Sleep was a country to which Lena no longer had a passport. Every time she closed her eyes, she was back in the moon-drenched ruins of the château, a phantom gown of midnight blue silk rustling against her skin.
She could almost hear the ghost of a string quartet, a melody that vibrated in her bones with an agonizing familiarity.
Her hands would clench, trying to recapture the feel of cool, phantom fabric, only to find the coarse weave of her tactical gear or the cold sweat on her palms.
Rhysand’s words were a poison and a balm. “We danced here.” He had said it with such certainty, his voice a low thrum that bypassed her ears and settled deep in her chest.
She, the Order’s sharpest blade, had fled. Not from a monster, but from a memory that felt more real than the ground beneath her feet.
It had to be a trick. A psychic assault.
The Order had trained her for this, warned her of the sophisticated mental manipulations ancient vampires could employ. They could weave illusions, plant false memories, and prey on psychological weaknesses.
And yet… the sensory detail of it all felt too intimate, too specific. It felt like her own.
This uncertainty was a cancer, and it was eating her from the inside out. The Order demanded faith, absolute and unquestioning.
But faith couldn’t explain the scent of wisteria on a phantom breeze or the echo of a forgotten song.
For that, she needed knowledge. She needed proof.
The Order’s archives were located in the deepest sub-level of their Parisian headquarters, a sanctum sanctorum known as the Scriptorium. It was a place where history was not merely stored but curated, sanitized, and weaponized.
Access was restricted to the highest echelons—Masters and Chroniclers. Lena was neither.
But she knew the security protocols. She had helped design some of them.
Just after the second bell of the new day, when the corridors were at their quietest, she slipped from her quarters.
Dressed in the simple gray fatigues of a trainee to avoid notice, she moved like a wraith through the stone hallways, her footfalls silent.
She bypassed the main entrance to the Scriptorium, instead using a maintenance conduit whose biometric lock she had learned to fool with a looped thirty-second recording of a Chronicler’s heat signature.
The air that hit her as she eased the panel open was cold and dry, smelling of vellum, ozone from the servers, and something else—the deep, undisturbed dust of centuries.
The Scriptorium was a paradox.
Rows of humming servers containing petabytes of digitized data stood sentinel over shelves of ancient, leather-bound tomes that stretched into the darkness. The modern war against the night, filed neatly beside its medieval origins.
Her target was the primary server bank. Using a command-line interface she accessed through a hidden terminal, she began her search: de Valois, Rhysand.
The official file was immense, but frustratingly superficial. It read like a hagiography of a demon.
Centuries of kills attributed to him, alliances with monstrous cabals, a litany of atrocities. But the details were inconsistent.
A confirmed sighting in Vienna would be contradicted by a report placing him in Lisbon on the same night. Entire decades were missing, simply marked as Dormant/Location Unknown.
And then there were the redactions. Great black blocks of text, like tombstones marking dead information.
Someone had meticulously scrubbed the records, leaving only the image of a soulless predator. This wasn’t an intelligence file; it was propaganda.
Frustration gnawed at her.
This told her nothing of the creature who had whispered poetry in her ear, who had looked at her with an eternity of sorrow in his eyes. This wasn’t the vampire who knew the color of a dress she’d never worn.
Driven by an instinct she couldn’t name, she shifted her search away from official hunter reports and delved into the apocrypha—the digitized records of texts deemed heretical or unreliable by the modern Order.
These were journals of disgraced hunters, transcripts of vampire interrogations, and philosophical treatises on the nature of their enemy.
Most of it was nonsense, ramblings of men driven mad by what they’d seen. But tucked away in a cross-referenced file on “Vampiric Psychological Warfare,” she found it.
It was a scanned manuscript from the 16th century, penned by a Dominican friar named Inigo, who was later excommunicated for heresy.
He wrote of legends he had heard from the oldest vampires he had captured, creatures who spoke of laws that predated their own curse.
He described a concept the vampires called the vinculum animae—the soul bond.
“They believe,” Lena read, her eyes flying across the archaic script, “that in rare instances, two souls are forged as one in the crucible of creation. When one is turned to the night, the bond endures, a golden thread in an endless darkness. The immortal is thus cursed to seek its mortal twin across the ages, for the soul, they claim, returns to the world time and again, clothed in new flesh but ever the same in its essence.”
Reincarnation.
The word struck her with the force of a physical blow. Her breath hitched. It was the answer.
The insane, impossible answer that explained everything. The unnatural familiarity of his movements.
The shared knowledge of a poem. The memory of a dance.
This was the manipulation Voronin had warned her of. A lie so vast, so seductive, it could shatter a hunter’s resolve.
A fairy tale designed to disarm and destroy. It had to be.
But Friar Inigo’s account wasn’t the only one.
She found other references, scattered across centuries. A note from a Venetian hunter in 1782, describing a vampire who surrendered willingly, claiming the hunter was his long-lost love.
He was executed, of course. A censored interrogation log from the early 20th century, where a captured female vampire spoke of waiting for her mortal husband’s “return.”
The interrogator had noted: Subject is either delusional or employing a new, sentimentalist form of psychological manipulation. Recommend termination.
The Order didn’t just dismiss these ideas; they actively suppressed them. They buried them under labels of heresy and propaganda, ensuring that no hunter would ever consider a vampire capable of anything resembling love or loyalty.
It was a lie of omission, a carefully constructed pillar of their entire ideology.
“It is a beautiful and dangerous lie, isn’t it?”
The voice was quiet, laced with a familiar paternal disappointment.
Lena froze, her blood turning to ice. She didn’t have to turn around.
Master Voronin stood in the aisle behind her, his formidable frame cloaked in shadows, only his silver hair catching the low light of the monitor.
He hadn’t made a sound. He moved with the silence of a predator, the very thing he’d taught her to emulate.
Slowly, she rose from her chair, her face a mask of neutrality she could no longer feel. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic bird in a cage.
“Master Voronin.”
He stepped forward, his eyes not on her, but on the screen displaying Friar Inigo’s forbidden text. He didn’t seem angry. He seemed… weary.
“The oldest trick in their book, Lena. A poison whispered in the ear of the vulnerable. They find a hint of your past—a lost love, a dead family member—and weave a grand romance around it. A promise that death is not the end. It is their most potent weapon against those who grieve.”
“I was researching his tactics,” Lena said, her voice steady despite the tremor in her soul. “His file is full of contradictions. I needed to understand his methods of manipulation.”
Voronin’s gaze finally shifted to her, and his eyes, usually so warm and encouraging, were sharp and analytical. They dissected her, searching for the cracks Rhysand had made.
“And what have you concluded?”
“That he is attempting to exploit a psychological weakness. He invents a shared history to create a false intimacy.” She was reciting doctrine, words she had believed without question only a week ago.
Now they tasted like ash in her mouth.
A small, sad smile touched Voronin’s lips.
He reached out, his hand resting on her shoulder. His touch, which had always been a source of comfort and strength, now felt heavy, proprietary.
“Good. You see it for what it is. But curiosity, my child, can be as deadly as any vampire’s fang. These texts were sealed for a reason. They are tempting heresies that blur the line between hunter and monster. A line that must remain absolute.”
His thumb stroked her shoulder, a gesture that was meant to be reassuring but felt like a quiet threat.
“Rhysand de Valois is ancient, and his cruelty is matched only by his cunning. He chose you, Lena, because he senses your strength. To break the Order’s finest is a prize he covets. He will tell you whatever you want to hear. He will show you things that feel real. He will try to convince you that the monster has a heart.”
He leaned closer, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “Do not let him. Remember your vow. Remember what they are. Soulless.”
Every word was a perfectly calibrated tool, designed to reset her thinking, to reinforce her conditioning, to invalidate the visceral truth of her own experience. He wasn’t answering her unspoken questions; he was ordering her to stop asking them.
His paternal concern was a velvet glove on an iron fist. He wasn’t just a mentor; he was a gatekeeper, and she had just rattled the lock.
“I understand, Master,” she said, her gaze unwavering. It was the greatest lie she had ever told.
He held her gaze for a moment longer, a flicker of something unreadable—suspicion, perhaps even disappointment—in his eyes before it vanished. “See that you do,” he said, finally releasing her.
“Clear your research and go. Get some rest. You’ve been pushing yourself too hard.”
He turned and walked away, his footsteps echoing in the vast, silent Scriptorium.
Lena stood motionless until he was gone, listening to the soft click of the heavy door sealing her inside. She was alone again with the servers and the books, but the space no longer felt like a repository of knowledge.
It felt like a tomb.
Voronin hadn’t discovered her researching a target. He had discovered her questioning her faith. And his gentle warning was not an act of guidance. It was the first bar being locked into place on a cage she hadn’t realized she was in. She now knew two things with absolute certainty.
Rhysand was lying to her. Or the Order was.
And she no longer knew which was worse.