The basement was located beneath the kitchen floor, hidden behind a wooden shelf crowded with empty perfume bottles.
Lucas turned the brass knob on the side of the shelf three times. A click sounded from behind the wall, and the entire shelf shifted a few inches. A dark gap opened beneath it.
I switched on the small light at my wrist and went down first.
The air inside the basement was far colder than the night air outside. The smell of wet earth mingled with something that faintly reminded me of iron—not fresh blood, but blood that had seeped into the stone long ago and refused to be forgotten.
"You keep too much stuff," I said.
Lucas closed the secret door behind us. "You call it too much because every time we move, you want to burn everything."
"That's because most of it is useless."
I passed the wooden crates stacked along the walls. Clothes from various eras, passports bearing names that had long since died, cash in currencies no longer in circulation, and weapons we could never truly leave behind.
In the corner of the room, an open black suitcase lay on the floor. Lucas put two bottles of synthetic blood inside, followed by a small pistol loaded with silver-nitrate rounds.
"We're not bringing that weapon," I said.
"We're bringing it precisely because you said we don't need it."
"I've killed members of the Order without a weapon."
"You also nearly burned to death in Prague."
I turned on him sharply. "And you left me there."
Lucas stopped moving.
For a moment, the basement filled again with sounds that weren't there: the roar of flames, the screams of people running through the stone streets, and the sound of my own body hitting the ground after falling from a second-story window. The memory was decades old, but its pain had never aged.
Lucas closed the suitcase.
"I came back," he said.
"Three days later."
"I came back."
"To make sure I wasn't dead, or because you couldn't stand losing your property?"
His blue eyes hardened. "Don't call yourself my property."
His tone silenced me—not because I was afraid, but because there was something beneath his anger too old to be called mere offense.
He was standing too close again. In the narrow aisle between the crates, there was nowhere else to stand. The light at my wrist threw his shadow over me, and I felt the cold of the stone at my back and the colder stillness of him in front of me.
"Then what should I call myself?" I asked.
He didn't answer. Instead, his fingers found my wrist—the one with the light—and turned it gently aside, so the beam no longer cut across his face. His thumb rested where a pulse should have been. There was nothing there. He held it anyway, as if he were listening for something only he could hear.
"Lucas." It was meant to be a warning. It came out lower than I intended.
His gaze dropped to my mouth. Mine, God help me, dropped to his.
He leaned in. Slowly. Slowly enough that I could have stopped him a dozen times. I didn't. His breath—a habit, not a need—ghosted across my lips, and I felt my fingers curl into the front of his shirt instead of pushing him away.
"Tell me to stop," he murmured.
I opened my mouth to tell him exactly that.
A faint sound came from upstairs.
One knock.
Then two.
Lucas immediately covered the light at my wrist.
Darkness swallowed us.
I didn't need light to see. In the dark, the outlines of the room emerged more clearly: the crates, the table, the stairs, and Lucas standing several steps in front of me, his body tense.
Three more knocks sounded.
Not from the front door.
From the wall on the left.
I raised a hand, signaling Lucas to stay still. As a former hunter, I recognized the pattern. Short knocks, a pause, then a long knock. An inspection signal.
They weren't knocking on the door.
They were checking whether something was hiding behind it.
Lucas approached without a sound. His lips nearly brushed my ear as he whispered, "There are four people upstairs. One is carrying a UV emitter."
"Two people," I countered. "The others aren't human."
He looked at me.
I caught the scents filtering through the cracks in the walls: human sweat, hot metal, and the distinctive stench of an old vampire that had gone hungry for far too long.
"Feral," I said.
A man's voice came from above.
"Valerie Cassandra Cross. In the name of the St. Jude Organization, you are ordered to surrender."
The blood that didn't flow through my body seemed to freeze.
They had spoken my family name.
That name had never appeared on any of my false identities. For a hundred years, I had made sure the name Cross died with my family home.
Lucas grabbed my arm. "We can get out through the back tunnel."
"No."
"Valerie."
"They didn't come only for us."
I knelt before the oldest crate and pulled open its iron latch. Beneath layers of cloth and old documents sat a small wooden box bound in chains.
I had never seen it before.
Lucas stood beside me. "Don't open that."
I looked at him. "You know what's inside."
"I know what will happen if you open it now."
The knocking on the wall turned into pounding. Dust rained from the ceiling. Purple light pierced the basement through the gap in the shelf like a knife.
Lucas raised his pistol.
I drew the silver dagger from my boot.
"You want to take me away," I said quietly, "even though you've known from the beginning that they would find us."
"I didn't know when."
"But you knew why."
His face no longer held any trace of composure. For the first time that night, I saw something in his eyes worse than guilt.
Fear.
Not fear of the Order.
Fear of the box between us.
The basement wall shattered. A beam of UV light swept across the room. Lucas moved faster than I could see, stepping in front of me and taking the blast of light across his shoulder.
Smoke began to rise from his skin.
"Lucas!"
He didn't turn. "Open the tunnel door. Now."
Two figures burst through the hole in the wall. The first wore a black coat with the St. Jude emblem on its collar. The second was no longer human. Its mouth gaped far too wide, its teeth jagged and broken, and its eyes reflected a red glow like embers on the verge of dying.
I looked at the wooden box one more time.
Then I broke its chains with my bare hands.
Inside was an old photograph.
A photograph of my family.
My father, my mother, and I stood in front of the Cross house on the night before the massacre. But behind us, half-hidden in the shadow of a tree, stood a black-haired man with blue eyes I could never have mistaken.
Lucas.
Beneath the photograph, a single sentence was written in red ink:
Lucas Vanz is not your savior.
He is the reason your family was murdered.
Behind me, Lucas snarled as the Feral lunged.
And for the first time in a century of being a monster, I didn't know whether I should save him—or drive my dagger through his heart.
I chose to save him.
Not because I trusted Lucas.
Trust was a luxury that had died long ago with my family. It was buried beneath the Cross house, alongside my father and mother's bones, alongside the name I had dared speak only in my dreams for decades.
I saved him because the Feral lunged from the wrong direction.
At least, that was the excuse I gave myself.
The silver dagger flew from my hand and sank precisely beneath the creature's jaw. Its body was hurled sideways, slamming into a metal shelf and sending the old crates tumbling down. The smell of burning flesh filled the basement.
Lucas dropped to one knee, pressing a hand against his shoulder. The skin there had blackened from the UV light, but his eyes remained fixed on me—not on the enemy struggling to rise, but on the photograph still clutched in my hand.
"Valerie, listen to me. That photograph—"
"Don't you dare tell me to listen."
The St. Jude agent raised the UV emitter. Purple light flared again, brighter and closer.
I moved ahead of Lucas.
My body slammed into the man before he could aim his weapon. We rolled across the floor. He smelled human, but his pulse was calm—far too calm for someone who had just watched his partner turn into a corpse.
He pressed something in his palm.
My muscles hardened instantly.
Suppressant.
The serum spread through the air like a thin mist. My knees gave out, and for the first time since becoming a vampire, I felt my body begin to resemble a corpse again.
"Valerie!"
Lucas's voice broke.
The agent grinned, then dragged me toward the light. "The Cross blood is finally back in our hands."
My fingers nearly touched the floor when Lucas appeared between us.
He moved with a speed he rarely showed me. His hand clamped around the agent's throat and lifted him off the floor. Smoke still rose from his shoulder, but his face had transformed into something far older than the man who had lived with me all this time.
"Touch her again," he whispered, "and I'll keep you alive long enough to regret every second you've ever had."
The agent laughed with difficulty. "Still protecting her, Vanz? After everything you did?"
Lucas went rigid.
Not because of the threat.
Because he recognized the voice.
I saw a small change in his eyes—a crack he immediately concealed.
"Who are you?" I asked.
The agent looked at me, then smiled.
"I'm the man who witnessed the night your family died. And I know who opened the door of the Cross house to the vampires."
My hand clenched.
"Name him."
He glanced at Lucas.
"Ask your husband."
Lucas crushed the UV emitter in his left hand. Sparks of dead light flickered between his fingers.
Then, in a voice barely audible, he said, "He's lying."
I stared at his face.
For the first time, I realized something more horrifying than the possibility that Lucas was responsible for the destruction of my family.
He might not be trying to convince me.
He might be trying to convince himself.