The vampire city was always cold.
Stone towers rose like broken fangs into the sky, and shadows moved faster than the sun. Even laughter sounded hollow there.
This was where Matteo grew up.
He never smiled much.
No one gave him a reason to.
Other children feared him. They said his eyes were strange, sometimes dark like a vampire, sometimes glowing faint gold like something else.
"Half-blood," they whispered when he passed.
"Wrong blood."
Matteo never answered. He just walked on.
His mother, Matha, kept him close. She braided his hair in silence, packed his meals, and told him stories of wolves she once knew.
"Are wolves bad?" Matteo asked once.
She smiled faintly. "No. They just… live far away now."
She never said why.
She never said who his father was.
He stopped asking.
Hives trained him.
The same man who had killed Deja stood over Matteo every morning in the training yard, cold as stone.
"Again," Hives barked as Matteo stumbled from a punch.
"I'm tired," Matteo muttered.
"Then get stronger."
Hives never hugged him. Never praised him.
But he watched Matteo closer than anyone.
And Matteo trained until his knuckles bled.
One night, during training, Matteo's nose caught something strange, iron, wild, alive. Blood.
A young vampire boy lay bleeding in the yard, cut from a spar gone wrong. Everyone panicked.
Matteo didn't.
Something in him moved, soft, warm, like a distant heartbeat not his own. He pressed his hands over the wound and closed his eyes.
"Stop the bleeding," he whispered.
And it stopped.
The boy gasped, alive.
Hives stared at Matteo in shock.
Matha dragged him away before anyone could speak.
That night, she locked the doors and shook as she held him.
"Don't ever do that again," she whispered.
"Why?" Matteo asked.
"Because… they'll fear you."
The whispers spread anyway.
The half-blood boy who healed with his hands.
Matteo grew older, stronger. At sixteen, he fought like a vampire.
At eighteen, he moved like shadow.
But at night, when he was alone, he felt something else inside him, like claws scratching at his heart.
Something wild.
Something hungry.
And he didn't know what it was.
On his twenty-first birthday, he went to the Oracle.
The old seer lived at the city's edge, where the stones cracked and vines grew between the walls. Her eyes were pale as smoke.
"You carry two voices," she said the moment she saw him.
Matteo froze. "What does that mean?"
"One sings of blood," she whispered.
"The other howls."
Matteo's heart pounded. "Tell me the truth."
The Oracle leaned close.
"Long ago, a wolf and a vampire loved the same woman. One killed the other. And the woman wept."
She touched his chest.
"You are the tear she shed."
Matteo left in silence, her words echoing in his head.
Two voices.
Blood… and howls.
That same night, under the full moon, something inside him stirred. His heart raced, his vision blurred, and for a moment he thought he saw claws where his hands should be.
He ran into the forest until his legs gave out.
And deep in the trees… he smelled her.
Warm and wild.
Like sunlight after storm.
A girl.
A wolf.
Her name was Kiaro.
And meeting her would change everything.