The package was already sitting on the windowsill when Riley woke.
No delivery. No sound.
Just there.
Wrapped in waxy black paper and sealed with a mark she hadn't seen since the last time her orders came from a man she thought dead.
🜏
She didn't touch it right away.
She circled it once. Checked the sill for prints, for pressure, for trick wire.
Nothing.
Eventually, she opened it with a knife—not her fingers.
Inside, wrapped in a layer of scorched gauze, was a thin piece of government plastic.
An ID badge.
Worn. Scratched. Edges curled with heat damage.
Her fingers froze when she saw the face.
MILO HART.Unit Designation: R-22.Tactical Hunter, Recon & Suppression.Clearance Level: Red-Eclipse.
She hadn't seen Milo in five years.
He'd gone dark on the same mission that burned her team out of the records. She'd buried the others. Found their pieces. Found their dog tags.
Milo was the only one she didn't find.
Until now.
There was blood dried into the crack along the badge's corner. Not human. Not fully.
She turned it over.
There was a message scratched into the plastic.
Rough. Shaky. Like someone wrote it mid-convulsion.
STILL ME. NOT FOR LONG.
She swallowed.
Inside the box, beneath the badge, was a small folded slip of paper. Thick. Heavy. The kind Ashgrave always used for mission debriefs.
It read:
He's alive. You can save him.Bring Vale.Do not warn him.You have one night.
That was all.
No threat. No leverage. No lies.
Just a trade.
A choice.
Riley stood there, holding the badge between her fingers.
Ashgrave hadn't threatened her.
He didn't need to.
He knew the only thing worse than being hunted was hoping someone was still human when you found them.
The chapel had never felt safe.
Not really.
It just felt… familiar. Like old guilt. Cold and carved in stone.
Lucien stepped inside and knew something was off before he took his second breath.
The air was still.
Not silent—still. Like breath had been pulled out of the room and held hostage somewhere beneath the floor.
Rook wasn't there.
No candlelight. No prayers scrawled on the wall in blood and chalk. Just that old bone-deep silence.
Lucien walked slowly past the altar, his boots echoing too cleanly. He half expected a note. A symbol. A warning.
But there was nothing.
Until he touched the floor behind the altar and heard a hollow knock.
Stone. But not solid.
He crouched, fingers moving over the floor's worn pattern.
There—an edge.
Lucien dug his fingers in and pried open the stone slab. Beneath it: stairs. Narrow, ancient, carved into the dirt and rock like a wound no one remembered inflicting.
He hesitated.
Then descended.
The air was colder down there. Older.
At the base of the stairs was a chamber. Small, but alive with presence. Candle stubs in wall niches. Dust-covered shelves. Files. Charts. A desk riddled with carvings and blackened fingerprint smears.
Lucien stepped closer.
The files were coded with red bands.
Old hunter archives.
Rook had been collecting them.
Some were decades old—Syndicate maps, vampire migration records, bloodline collapse reports.
But others…
Lucien froze when he found the folder labeled:H-X Hybrid Conversion TrialsTarget Pool: Hunter-Blood OperativesStatus: ActiveDirective: Adaptive Integration
Inside: photos.
Men and women mid-turn. Not full vampires. Not full human. Features warped. Eyes dulled. Skin blistered in patches where blood met silver.
Not killed.
Not tortured.
Engineered.
Lucien's hands tightened around the file.
Juno wasn't just targeting vampires anymore.
She was harvesting hunters.
And turning them into something worse.
Something like him.
Lucien didn't look surprised when she walked in.
He rarely did anymore.
Riley didn't sit this time.
She stood across from him, hands in her pockets, shoulders rigid beneath the weight of the question she hadn't decided how to ask.
Lucien waited.
She tossed a folder onto the bar.
Thin. Red-tagged.
It slid to a stop inches from his hands.
"Found it in Rook's basement," she said. "Hidden under the altar. You know, the usual holy spot for horrific research."
Lucien didn't touch it. Didn't have to.
He already knew what was in it.
"They're experimenting," she said. "Not just on vamps. On hunters. Turning them. Breaking them down. Rebuilding them."
He said nothing.
"Juno's syndicate," Riley added, voice sharp, "has been taking our kind. Using our blood. Our bodies. While we thought the threat was dying, it was evolving."
Still, Lucien said nothing.
And that was her answer.
"You knew," she whispered.
He nodded.
"How long?"
Lucien's voice was rough. "Long enough to know it wouldn't stop."
She stepped closer. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because you already suspected. And because hearing it from me would make it harder to ignore."
Riley stared at him, eyes cold.
Then she said, "You worked on it."
It wasn't a question.
Lucien's hands curled against the wood grain.
"I was the first," he said quietly. "Before they had a stable formula. Before they started testing on others. Juno thought using me would be poetic."
Riley blinked once. "You're a hybrid?"
"No," he said. "Not anymore."
"Then what are you?"
Lucien looked up.
And in that moment, he didn't smile. Didn't flinch. Didn't lie.
"I'm what happens when you survive it."
The sky above Eidolon was slate-gray and choked with the kind of wind that carried the city's guilt down its alleys.
Riley walked beside Lucien, silent.
They hadn't spoken since the bar. Not really.
He followed without asking questions.
And she didn't offer answers.
He didn't know where they were going. She hadn't said. Just that it was important. That it might lead to the truth. And maybe it did. Maybe it would.
But she hadn't told him the coordinates came from Ashgrave.
She hadn't told him Milo might be alive.
She hadn't told him she was baiting him with the same silence he used on her.
Lucien glanced at her as they turned onto a narrow service road that dipped beneath a dead viaduct.
"You don't usually walk this quietly," he said.
"I'm thinking."
"That's dangerous."
"For who?"
He didn't answer.
Ahead, the entrance came into view—half-collapsed signage, fencing torn open, a stairwell swallowed in shadow.
The old metro tunnels.
Long sealed. Long forgotten.
Except by people like Ashgrave.
People who didn't leave tracks—just invitations.
Lucien paused.
"This is where we're going?"
She nodded. "Lead goes underground."
"Of course it does."
They descended together.
One step at a time.
The deeper they went, the colder the air became.
Like something didn't want them down there. Or like something had been waiting.
Riley kept her hand near the blade inside her coat.
Just in case.
She told herself it was backup.
Not betrayal.
But her chest felt tight anyway.
Because she hadn't told him the real reason she needed him to come.
And if she looked him in the eye right now?
She might not be able to lie at all.
The tunnel opened like a throat, swallowing light.
The last working bulb above the stairwell sputtered and died behind them.
Riley's boots hit old tile first, then Lucien's. The air below the surface was thick with mold, rust, and something… off. Not rot. Not blood.
Memory.
The platform stretched empty under a half-collapsed ceiling. Broken rails ran into the dark. A burned-out train car rusted at the far end like a tomb no one dared open.
Riley scanned the space. One hand near her hip.
She waited for the shuffle of boots, the call sign, the voice.
Ashgrave's.
But it didn't come.
Lucien stopped walking.
He had gone rigid. Still.
Not afraid.
Not surprised.
Something worse.
"Lucien?" she asked.
He didn't answer.
He was staring ahead, toward the far end of the platform.
So she followed his gaze.
Someone stood there.
Not Ashgrave. Not Milo.
A man. Tall. Black coat. Gray eyes that didn't blink. Not older, not younger. Just… fixed. Like he hadn't changed in decades. Like time hadn't touched him at all.
Lucien whispered one word. Not to her.
To himself.
"Dominic."
Riley blinked.
She didn't know the name.
But Lucien did.
He took one slow step forward.
Then another.
Then stopped.
The figure spoke—voice smooth, precise. Like glass being cut.
"You shouldn't have come, Vale."
Lucien's voice cracked. "You're dead."
Dominic smiled.
"No," he said. "You just forgot what I looked like when I wasn't screaming."
Riley reached for her blade.
Lucien didn't notice.
He was caught in something deeper.
And for the first time since she'd met him, Riley saw something new in Lucien Vale.
Not guilt.
Not restraint.
Not grief.
Fear.