The coin burned in Elena's palm.
She crouched behind the chapel altar, her knees pressing into cold stone. The saints watched her from the walls, their faces peeled away by time. The air smelled of wet earth and something older—iron, maybe, or dried herbs.
Don't trust the saints, Kolya had said. Their eyes are open.
She held up the Roman coin. Moonlight caught the engraved wolf, making its jaws seem to snap.
A draft whistled through the chapel.
The floorboard she'd pried up last night gaped like a mouth.
Elena reached inside.
Her fingers brushed cold metal.
The key was black with age, its teeth jagged as a wolf's bite.
It fit the lock behind the Virgin's statue.
The door opened with a groan, exhaling air so stale it made Elena's eyes water. Stairs spiraled down into darkness.
Turn back, whispered Sister Valya's voice in her head. This is sacrilege.
But another voice answered—a woman's, velvet and venom: Nocturna does not fear the dark.
Elena took the first step.
The door slammed shut behind her.
The tomb was older than Russia.
Frescoes covered the walls: armored women with sharp smiles, their robes stained red. Above them, a banner unfurled in painted silk—Gens Nocturna.
Elena's breath hitched.
She knew that word.
Dream-memory: A woman with her own black hair standing in a field of corpses. Blood dripped from her lips. You are the last, she whispered. The tsars burned the rest.
Ahead, an altar stood draped in rotted velvet. At its center, a shallow basin held a black liquid that wasn't water.
Elena's reflection wavered in it.
Then it winked.
The cut was accidental—a slip on the slick stairs, her palm scraping against a protruding nail.
Blood welled, bright as a berry.
It dripped into the basin.
The tomb shuddered.
The liquid ignited, flames licking up without heat. Shadows twisted into shapes—wolves, women, a battle under a blood-red moon.
A voice hissed: Domina Valestra waits.
Elena stumbled back. Her teeth ached. Her gums itched.
Above the altar, a brick slid free.
Inside lay a knife.
Its blade was bone.
The journal was tucked behind the brick, its pages brittle as dead skin.
Elena recognized the handwriting—the same looping script as the notes left in the orphanage library. Irina, 1917.
She flipped to the last entry:
Virek is not the first. The Romans brought the curse. They fed the children to the dark, one by one. The wolf-blooded go mad. The vampire-blooded vanish. Only the hybrids survive. He calls it progress.
I am next.
If found, burn this.
Elena's pulse hammered.
A hybrid.
Like whatever they'd made of Luka.
Like whatever Virek wanted Kolya to become.
The chapel door exploded inward.
Sister Valya stood framed in the wreckage, her crucifix raised. Her lips peeled back from yellowed teeth.
"Abomination!"
Elena barely dodged the splash of holy water. It sizzled where it hit the floor.
The nun's robes billowed as she advanced. "You think you're the first Morozova to crawl down here? Your mother begged for mercy too—before they bled her dry."
Elena's vision swam red.
Her teeth lengthened.
The bone knife hummed in her grip.
Behind Valya, the shadows moved.
Kolya caught the nun by the throat.
His eyes were fully wolf now, the pupils swallowing the amber. His claws dug into Valya's wrinkled skin.
"Run," he snarled at Elena.
Valya's laugh was a death rattle. "Too late, wolf-child. The doctor knows. He's always known."
A whistle cut the night—the orphanage alarm.
Boots pounded the snow outside.
Kolya snapped Valya's head back. The crack echoed like a gunshot.
Elena grabbed his arm. "They'll kill you!"
He bared bloody teeth. "Let them try."
The first orderly burst through the door.
Kolya lunged.
The orderly died with Kolya's teeth in his throat.
Blood sprayed across the chapel walls as the man gurgled, his hands scrabbling at Kolya's matted hair. Elena stumbled back, the bone knife slippery in her grip. More shouts echoed from the hallway—boots, rattling keys, the cocking of a rifle.
Kolya dropped the corpse and turned. His face was a mask of red, his eyes wild with something between fury and fear. "Run," he growled again, but Elena grabbed his wrist.
"Not without you."
The second orderly lunged through the door, a rusted scalpel raised. Elena moved before she could think—her body twisting with unnatural speed. The bone knife flashed. The man screamed as his fingers hit the floor, still clutching the blade.
Kolya stared at her. "You're changing."
Elena touched her teeth. They were sharp.
They fled through the orphanage's underbelly—through cellars where the walls wept and laundry rooms stinking of lye. Kolya led the way, his nostrils flaring at every turn. Elena could hear them hunting: whistles, curses, the creak of leather gloves tightening around batons.
A child's cry split the dark.
Elena froze. "The dormitory."
Kolya's claws dug into her arm. "We can't."
"They'll punish them for what we did."
A shadow moved at the end of the corridor. Dr. Virek's voice, smooth as poison: "Subject Seventeen. You've disappointed me."
Kolya snarled, but his body locked up—muscles seizing. Elena realized too late about the injection marks on his neck.
The drugs. He's still under their control.
Virek raised a silver whistle to his lips.
Kolya collapsed, howling.
The restraints were steel this time.
Kolya thrashed on the infirmary table, his wrists and ankles cuffed with reinforced shackles. Elena crouched in the ventilation shaft above, her nails biting into the grate. She'd followed, silent as the ghosts in the walls.
Virek rolled up his sleeves. "You were bred for obedience, Lupovka. Not this rebellion." He pressed a scalpel to Kolya's ribs. "Let's see how deep the wolf goes."
The first cut made Kolya arch off the table. The second made him laugh.
Blood dripped onto the tiles—black, then red, then black again as his flesh knit itself back together.
Virek's glass eye gleamed. "Remarkable. The Nocturna blood is accelerating your healing." His gaze flicked upward, directly at Elena's hiding place. "Perhaps we should test its limits."
A hand clamped over Elena's mouth from behind.
The storage closet smelled of antiseptic and old urine. Elena drove her elbow backward, connecting with soft flesh. A grunt, then a familiar whisper:
"Stop. It's me."
Anya. The girl from the dormitory. Her left eye was swollen shut.
"They're coming for all of us," she panted. "Virek's purging the defective ones after tonight." She pressed a rusted key into Elena's palm. "Cell block C. The others are waiting."
Elena's pulse hammered. "Why help us?"
Anya lifted her sleeve. Scars laddered her arm—puncture marks in neat rows. "Because I remember what they did to my sister. And I won't let them do it to you."
Shouts echoed down the hall. Anya shoved Elena toward a grate. "Go. Before they—"
The door burst open.
Kolya's roar shook the walls.
Elena crawled through the ducts, the screams following her. She could feel it when he broke free—a tremor in the metal, a hot wind carrying the stench of wet fur and iron.
Cell block C was a converted wine cellar, its bars patched with silver. Six children huddled inside, their faces gaunt. The oldest—a boy with Luka's freckles—gasped when he saw her.
"You're the one they're afraid of," he whispered.
Glass shattered above them. Kolya dropped through the ceiling in a hail of splinters, his body halfway between boy and beast. His claws made quick work of the locks.
Elena turned the bone knife in her hand. "We're leaving."
The orphanage alarm wailed like a dying animal.
Somewhere, Virek was smiling.
The snow burned their bare feet.
They ran toward the tree line, the younger children stumbling between Elena and Kolya. Behind them, floodlights carved the night into slices. Gunfire popped—then screams as something else joined the chase.
Luka's brother sobbed. "What is that?"
Elena didn't need to look back. She could smell it: chemicals and rotting meat.
The hybrid.
Kolya bared his fangs. "Go. I'll hold it."
"No." Elena gripped his arm. "We fight together."
She pressed the Roman coin into his palm. Their blood smeared together—black and red.
The trees shuddered.
It was coming.