marrow of her soul. Where had they come from?
Rhysand’s pained expression softened into one of profound, heartbreaking hope. A faint, sad smile touched his lips.
It was the look of a man who had waited centuries for a single drop of rain in a vast desert and had finally felt it on his skin.
“Isabeau,” he breathed, the name a prayer.
Then, before she could react, before she could raise her blades or demand an explanation, he pushed off the wall and melted back into the deepest shadows of the alley. He was there one moment, a solid, wounded presence, and gone the next.
Vanished.
Lena was left alone in the rain-soaked courtyard, surrounded by piles of vampire ash and the lingering scent of blood and decay. She looked at her silver dagger, the one that had wounded him, and saw a smear of his black blood on the blade.
He had saved her life.
He had fought beside her as if they were two halves of a whole. He had been wounded by her own blade while protecting her.
And he had whispered a line of poetry that she, somehow, knew the end to.
Her black-and-white world, the rigid, unyielding dogma of the Order of Luminos, had not just been cracked—it had been shattered.
The monster wasn’t a monster. The enemy was a protector.
The soulless creature was filled with a soul-crushing sorrow she could almost feel herself.
Standing in the cold Parisian rain, Lena Petrova, the Order’s finest hunter, felt the foundations of her entire existence crumble into dust.
And for the first time, she was terrified not of the monsters in the dark, but of the truth he was trying to show her.