Kyrell's POV, dark M×M slow-burn, emotional tension)
> 🎵 Instrumental suggestion for reading: "Hunter's Moon" – Lorne Balfe (soft, building tension)
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The mist curled along the ancient woods like coiled breath, thick and silver, shrouding the ground in silence. From the shadows, Kyrell stood, unmoving. Watching.
Lucian moved like a phantom beneath the trees—unaware, beautifully oblivious. A memory dressed in black.
The vampire.
The name had a taste again. Bitter. Feral. Sinful.
> He shouldn't be alive.
He was supposed to be a memory in the earth, buried and burned.
Kyrell pressed his back to the bark of an old pine, clutching the wooden talisman around his neck—an old gift from his father. A hunter's charm. It pulsed with quiet warning.
"You're not him anymore," he whispered to himself, fingers trembling. "You're not that boy who wandered into the forest and met a devil wearing a beautiful face."
But Lucian had looked at him. That night. Like he was more than prey. Like he was already his. And something inside Kyrell had never recovered.
He should've run.
He hadn't.
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The Order had found Kyrell years later—half-dead, drifting through snow-covered ruins, eyes glazed with nightmares. They had turned him into something useful. A blade. A warning. A vessel for vengeance.
And yet… when the call came that Lucian had resurfaced, when the whispers spread that he was alive, haunting the northern territories again… Kyrell had asked to go.
He had lied to them. Said he would kill the vampire.
But Kyrell wasn't here to kill Lucian.
He was here to remember.
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Lucian had changed. Taller. Paler. A king now—or something worse. But the way he'd tilted his head in that dream, the way the wind carried his scent—Kyrell still felt the pull. As though they had unfinished business threaded between lifetimes.
Kyrell stepped forward into the clearing, but the dream began to shatter like glass, pulling him backward—
—wake up—
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He jolted from sleep, breath heavy, fingers digging into his sheets. The ceiling above him was cracked with age, the inn dark and cold. The scent of damp wood clung to the air.
He wiped his eyes.
Lucian's name was still on his lips.
And outside the window, far across the darkened valley, a castle loomed in silence. Watching. Waiting.
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