The bar was dark.
Too dark for a place that claimed to close late.
Riley stood across the street, coat pulled tight, hood up, a small tin of sharpened silver tools tucked beneath her arm. From this distance, the building looked ordinary. Still. But something about the silence scraped wrong against her nerves.
Lucien was always behind the bar. That was the rule.
But tonight?
The lights were off.
The front was locked.
And the city didn't feel right.
She crossed the street, glanced once over her shoulder, then knelt by the bar's door. No camera. No alarm she couldn't bypass. She reached into her sleeve, pulled a thin, curved pick from a cloth wrap, and slid it into the old-fashioned lock.
Click.
She slipped inside.
The place smelled the same—smoke, clove, a trace of blood and whiskey.
But it felt abandoned.
No music. No glassware. No trace of Lucien's voice behind the counter, warm and sharp-edged.
She moved through the shadows quietly, closing the door behind her.
"Lucien?" she called.
No answer.
She didn't expect one.
She stepped behind the bar, scanned the bottles, the shelves. Everything in its place. Except—
A black matchbook.
It sat on the counter like it was waiting for her.
She picked it up, turned it over.
The Crimson Room.
Her blood went cold.
She opened it.
Empty—no matches. Just a faint smudge of red inside, like ink… or something else.
She tucked it into her coat and moved deeper, toward the back office. She didn't know what she was looking for.
But something was off.
Lucien Vale didn't leave things behind.
And he didn't run without reason.
Lucien stood in front of what was left of the Crimson Room.
The building leaned like it was tired, its brick face blackened with soot, windows boarded but broken behind the planks. A chain-link fence surrounded the structure now, meant to keep people out. Or things in.
He stepped over it.
No hesitation. No nostalgia.
The air still smelled faintly of ash and old perfume.
Inside, the main floor was caved in on one side. A chandelier lay in pieces across cracked tile. The stage was gone. So were the velvet curtains and the long, mirrored bar where blood once flowed in crystal glasses.
Now, only rot remained.
He moved through it slowly, footsteps echoing too loud.
There were marks scorched into the walls—glyphs, old vampire symbols. Burned in deliberately, like trail signs. The kind used by syndicate operatives to guide loyalists. Or warn enemies.
He followed them down a corridor.
Past what had once been a private tasting room. Now a hole in the floor.
Down another hall. More glyphs.
One read: LOYALTY LIVES.
Another: TITHING REQUIRED.
Lucien's jaw clenched.
He reached the last door.
Not locked.
Not sealed.
Just… waiting.
He touched the handle. Cold metal, rusted and pitted.
For a moment, he expected her voice. Juno's.
Expected her to be waiting inside. Legs crossed, drink in hand, smiling like none of it had ever burned.
But the door opened to silence.
No smell of blood. No perfume.
Just dust and dimness—and something else.
Someone was here.
Lucien didn't move. He just let the door creak open fully, light spilling onto the cracked floor.
Footsteps shifted inside.
Not Juno.
But someone wearing her mark.
The figure in the room didn't rise.
He sat casually in an old armchair, its velvet charred but intact, legs crossed at the knee, sipping from a glass like this wasn't a ruin and the air wasn't full of ash.
Lucien's eyes narrowed.
"Silas."
The man smiled, slow and deliberate. "Lucien Vale. You haven't changed a bit."
Lucien stepped inside, letting the door fall shut behind him. "You were supposed to be dead."
Silas chuckled. "Aren't we all?"
His suit was crisp—too clean for the room around him. Not vampire old-money elegant, but syndicate-clean. Practical. Dangerous. The kind of tailored that meant he had a blade tucked behind his spine and a plan already unfolding.
Lucien didn't sit.
"I'm not here to reminisce," he said.
"Good," Silas said, sipping again. "I'm not here to beg."
Lucien's jaw tightened. "Then why the summons?"
Silas leaned forward, glass dangling from two fingers. "You know why. Juno's not hiding anymore. The Black Sun is returning. Slowly. Quietly. Blood by blood."
"I'm not part of that."
"You were. Long enough to matter." Silas's smile thinned. "Long enough that when your name comes up, people remember."
Lucien stayed still.
Silas stood now, slow and deliberate, moving closer across the cracked floor. "She wants her people back. Her originals. The ones who built things before the fire. The ones who survived it."
Lucien's voice dropped. "She burned them herself."
"She burned the weak ones."
Silence.
Then Silas lowered his glass. "You have a choice. Come back. Help clean up the new generation. Or stay out here in the dark, pretending to be something you're not."
Lucien met his gaze. "You think you can threaten me into that?"
"No," Silas said simply. "I think someone else might. Someone you haven't seen yet. Someone she's saving for later."
Lucien stepped closer, nose to nose.
"You tell Juno," he said coldly, "if she wants me, she can come get me herself."
Silas grinned.
"Don't worry," he said. "She plans to."
Riley moved through the dark with purpose.
The main floor of the bar had nothing left to offer. No scent, no sign of recent presence, no trace of Lucien except for the matchbook—and something cold clinging to the air.
But behind the bar, beneath the shelves, she'd found a second lock.
It was old. Mechanical. Buried beneath a false drawer panel that clicked strangely when she leaned on it. It took her three tools and five minutes to crack.
The small door creaked open.
Revealing stairs.
Of course.
Lucien Vale didn't keep his secrets in plain sight.
She descended slowly, hand hovering near her belt, fingers close to the hilt of a blade. The air below was cooler—cellar air, but still faintly perfumed with clove and dust and something older.
The office was small.
Dim. Cramped. Half storage, half memory.
The desk was warped. Burn marks curled across the wood in delicate arcs—too neat to be accidental. A single lamp cast a cone of light over a battered black notebook.
Riley stepped closer.
The cover was cracked leather. Part of it had been burned. But the pages inside… not all of them were gone.
She flipped gently.
Names.
Dozens of them. Written in sharp, clean ink. Sometimes with dates. Sometimes with symbols. Some crossed out.
She recognized a few.
Hunter aliases.
Two of them were confirmed dead. One disappeared five years ago.
And then her own.
Scrawled in near the bottom. Not crossed out.
Just underlined. Twice.
Riley exhaled slowly.
Next to her name, drawn in smudged ink, was a symbol she hadn't seen since her training days.
A circle. Spiked rays.
The Black Sun.
She stared at it for a long time.
Not because it surprised her.
But because she didn't want it to mean what she already knew it meant.
Lucien hadn't just known about the Black Sun.
At some point…
He'd marked her.
Lucien stood at the edge of the ruins, watching the fire catch.
He hadn't meant to light it.
Not at first.
But as he left the back room—Silas's words still digging behind his eyes—he passed one of the old fuel tanks still wedged into the support beams. Broken open. Bone-dry but still flammable.
He didn't need much.
Just a trail of liquor from a forgotten stash. A flick of his lighter.
Let it burn.
Now, amber light flickered across the ash-soaked walls. The lower level would go first—just enough to make a statement.
Not enough to bury the ghosts.
He turned to leave, coat flaring behind him.
He didn't look back.
Two buildings away, someone stood on a rooftop.
Watching him go.
They didn't move. Didn't speak. Just pulled a small piece of folded paper from their coat pocket and struck a match.
The fire curled along the edges of the note before the wind caught it, lifting the ashes away.
It had said only one thing.
VALE RETURNED.
The figure stepped back from the edge and disappeared into the night.
Lucien didn't make it far before the taste hit him again.
The blood in the air.
Not Juno's.
Not the synthetic.
Something sharper.
He staggered into a side alley and leaned against the wall, breathing through clenched teeth. His fingers dug into the brick. His jaw locked.
You're not slipping. You're in control.
But even he could feel it now. The hunger.
The one he buried years ago.
The one the bar kept quiet.
The one Riley had stirred without knowing.
He could still smell her. Even now.
And something in him—
wanted.