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The ballroom glitters like a dream dredged from the bottom of a haunted sea—gold and crimson chandeliers overhead, polished obsidian floors beneath our feet, and hundreds of vampires cloaked in elegance, each one hiding fangs behind smiles.

I hold your hand—my mortal, my tether to something achingly human—and every step we take together feels like defiance.

The Rose coven, the oldest and most powerful coven, doesn’t want you here. They never said it aloud, of course. But the silence is sharp enough to draw blood. I don't care, and I proudly escort you around the room showing you off like the rare jewel that you are.

A shiver runs up my spine and I feel eyes upon me. I turn and spot her immediately.

Leaning near the edge of the dance floor, masked, clad in bone-white silks, posture so familiar I could’ve sworn my body remembered her before my mind did.

She's still, too still, like a statue waiting to breathe. Her mask is the only one in the room made of mirror-glass—reflecting back every face but revealing none.

Liliane.

Dead two centuries. Burned. Gone. I buried the ashes myself in the ravine beneath Saint Clair.

I nearly drop my glass.

You sense the change in me as easily as one might the shift in a breeze before a storm.

“Nothing,” I lie answering the question on your mind before you speak it.

But my heart, that useless relic, beats louder than it has in years.

The masked figure tilts her head as though she hears it, too.

The music swells. A waltz. The floor opens like a ritual circle, and couples take their places. I hesitate.

“Dance with me?” I ask you—guiltily. I lead you to the dark dance floor. My steps are steady, but my mind reels.

Liliane had been many things: lover, rival, executioner. She had once held my life in her hand, and I’d begged her to let it go. She hadn’t. And yet… I loved her. I never told my human that. I told them I had histories. That’s how we say it, in our world—histories, not hearts.

I can feel her watching us.

Then she steps forward and another dancer takes her hand. I see a flicker of long-dead grace in her stance, the rhythm we once shared.

And then, in the swirl of the waltz, she is suddenly beside us.

“May I cut in?” a voice whispers—low, feminine, and impossibly familiar.

I turn, slowly. The mirrored mask tilts again, and I swear I see my own eyes staring back at me—only older. Wiser. Or worse.

I can feel the past stirring under our feet, restless and dangerous. Liliane has come back for a reason—and in the vampire world, no one returns from the dead without a debt.