The cobblestones of Montmartre were slick with a fine mist, reflecting the jaundiced glow of the streetlamps. Each step Lena took was a conscious act of defiance against a lifetime of training. She followed Rhysand up the winding, narrow streets, the Sacré-Cœur a ghostly white crown against the ink-black sky. He moved with a liquid silence that her own disciplined stealth could never quite replicate, a predator at ease in his natural hunting ground. But tonight, he wasn’t hunting. He was leading. And she, his sworn enemy, was following.
The conversation she’d overheard still echoed in her mind, a venomous whisper of Project Helios and blade-tips glowing with artificial sunlight. Voronin’s calm, paternal voice discussing genocide had fractured the very foundation of her world. Now, every certainty was suspect, every mission a potential lie. That fissure of doubt had become a chasm, and into that void, Rhysand had stepped. He hadn’t forced her, only offered a destination. “There is something more of her I want you to see,” he’d said, his voice low and devoid of trickery. And Lena, adrift and desperate for a truth—any truth—had agreed.
He stopped before a dilapidated building tucked between a brightly lit bistro and a darkened gallery. Its facade was grim with age, the paint peeling like sunburnt skin. An iron-wrought door, rusted at the hinges, stood as a silent guardian to the decay within. Rhysand produced an old, ornate key, the metal gleaming dully in the lamplight.
“Where are we?” Lena asked, her hand resting instinctively on the hilt of the silver knife at her belt. Her voice was sharp, a shield against the unnerving sense of anticipation coiling in her gut.
“A place of creation,” he answered, turning the key. The lock protested with a groan of disuse before clicking open. “A place she loved.”
He pushed the door inward, and a wave of trapped air rolled out to meet them—the scent of dust, of time itself, layered with the ghosts of turpentine, linseed oil, and something else… something dry and earthy she couldn’t quite place. Rhysand stepped inside, not turning to see if she would follow. He knew she would.
The space was a cavern of shadows, vast and open, with a ceiling that soared two stories high. Moonlight, thick and silver, streamed through a massive, grime-caked skylight, illuminating a world frozen in time. Canvases draped in white cloths stood like shrouded figures in a silent congregation. An easel held a blank, waiting canvas. Jars filled with desiccated brushes stood on a paint-splattered worktable. It wasn’t a ruin like the château; it was a sanctuary, perfectly preserved in its abandonment.
“She called this her nest,” Rhysand’s voice was a soft murmur, careful not to disturb the profound stillness. “High above the city, where she could watch the world and capture it.”
Lena’s gaze swept the room, and a strange ache bloomed in her chest. It was the same feeling she’d had in the library, a sense of homecoming to a place she’d never been. “Isabeau’s studio,” she stated, the name feeling foreign and yet intimately familiar on her tongue.
He nodded, his silhouette a dark, sorrowful shape against the moonlit window. “She spent more time here than anywhere else. It was the only place her soul was truly bare.”
He moved toward a heavy wooden artist’s chest in the corner of the room. Lena watched, her body tensed, her mind a battlefield. This is a manipulation, Voronin’s voice warned in her head. He is preying on your confusion. But her heart beat a frantic, traitorous rhythm, hungry for the very poison she was meant to resist.
Rhysand knelt and traced a finger along the carved edge of the chest’s lid. He didn’t open it. Instead, he pressed a knot in the wood on the side panel. With a soft click, a false bottom sprang loose, revealing a shallow, hidden compartment. From it, he carefully lifted a large, leather-bound portfolio.
He carried it to the central worktable, laying it down in a beam of moonlight. The leather was cracked with age, the ties brittle. He undid them with a reverence that felt almost holy.
“Her formal paintings were for the world,” he said, opening the portfolio. “These… these were just for her. And for me.”
He slid out the first sheet of heavy, cream-colored paper. It was a sketch, rendered in charcoal, of a peregrine falcon just as it took flight, its wings a blur of powerful, kinetic strokes. The next was a study of rain on a Parisian street, the reflections in the puddles captured with impossible detail. There were hands, gnarled and old; a child’s face, laughing; a storm gathering over the Seine. Each image was alive, imbued with an emotion that transcended the simple medium.
Lena found herself stepping closer, drawn by an invisible current. She reached out, her fingers hovering over a sketch of a wilting rose, the charcoal smudged to show the delicate decay of the petals.
“Your hands,” Rhysand said, his voice barely a whisper. “They have the same grace. I’ve seen it when you hold a blade. The same focus. The same certainty of line.”
Her hand recoiled as if burned. “I am a hunter. She was an artist.” The words were meant to be a dismissal, a wall between them, but they came out sounding like a question.
He didn’t argue. He simply turned to the last sketch in the portfolio. He hesitated for a moment, his own ageless features tight with a pain she was beginning to understand. Then he revealed it.
It was him.
A portrait, but unfinished. He was younger, or at least he looked it. His hair was longer, wilder, and his expression was one of unguarded affection, a soft smile playing on his lips. The likeness was perfect, capturing not just his features but the ancient soul behind his eyes. It was a look of pure love. But the artist had stopped halfway through sketching his jawline, leaving a faint, guiding line that trailed off into nothing. One side of his face was a masterpiece of loving detail; the other was a ghostly suggestion.
Lena stared, her breath catching in her throat. The dry, earthy scent she’d noticed earlier intensified. It was the smell of the charcoal itself. Rhysand picked up a single, unbroken stick of willow charcoal from a dusty tray on the table. He didn’t look at her, but held it out.
“She could never quite capture the line of my jaw to her satisfaction,” he said softly. “She said it held too much stubbornness. She threw this piece down in a fit of frustration, vowing to finish it the next day.” He paused, the weight of centuries pressing down on the silence. “The next day never came for her.”
Lena looked from the unfinished portrait to the stick of charcoal in his outstretched hand. A war raged within her. To take it would be to accept a connection she was trained to deny. To refuse would be a lie, a betrayal of the undeniable pull she felt.
Her hand moved, seemingly of its own accord. Her fingers closed around the charcoal.
The moment she touched it, the world tilted. It wasn’t a memory, not a full scene like in the ballroom. It was a violent, sensory explosion. The phantom weight of the charcoal, familiar and perfect in her grasp. The rough texture of the paper beneath her knuckles. The scent of dust and her own skin. And an overwhelming flood of emotion—frustration, fierce determination, and a deep, abiding love that made her soul ache. The line. The curve of his jaw. She knew it better than she knew her own face. It was wrong. It needed to be fixed.
Before her conscious mind could rebel, before the Order’s doctrines could scream their warnings, her hand moved to the paper. With a single, fluid stroke, her fingers guided the charcoal along the faint line, deepening it, giving it the perfect, subtle curve of strength and shadow that was missing. The stroke was bold, certain, and unerring. It completed him.
Her hand fell away. The sound of her own ragged gasp echoed in the silent studio. She stared at the finished line, a perfect continuation of a 500-year-old sketch. It was her work. She knew it in her bones, in her very soul.
Rhysand’s gaze was fixed on her, his eyes burning with a desperate, triumphant fire. He took a step closer, and then another, until he stood directly in front of her. He raised a hand, his cold fingers gently brushing the charcoal dust from her cheek.
“Isabeau,” he breathed, the name a prayer.
And in that moment, all the walls she had so carefully constructed crumbled to dust. The conditioning, the training, the years of hatred—all of it was incinerated by the raw, undeniable truth of what she had just done. He was not a monster. He was the man in the portrait. He was hers.
She surged forward, her hands fisting in the fabric of his coat, and crashed her lips against his.
The kiss was not gentle. It was a desperate, frantic collision, a drowning woman’s gasp for air. It was five hundred years of his longing and a lifetime of her confusion finding a single, explosive point of release. His arms wrapped around her, pulling her tight against him as if he could physically merge their souls and end their separation forever. It was everything her training had warned her against—a monster’s touch, a predator’s embrace—but it felt like the only truth left in the world. It felt like coming home.
For a breathless instant, she gave in completely, surrendering to the feeling, to the man, to the memory that was no longer a fragment but a living thing inside her.
Then, the conditioning snapped back into place like a whip crack.
What are you doing? The thought was cold, sharp, and brutal. Voronin’s face flashed in her mind. The glowing blue of the Helios serum. The bodies of the vampires she’d slain. This is your enemy. The soulless thing you vowed to destroy.
A guttural sound of horror and self-loathing escaped her lips. With all her strength, she shoved him, breaking the kiss with a violent wrench. He stumbled back, surprise and hurt flashing in his eyes.
“No,” she panted, her body trembling, her mind tearing itself in two. She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth as if to scrub away his touch, to erase the feeling. “This is a trick. A lie.”
But even as she said the words, she saw the finished portrait over his shoulder. She saw the charcoal dust on her own fingers. The proof.
“Lena…” he began, his voice laced with pain.
“Stay away from me,” she snarled, taking a step back, her hand flying to her knife. The familiar weight of the weapon was a desperate anchor in a sea of chaos.
Her duty. Her vow to the Order. That was real. That was her life. This… this artist’s soul that had woken inside her for a terrifying, beautiful moment… it could not be. It would destroy her.
Torn between the man who held her past and the Order that had defined her present, Lena stood poised on a razor’s edge, her heart at war with her mind, and for the first time in her life, she had no idea which side to believe.