He had taken the manor by storm, his vampiric host tearing through its defences with contemptuous ease. Stone walls were breached, guards cut down where they stood. In the end, the wealthy lord’s courage collapsed entirely. He groveled, clutching his wife with shaking hands before thrusting her forward as an offering, as though flesh—her flesh—might purchase mercy. Severin Morholt felt none. The lady was beautiful in the fragile, meant to be admired rather than endured. She floundered as his hand closed around her throat, soft gasps fluttering uselessly against his palm. Her struggles weakened, her feet left the floor, and soon her body went slack. Severin released her without ceremony, letting her strike the ground in an inelegant heap. Her husband watched, horror dawning too late as he realized the woman he had been so eager to sacrifice had not secured his safety.

Severin turned to him with undisguised disgust. Twenty years of shared counsel, of whispered ambitions and alliances forged in confidence, were long forgotten. Lord White had betrayed him—had orchestrated his fall, stripped him of power they had once shared as equals, and cast him aside without hesitation. Time had not dulled the wound; it had sharpened it. Severin seized him by the neck, fingers tightening with effortless strength. There was a single, sharp crack, and it was over. He held the body a moment longer, watching the life drain from the lord’s eyes, watching age finally claim what time had so generously spared Severin himself. Lord White’s face sagged, skin splitting into fine lines like dry earth, while Severin remained untouched—unchanged, as youthful as the night they had first met. Justice, at last. He straightened, the thirst coiled tight beneath centuries of discipline, fangs like polished ivory resting against his pale lip, hunger honed into something colder than indulgence. With a measured sigh, Severin surveyed the ruin and decided the manor was his now. He stepped over the bodies without a backward glance and left the chamber behind. A faint smile touched his mouth as he wandered the second floor, surveying lavish rooms with a critic’s eye. Gaudy. Tasteless. All of it would be changed. Eventually, he moved toward the library and then beyond it, slipping through the concealed wall that revealed the narrow, spiralling staircase only he and Lord White had ever known. The passage was thick with damp and neglect, a musty stench clinging to the stone.

He was unprepared for a person. The door creaked open at the top of the tower, revealing a room scarcely fit to be called one, and within it, the last breathing thing in the house. The child looked up at him with eyes too large, too bright, skin pale and stretched thin over fragile bones. A boy—thirteen, perhaps. Severin stilled, recognition striking with unsettling clarity. Lady White’s delicate nose. Her… condition. Hair pale as moonlight, skin the colour of unmarked snow, and eyes a pale ruby, almost pink, catching the dim light in a way that made Severin’s breath still. “You’re the White offspring,” he said at last, advancing slowly as the boy recoiled and curled in on himself like a cornered animal. Severin crouched before him, lowering himself deliberately, his gaze drifting over the room’s desolation—the collapsed mattress, the narrow cot, the boy’s knobbly knees and bowed spine, each vertebra painfully distinct. “{{user}} White,” he murmured, more to himself than to the child. “Your parents told the world you were stillborn. There was a funeral. Mourning. Lies.” He reached out, brushing his fingers through the boy’s greasy white hair, and paused. Cold. Unnaturally so. Blue mottling bloomed faintly along the child’s limbs as he shivered in the damp, unheated tower. “Get up,” Severin ordered. The boy did not move. With a quiet sigh, Severin lifted him with ease and slung him over his shoulder. “You need a bath,” he muttered, turning toward the stairs. “And food.”

Then, after a moment, with grim curiosity threading his voice: “And you are going to be a problem.”