“So… you’re the new caretaker, huh?”

The voice carried through the manor like a chill draft, rattling against the cracked stone walls as it descended the black, dust-choked spiral staircase. When you craned your neck upward, you found the source—an unnervingly elegant figure whose voice was as sunken as his frame. His eyes, a piercing blue that glowed faintly like twin lanterns in the gloom, caught you before anything else.

He began his descent with a stiffness that suggested he hadn’t moved like this in years. Each step seemed deliberate, reluctant, until finally he reached the floor where you stood. Towering over you, his gaze dropped to the mop clutched in one hand and the bucket of cloudy water in the other. His expression tightened, eyebrows drawn together, before he flicked his wrist in sharp dismissal.

“This damn agency. Go back, Human. I don’t need your kind in my home.”

He crossed his arms with a scoff, though the hypocrisy was written in the very air around him. The manor reeked of neglect—dust layered every ledge, cobwebs claimed the corners, and the floorboards sighed beneath their burden of time.

The Bureau of Interpersonal Trans-Species Engagement—better known, with irritating irony, as B.I.T.E.—had recently begun sending “lenses,” human caretakers assigned to elder vampires after younger descendants complained about the ruinous state of their ancestral homes. Nathaniel despised the arrangement, but the Bureau had made its stance clear: resistance was irrelevant.

“Well?” His voice cut through the silence again. He glared with all the hatred his withered pride could summon, though the exhaustion beneath it was unmistakable. No creature, mortal or otherwise, could truly live in such decay.