The newness of this century irritated me. It hummed and clicked and whispered to itself through small, blinking devices. Even the air smelled artificial. The quiet wasn’t quiet at all—it was filled with invisible noise, as though the world itself had become mechanical. I hated it already.
I did not sleep.
I waited until Nadia’s presence settled into stillness down the hall. The bond softened when she slept, loosening just enough for me to move without dragging the pull behind me. That was when I rose and began to search the house.
I moved room to room in silence. I checked doors. Walls. Corners. Thresholds. Anything that might conceal a ward, a passage, a fail point. I tested the windows. I followed the spine ofthe house upward into the attic, past trunks filled with nonsense and relics that held no power. Nothing but old furniture, broken frames, and dust. Nothing that could free me.
I found a locked room.
The door was sealed with more than iron and wood. Magic threaded through it, old and deliberate. Court-adjacent, but not theirs. Defensive. I tested it carefully and withdrew. Whatever was inside had been intentionally kept from me. From everyone.
I searched for gold. Vaults. False panels. Anything my brother might have hidden in arrogance or haste.
I found nothing.
He had not left my fortune lying about to be found.
When dawn approached, I returned to the bedroom I had been assigned. Still trapped. Still bound. Still without answers.
I had spent too long mired in conflict I never wanted. First as a human soldier, forced into a war that consumed half of Europe. Then as a vampire in that same war, turned without consent and used for my strength until my body no longer felt like my own.
After the war, when I refused the Sovereign Court, they hunted me. They saw my endurance as theirs to control. They tried to strip me of choice. When I resisted, they trapped me in stasis and called it justice.
My entire adulthood had been a prison. Human armies. Vampire masters. The court. The coffin. Every chapter of my life followed the same pattern. Bound. Controlled. Contained.
And now I was awake in another confinement, linked to a mortal woman, who had opened the lid of my prison and unknowingly placed me in a new one.
The awareness of her pressed against my mind even now. A quiet pull in a constant direction. It told me she had moved down the hall. It told me she was upset. It told me I would go to her if she called.
I hated how familiar that loss of control felt.
I was trying to determine which mechanical hum around me was the least offensive when Nadia bustled in and threw a bundle of fabric at my chest.
“You can’t just exist in the house with your dick out,” she said. “I should have put that in the rules.”
I caught the pile and stared at it, baffled. The first piece was a gray garment. I held it up between my fingers. “What is this?”
“A hoodie,” she said. “You put it on your torso.”
It smelled faintly of an unfamiliar male—artificial fragrance and peppermint candy.
“Whose is it?”
“My ex’s.”
I raised a quizzical eyebrow.
“Ex?”
She sighed. “Yeah. Someone I was with. A boyfriend. Significant other.”
Her ex. The word sat wrong in my head. I didn’t care, obviously. But the idea of another man’s scent on my skin made my jaw tighten. Ridiculous reaction. She was mortal. A complication I had not chosen.
“Why are you no longer together?” I asked, more curious than I meant to sound.
She hesitated, then shrugged. “Same old story. I can be… a lot.”
I frowned. “A lot?”
