Perviously from the last Chapter...
I swallowed hard. "What happens now?"
He didn't move. Just looked at me like the weight of the answer was heavier than he wanted to admit.
"That," Julian said quietly, "depends on you."
...
The Obsidian Spire was too quiet.
Not the peaceful kind of quiet. The kind that wraps around you like a warm blanket. No, this was the silence of mausoleums. The kind that pressed in close, muffled your breathing, and made your heartbeat feel too loud.
I crept down the corridor, barefoot on the marble. The stone was colder than I expected—cold enough to bite. Dawn filtered through the stained-glass windows in slanted beams, scattering fractured reds and sickly blues across the floor like spilled blood and bruises. The air smelled faintly of polished wood and something older, like faded parchment, or dried roses left too long in a vase.
The mansion felt like a tomb. A beautiful, terrible tomb.
I passed a line of portraits hanging high on the walls. They were painted in oils, but the eyes looked real enough to blink. Each face held the same proud angles, the same sharp cheekbones and hollow gazes. Aristocrats carved in dusk and memory.
Their eyes followed me. I told myself it was a trick of the light.
One frame stood empty. No painting. Just a tarnished name plate beneath it: Lucian Vire, 1472–1498.
A chill slipped down my spine like cold fingers.
I moved on.
The next door I came to was locked.
I tried the handle cautiously. No give. But something stirred on the other side. Something not quite a sound. More like a feeling. A hum in my bones, a tension that tasted metallic on the back of my tongue.
I leaned in, pressing my ear to the wood.
There. A whisper. A sigh. The barest scrape of motion, like a piano breathing through broken keys.
Then...
"Lost?"
I spun around so fast I nearly slipped.
Julian stood behind me, too close. I hadn't heard him approach; no footsteps, no rustle of fabric. Just suddenly there, as if he'd stepped through the shadows. His black coat seemed to devour what little light remained, and his face…his face was carved from quiet fury.
I forced a crooked grin, trying not to show the way my heart slammed against my ribs. "Just admiring the decor. You've really nailed that haunted-funeral-home aesthetic. Very chic."
His jaw tightened. "This isn't a joke."
"Never said it was."
He took a step closer. The temperature dropped with him, the hallway thickening with cold.
"You will not open this door," he said.
My pulse skipped. "Why?" I asked. "What's in there?"
"Nothing for you."
I let out a laugh that came out more jagged than I intended. "Let me guess—your torture chamber? Victim storage? Or…" I raised an eyebrow, "a deeply humiliating vampire kink collection?"
He moved. Fast.
One hand slammed against my wrist and pinned it to the wall. My body followed, breath knocked from my lungs. His grip was iron; unyielding, ancient.
"You're alive," he growled, "because I allow it. Don't test the limits of that mercy."
My throat went dry. His face was inches from mine. I could feel his breath, icy and unnatural, like standing before an open crypt.
Still, I met his gaze. My voice was low, hoarse. "I'm not your prisoner."
His eyes burned, flaring crimson like coals stirred in darkness. "You're prey in this city. And prey doesn't wander."
We stood like that, frozen in the heat of our own defiance. My wrist throbbed beneath his grip, and his breath curled against my cheek like frost. Neither of us moved.
Then...
The chandelier overhead rattled. Just once. A shiver of crystal and chain.
There was no wind.
Julian's eyes flicked upward.
He released me.
***
Night fell like a guillotine—sharp and sudden, severing the day without warning.
I waited until the mansion exhaled into sleep. No footsteps echoed through the marble halls, no candlelight flickered behind the door cracks. Just the stillness of old bones and older secrets.
Then I crept into the grand hall, violin clutched like a weapon.
Moonlight poured through the skylight in silvery beams, casting ghostlight on the floor. The shadows leaned in, too still to be innocent. They watched. They listened.
I raised the bow. My fingers trembled, but not with fear, something else. Something older than fear.
The first note sliced through the silence.
And the silence bled.
It wasn't like before. This wasn't music. It was a force. Wild. Feral. It clawed at the walls, at my chest, at the bones of the very Spire. I felt it unraveling me and the air around me, like threads pulled from a too-tight seam. The strings of the violin glowed faintly, lit from within by the trace of Julian's blood.
The ground shivered beneath my feet.
A deep groan echoed through the chamber.
Then…
A scream.
I looked up.
The painting on the far wall—the woman in green velvet, serene and still the day before—was weeping.
Blood leaked from her eyes in slow, deliberate streams. The drops fell onto the marble with a sound like glass being tapped by a knife. Crisp. Fragile.
Then the chandelier shattered.
Glass and crystal rained down like a thousand tiny guillotines. I ducked, but I didn't stop playing. I couldn't stop. The music had its hooks in me, dragging me forward note by burning note.
Then, hands.
A grip yanked me backward, hard.
Julian.
His face—always pale—was now sheet-white, contorted with something that looked like fury but felt too wild, too raw.
"Enough!" he roared.
Our bodies collided. The violin shrieked between us. He reached for my wrist again, like he always did, but this time…
A spark.
A jolt, like lightning passed through skin and memory.
Julian staggered back as if burned. He stared at his hand like it no longer belonged to him.
"What are you?" he rasped, voice scraped thin.
I was panting, my lungs raw. "I don't—"
Flashback: 1498
Fire devoured the night. Smoke blackened the sky. A village crumbled beneath its own ashes.
Julian knelt in the mud, soaked in blood and rain. In his arms, a dying man coughed crimson into the air, clutching a shattered lute like a relic.
The man's lips moved—barely—a melody whispered, so haunting it made the rain hiss where it struck his burning skin.
"Soulweaver," the man breathed. A final exhale. Then he was gone.
Julian's scream tore the fire open.
Present
The memory snapped back like a whip.
Julian stumbled away from me, breathing like he'd just surfaced from drowning. His hands trembled at his sides.
"Get out," he said.
I didn't move. "What the hell was that?"
"GET OUT!"
The windows cracked. The air itself pulsed with rage, with grief, with something unspeakable, something powerful. Something ancient and feral.
I ran.
Not because I feared him.
But because, for the first time, I feared myself. And I did not know which one was more scary, more lethal and foreboding.
***
Julian's POV
Dawn arrived not with light, but with a warning.
A black raven perched silently on the arched window sill of Julian Vire's chamber, its talons clicking softly against the stone. Mist clung to the glass, and the sky beyond it was a bruised palette of gray and violet; more storm than morning.
Julian stood before the window, shirt unbuttoned, shadows pooling at the sharp angles of his collarbone. His eyes, the color of faded wine, narrowed at the creature.
The raven said nothing. It didn't need to.
Tied to its leg with red twine was a slip of parchment, aged and curled at the edges.
Julian reached forward slowly, as if plucking the message might detonate something sacred. The raven didn't flinch. It merely tilted its head, intelligent and still, like it knew too much.
He unrolled the parchment.
Two lines. Inked in a hand too elegant to be casual, too precise to be forgotten:
You've brought a storm into your house, Vire.
She hears him singing.
Julian's jaw clenched. The parchment crinkled slightly in his hand. He stared at the words as if they might rearrange themselves into something more bearable.
But they didn't.
A faint chill crept into the room.
The raven gave a low, gravelly caw—a sound that felt more like a sentence than a cry—and waited. Watching him with the eerie stillness of an oracle.
Julian stepped back, the weight of the words dragging through his mind. The storm. The storm wasn't coming. It was already inside.
And she hears him singing.
The meaning struck like cold iron.
Outside, thunder growled low over the hills, not yet a roar, but a promise. The sky wept faint streaks of rain across the glass, tracing crooked rivers down the pane like trembling fingers.
The raven remained a moment longer. Then, with a beat of shadowy wings, it vanished into the dawn, leaving Julian alone with the silence, the storm, and the sound of something ancient stirring in the depths of the house.