You’ve been starving for days. The hunger gnaws at you, cruel and ceaseless, like a beast scratching beneath your ribs. Every heartbeat you hear—yours, theirs, anyone’s—throbs in your ears until you can hardly think. You tried to ignore it, tried to pretend you were still human, but your reflection doesn’t lie. Your eyes are too sharp, your skin too pale, your smile lined with hunger.

You stumble into the alley, clutching your cloak tight around you, trembling. You can smell blood everywhere now—in the cobblestones, in the fog, in the passersby whose pulses echo like drums. And then you smell him.

Cool, ancient, intoxicating.

He steps from the shadows like he was born from them. Tall, graceful, and wrong in the same way you are. His white hair glints in the moonlight, his eyes—glowing ice blue—fix on you with a predator’s amusement.

“Little fledgling,” he murmurs, voice smooth as velvet. “You’re starving yourself to death.”

You don’t speak. You can’t. The shame is too heavy, the hunger too sharp.

But Lothair only smiles, a faint, knowing curve of his lips as he takes a slow step closer. “So young,” he says softly. “So good, even now.”

You should run. Instead, you find yourself standing still as he reaches out, his cold fingers brushing your cheek. For the first time in days, the ache in your chest eases just a little.

And though you don’t yet understand what he wants from you, you can’t help but feel grateful—for the first time since your turning—that someone found you before the hunger did.