EPILOGUE
The Hunger Between Us
Immortality taught me many things.
How to wait without hope.
How to endure without prayer.
How to pretend that time does not leave fingerprints on the soul.
It did not teach me what to do after Lily Winters.
The world continued, as it always does. Mornings arrived. Nights followed. People loved and lost and never noticed the absence carved quietly into my existence.
Lily would have noticed.
There are places I no longer visit because she once stood there beside me, alive with questions, unafraid of the dark. There are words I have erased from my vocabulary because they sound too much like her laughter when spoken aloud.
Sometimes I catch myself turning, expecting to find her at my side—warm, stubborn, impossible. Sometimes I still listen, unsure of what I'm waiting to hear.
A heartbeat.
A breath.
Or nothing at all.
Whatever Lily Winters became—whatever I allowed, whatever I lost—I carry it with me through every endless night.
Immortality did not break me.
Loving Lily Winters did.
— Lucien Blackthorne
CHAPTER ONE
Lily Winters walked as though the world might break if she moved too loudly.
She was slight, her frame narrow beneath a coat that had once belonged to someone else. Dark hair slipped loose around her face, catching on her scarf, brushing her cheeks when the wind stirred. Her skin was pale in a way that suggested more nights than days, and her eyes—wide, soft, too honest—carried the quiet watchfulness of someone accustomed to being overlooked and misunderstood.
She did not rush home.
Home waited at the end of the street, heavy with silence and sharper words, with doors that closed too hard and glances that lingered too long. Lily had learned that arriving late was sometimes safer than arriving on time.
The night, at least, did not ask anything of her.
Streetlights flickered above as she passed beneath them, their glow softening her edges. The air smelled of damp pavement and wilted roses from the florist down the block. Lily breathed it in slowly. The scent calmed her. Old, bruised beauty always did.
She felt it then.
The awareness.
It crept along her spine, subtle and intimate, like a presence standing just beyond reach. Not fear—fear was loud and sharp. This was quiet. Observant. Almost gentle.
Lily slowed, fingers curling into the sleeves of her coat.
You're imagining it, she told herself. She always was.
Still, her heart began to beat faster.
Behind the awning of a closed bookstore, Lucien Blackthorne stood utterly still.
He had learned long ago how to disappear into the world, how to become nothing more than shadow and patience. Centuries had taught him restraint, had burned discipline into his bones until hunger became a thing he controlled rather than obeyed.
Then Lily Winters passed him.
It was not her appearance that stopped him—not at first. Though she was undeniably beautiful in a quiet, unassuming way, it was something deeper that reached for him.
Her aura.
It clung to her like a second skin—fragile and delicate, almost translucent, as though a single harsh word might shatter her. Yet beneath that softness lived something darker. A quiet sorrow. A shadow that did not belong to the night, but had grown there all the same.
It was that contrast that unsettled him.
Light and dark woven together so seamlessly it felt dangerous.
Then her scent reached him.
Warm skin. Rain-damp wool. Faint soap, inexpensive and clean. And beneath it all—life. Not intoxicating in the crude way blood could be, but gentle and steady. Human. Mortal.
Unprotected.
Lucien's breath stilled.
Her scent carried her truth with it: a girl who endured rather than resisted, who had learned to survive by becoming smaller, quieter. There was no armor around her soul. No sharp edges. Only a fragile resilience that had not yet been broken.
That was what drew him.
That was what made her dangerous.
Lily paused beneath a streetlamp, the light brushing her features in soft gold. Her lashes fluttered as she looked up, as though listening for something she could not hear. For a moment, she looked impossibly young. Too gentle for a world that had already taught her cruelty.
She shivered, though the night was not cold.
Lucien took a single step forward—then stopped.
He had sworn never again. Never to linger. Never to watch. Never to let a human presence reach beneath his control and twist something ancient awake.
Yet his gaze followed her with an intensity that startled even him.
Lily turned suddenly.
For a heartbeat, their worlds brushed.
She saw him—or thought she did. A tall figure standing where shadow gathered thickest, unmoving, watching. Her breath caught, not in terror, but in something quieter and far more unsettling.
Recognition.
Then the moment slipped away.
The street stood empty once more.
Lily let out a small, uncertain laugh, shaking her head. "You're tired," she whispered to herself. "That's all."
But her heart refused to slow.
She walked on, unaware of how the air seemed to cling to her, of how her scent lingered long after she disappeared from sight.
Lucien did not follow her home.
That restraint cost him more than blood ever had.
He remained where he was, the echo of her presence pressing against him like a wound that had just begun to bleed.
Fragile.
Delicate.
Dangerously dark.
And from the moment Lily Winters passed beneath that flickering streetlight, the hunger between them was no longer his alone