Riley sat in the dark.
Her apartment was quiet except for the low hum of her encrypted audio reader. The screen showed a simple waveform—green pulses against black—spooling out minute by minute. No voice-to-text. No AI filter. She didn't trust that tech. You missed the good stuff that way—the pauses, the breathing, the tension.
She leaned forward, elbows on her desk, one hand wrapped around a half-empty mug of coffee that had gone cold an hour ago.
The recording began about thirty seconds after she left the bar.
Lucien's voice came first—barely above a whisper.
"…hell are you doing, Vale."
A pause. The sound of glass sliding across a counter. A faint clink. Liquid.
"You knew better."
Another pause. Longer this time.
Then he exhaled. Not dramatic. Not theatrical.
Just tired.
Riley's eyes narrowed.
"You knew she was a hunter the second she walked in. You could smell it on her."
There it was.
Not guilt. Not panic.
Resignation.
She leaned closer, pressing a key to mark the timestamp.
A soft scraping followed—like paper, maybe. Something sliding open.
"Juno… if this is you, I'm not playing."
The name hung in the air like blood in water.
Riley froze.
She'd seen that name once before—scrawled in a hunter's journal alongside phrases like "Blood Architect" and "Syndicate Queen."
Juno was supposed to be dead.
But then again, so were a lot of people in this business.
Riley pressed pause. Rewound. Played it again. Just to hear the way he said it.
Not angry.
Afraid.
The file ended a few minutes later. No confession. No secrets spilled. Just Lucien talking to himself. Or to a ghost.
Still… it was enough.
He knew Juno. He was connected. Maybe not now—but once.
And if he was hiding that, what else was under the surface?
She closed the laptop. Sat in the silence.
Her instincts weren't screaming yet.
But they were getting louder.
Lucien hated closing.
Not the cleaning, not the paperwork. The silence.
The way the bar felt too big without bodies, too still without noise. Like a carcass picked clean after the night fed on it.
He dried the last glass with a towel that should've been retired ten years ago and set it in the rack upside down. Everything had its place. Routine was armor.
He turned his back for one second—one second—to kill the lights on the far wall.
When he turned back, it was there.
A single black envelope.
Sitting neatly on the bar where Riley had just been a few hours ago.
He froze.
No sound. No bell. No footsteps. The front door was still locked. Nothing on the security feed except static in the last ten seconds.
Lucien stared at the envelope.
His stomach turned.
He reached for it slowly, like it might bite. The paper was thick. Matte. Cold.
There was no name on the front. No stamp. Just a symbol pressed into the flap in black-on-black wax:
A circle. Radiating spiked rays.
The Black Sun.
Lucien's fingers clenched.
He cracked the seal.
Inside was only a matchbook. Plain, black, a little warped with age. Printed in red across the front: The Crimson Room.
He hadn't heard that name in years.
It was a vampire-exclusive blood bar. Shut down after a fire gutted most of the building. He remembered the screams. The smoke. The night it all went sideways.
He opened the matchbook.
One word inside.
Scrawled in red ink.
Come.
No time. No place. Just the message.
A summons.
Not a request.
Lucien dropped the envelope into the trash and stood motionless behind the bar, heart echoing in his ears—slow, dull, dead.
Someone wanted to remind him who he used to be.
Someone who hadn't forgotten.
The screen glared back at her like a bad secret.
Riley sat in the corner of her apartment, wrapped in a hoodie two sizes too big, hair tied back messily, the glow of three monitors throwing stark shadows across the walls. Behind her, maps and printouts still fluttered from the open window draft, pinned in constellations of violence.
She was three layers deep into off-grid hunter archives—networks that hadn't been officially maintained since the Collapse—but the data still trickled in, slow and ugly.
Name: Juno ValeSpecies: VampireStatus: Confirmed Active (formerly Presumed Deceased)Affiliations: Black Sun Syndicate (High-Level)Last Known Sighting: District Six / Crimson Room IncidentNotable: Alchemical enhancement specialist. Suspected origin of synthetic-blood experimentation.
And there, in a red-flagged note at the bottom of the file:
"Usually accompanied by a male. Older. Assumed enforcer. Name not confirmed—goes by 'Luc.'"
Riley leaned back slowly.
Luc.
Short for Lucien.
Of course.
Her hand hovered above the keyboard.
There was a timestamp. A grainy image attached—low-res, distorted. But enough to make out the pair walking into the Crimson Room together. Juno. And Lucien. Side by side.
Not enemies. Not targets.
Partners.
She felt something twist in her chest.
Not pain. Not anger.
Clarity.
This wasn't just a vampire with a shady past.
This was a vampire with blood on his hands.
Riley clicked into another database—hunter-blacklisted sites with crowd-reported sightings. The name Juno came up six times in the last month. Always near hospitals. Blood clinics. Pharm labs. And always followed by a corpse.
Each entry had a date.
Every single one? Within twenty-four hours of someone being found half-turned.
Riley exhaled.
Lucien had lied.
Not just about the Black Sun.
Not just about the alley kill.
He'd lied about who he was.
And if he'd lied about that…
What else was he hiding behind that bartender charm?
The matchbook sat on the bar like it had weight.
Lucien had been staring at it for nearly an hour, elbows braced on either side of the counter, shoulders hunched forward like the world had suddenly shifted and put all its pressure on his spine.
The Crimson Room.
He hadn't thought about that place in years. Had tried not to. Tried to pretend he didn't remember the walls lit with velvet red, the women with gold-threaded eyes, the backroom where blood flowed from taps like wine.
And Juno.
She'd always called him "brother" like it was a dare.
Even now, the memory of her voice made the back of his neck prickle.
Lucien stood and poured himself a shot of something ancient. Drank it. Didn't flinch.
You knew she'd come back.
He walked to the far end of the bar, pulled out a crate of old supplies, and reached beneath it—beneath a loose floorboard, beneath everything he told himself he'd buried.
Inside: a lighter. Black metal. Singed.
He flipped it open.
The engraving was still there on the side: Let It Burn.
He remembered the night it happened—the fire at the Crimson Room. How Juno had set it herself. How she'd smiled while it caught, while vampires screamed behind her, while the old syndicate elders roasted alive.
Lucien had stood between her and the exit. Had the chance to stop her.
He didn't.
And afterward, when the smoke cleared, they both disappeared. She went underground.
He tried to get clean.
Until tonight, he didn't know if she was alive.
Now he knew.
And she wanted him to come back.
Lucien tucked the lighter into his pocket, buttoned his coat, and walked to the door.
He didn't tell Rook.
Didn't call for backup.
Didn't even leave a note.
He just locked up the bar, stepped into the street, and vanished into the cold.
The streets had gone quiet in the way only Eidolon could—like the city wasn't sleeping, just listening.
Lucien moved fast, head down, hands in his coat pockets. He stuck to the alleys, the back routes, old footpaths between forgotten buildings. The ones he used to know when he wasn't pretending to be normal.
The matchbook was still in his pocket. So was the lighter. So was the feeling he was being followed.
Halfway through District Nine, he slowed.
Someone was there.
He caught the scent first—burnt sugar and rot. Vampire. Young. Sick.
Then the voice, scratchy and too loud in the silence.
"Vale."
Lucien turned.
A kid—maybe eighteen when he turned. Rail-thin, hoodie pulled tight, eyes wide and unfocused. His hands shook like leaves. His lips were stained dark. Dried blood on his collar.
"Lucien Vale," the kid said again, like saying the name made him brave.
Lucien didn't move. "What do you want?"
The kid held something out—a folded scrap of torn paper. Fingers twitching like he wasn't sure if this was a delivery or a death sentence.
"She said you'd come looking."
"Who?"
No answer.
Lucien stepped forward, fast.
The kid flinched but didn't run.
Lucien snatched the paper from his hand. Opened it.
There was no message. Just a single line, handwritten in red ink.
She's not what she seems either.
Lucien's pulse didn't quicken—because it couldn't.
But something colder than fear pooled in his chest.
He looked back up.
But the courier was already gone—vanished into the maze of alleys, twitching into the dark.
Lucien stared down at the note again, fingers tightening.
She.
He didn't have to ask who.
And for the first time since Riley Voss had walked into his bar, Lucien wondered:
What exactly had she been lying about?