Rachel stood on a frozen cliff above the mouth of the underworld.

The land below was black stone and fire, carved into jagged paths that wound through rivers of magma towards a pair of towering gates. The gates were made of something darker than iron, their surface veined with ember-light, and on either side crouched lions shaped from shadow and bone. Their eyes glowed deep red as they watched the road beneath them, waiting for the one who had dared to walk where living creatures were not meant to go.

A shudder moved through the mountain.

The gates opened.

Heat rolled upward, carrying the stench of sulphur and smoke. From the darkness beyond the threshold, a figure emerged. At first, he was only shadow given the shape of a man, but as he stepped into the glow of the magma, Rachel saw the suggestion of a face, a crown of darkness, and eyes as red as dying stars.

The lions bowed their heads.

Aphrodite watched from the cliff, unable to look away.

In this dream, Rachel felt distant from the body she occupied, as though she were watching a story that had already been written and could only move through the lines assigned to her. The woman standing on the cliff knew this place. She knew the gates, the lions, the impossible path into Inanis. She knew the creature below, too, and the knowledge filled her with something worse than fear.

Grief.

The figure lifted his head, and across the impossible distance his gaze found hers.

"Aphrodite," he called, his voice deep enough to move through stone. "Together, we shall navigate the shadows of Inanis."

The words should have been strange, but some buried part of her understood them. Inanis was not merely a place. It was absence, hunger, the hollow realm between death and return. To descend into it was madness. To return from it was almost impossible.

"I heard rumours you were preparing to make the ascent to Inanis" she said, her voice carrying across the burning air.

He extended his hand towards her, though they stood so far apart that his body was little more than a dark mark against the fire. "You possess the strength to halt this madness. Bring me back, and we may reunite. I will forgive you for what you have done, and we will rule as we once did."

Aphrodite's hand tightened around the folds of her cloak. "Some acts are unforgivable."

Rage tore through him.

Darkness rose from the gates in twisting columns, spiralling upward with the force of a storm. The lions roared. The mountain shook. One of the shadowed winds struck the cliff, and the world vanished in a rush of cold and fire.

Aeneas.

The names moved through Rachel's sleeping mind like a warning.

The dream shifted, dragging her from the underworld's edge into a city on fire. Smoke crawled along stone walls. Flames devoured market stalls and wooden roofs. People screamed in streets choked with ash, while something vast and dark moved beyond the gates, pressing against them until the city itself seemed to bend beneath his hunger.

Aeneas.

She heard herself say the name again.

Then she was falling from a balcony, the world rushing up beneath her, the heat of the burning city filling her lungs.

Rachel woke with a sharp breath and rolled straight off the couch.

Her left arm struck the floor first, pain jolting through her elbow and shoulder as she landed on the polished wood. For a moment she lay there, stunned, tangled in the grey blanket and trying to understand why the ceiling above her was unfamiliar.

Then the room came back to her.

Black furniture. White walls. Heavy curtains. Shelves lined with old books. The faint pulse of music below the floorboards.

Vlad's apartment.

Rachel pushed herself upright, still breathing too quickly. The dream clung to her in fragments: black gates, red eyes, fire crawling over a city, and the name Aeneas. sitting on her tongue as if she had spoken it in another life.

"Are you all right?" Vlad asked.

She turned towards the sound of his voice and found him in the kitchen, standing at the stove as if vampires making breakfast in the middle of the night were a perfectly ordinary thing. His sleeves were still rolled to his elbows, but he looked steadier than he had before she fell asleep. The tremor in his hands was gone. The shadows beneath his eyes had softened, though something watchful remained in the way he studied her.

Rachel rubbed her arm. "I fell off your couch."

"I saw."

"And you didn't think to help?"

"You looked like you might bite me if I came too close."

"I'm not the one with fangs."

"No," he said, turning back to the pan. "Apparently, you only borrow the taste for blood when it is inconvenient."

Rachel grimaced as memory returned: Estella's wrist, the metallic taste, the rush of essence flooding through her body, and the terrible part of her that had wanted more. She looked down at her hands, half expecting to see blood still staining her fingers, but they were clean.

"What time is it?" she asked.

"The middle of the night." Vlad moved food from the pan onto a plate and carried it to the coffee table. "You have not lost another day."

He set the plate down in front of her. Eggs. Bacon. Toast. Something close to normal, except for the fact that she was sitting barefoot on the floor of a vampire's apartment after drinking blood from his mistress.

"Eat," he said.

Rachel looked at the plate. "I don't eat meat."

Vlad paused.

The silence stretched long enough for his mouth to curve.

"You drank blood."

"I didn't do it because I wanted to."

"No," he said, and for once there was no mockery in his voice. "But you wanted it once it touched your tongue."

Rachel looked away because that was the part she could not deny.

Vlad returned to the kitchen and took an apple from a fruit bowl that looked too deliberate to be practical. He examined it briefly, then tossed it to her. Rachel caught it against her chest.

"I keep them for decoration. Apparently they now have a purpose."

She eyed the apple, then him. "Did you just give me decorative fruit?"

Her stomach answered before her pride could. She took a bite, and the crisp sweetness steadied her more than she expected. Vlad sat at the opposite end of the couch and began eating from the plate he had made, as though the bacon had always been for him.

"You actually eat?" Rachel asked.

"Of course. A human body comes with human functions."

"Are there creatures that don't?"

"Yes. But those not born of this earth follow different rules."

Rachel stopped chewing. "Not born of this earth?"

"The world is larger than humans think."

"That is becoming an annoying theme."

Vlad's mouth twitched, but his attention sharpened at once. "Who is Aeneas?"

Rachel's fingers tightened around the apple.

"I said that out loud?"

"Twice."

"It was a dream."

"What kind of dream?"

She thought of black gates, lions with red eyes, and a shadowed figure calling her Aphrodite as if the name belonged to him. She thought of the burning city and the fall from the balcony. The words gathered in her throat, then stopped there.

"I don't know."

Vlad studied her for a moment, and the bond shifted between them, quieter than it had been before but not gone. It moved like a thread pulled beneath skin. She felt his attention through it, not as hunger now, but as something older and more careful.

"You do know," he said. "You simply do not trust me with it."

"That would require me to understand it first."

"Perhaps."

Rachel took another bite of apple to avoid answering. The dream was already fading at the edges, but the feeling remained. Grief. Rage. Fire. A creature who said they had once ruled together.

"Do dreams usually get worse after a creature starts feeding?"

Vlad leaned back, the plate balanced in one hand. "Dreams are not my area of expertise. Myus might say your creature is waking. Darius would probably tell you the memories are rising because your essence has been unlocked."

"And you?"

"I think something inside you has started opening doors."

The answer sat too close to what she had feared.

Rachel looked at him over the apple. "That sounds almost poetic for a blood-sucking leech."

"I am capable of depth."

"Are you?"

"On rare and inconvenient occasions."

For a moment, the faintest warmth moved between them. It touched the same place as the dreams of Céline, the same place that remembered his hands on her shoulders and the way his voice had softened when he asked her to come to the ball.

Vlad's expression changed as though he had felt something shift too.

"What?" Rachel asked.

"Nothing."

Silence settled between them. Rachel kept eating the apple while Vlad finished the food he had cooked. He moved differently now that his hunger had been eased. Not harmlessly, never that, but with more control. She could still feel the darkness in him through the bond, but it no longer clawed at her.

"Your essence had an interesting effect on Estella," he said.

Rachel remembered Estella sinking into the chair, breathless and faintly smiling after Rachel fed from her. Rachel's face warmed. "Interesting how?"

Vlad looked almost amused. "She was very keen for intimacy."

"Oh God." Rachel pressed a hand over her eyes. "Please stop talking."

His laugh was low and brief, and it transformed his face just enough to bother her.

She dropped her hand. "Do not look pleased with yourself."

"I am pleased that you are strong enough to be offended."

She cleared her throat and reached for safer ground, if safer ground existed between them. "Did you buy my paintings?"

Vlad's expression shifted, not into guilt exactly, but into something close enough that Rachel sat straighter.

"You did," she said.

"I am a fan of art."

"Oh, please."

"I am."

"You bought all of them?"

"They had something special."

Rachel narrowed her eyes. "Special as in artistically special, or special as in suspicious evidence of something?"

Vlad took his time answering, which was answer enough.

"Both," he said at last.

Rachel leaned back against the couch. "You could have told me."

"You would have refused the sale."

"Yes, because I don't particularly want my entire first exhibition secretly bought by the vampire who keeps telling me I'm dangerous."

"You are dangerous. and the paintings are safer with me."

Her irritation sharpened. "They were not weapons. They were my work."

"I did not buy them to hide them."

"Then why?"

He looked towards the shuttered windows, his jaw tightening slightly. "Because I recognised places. Important places. Because someone else might recognise them too. Because if your dreams are memories, then those paintings may lead to answers or to creatures who would use you before you understand what they are seeing."

Rachel wanted to argue. She wanted to accuse him of controlling another piece of her life, of deciding what was safe, what mattered, what could be taken. But the memory of Etna on the gallery wall, the river he had called the Nile, and the dreams that kept opening inside her weakened the argument before she could shape it.

She looked down at the apple in her hand and turned it slowly. "If they are memories, why don't I remember them properly?"

"I don't know."

"You're very old for someone with so few answers."

Rachel took another bite, then let her curiosity circle back to the question she had been avoiding. "How old are you?"

Vlad's mouth curved. "Old enough."

She studied him, thinking of candlelight, black velvet, and a woman in moon-coloured silk who had lied to him with practiced grace. "Have you ever lived in France?"

His expression shifted almost imperceptibly. "Among many other places."

Vlad went very still.

The change was subtle, but the bond caught it before his face did. A flicker of pain. Not fresh. Not open. Something old, sealed badly.

Rachel remembered Céline's reflection, moon-coloured silk, Vlad's hands at her shoulders. She wondered what would happen if she said the name aloud.

Céline.

The thought rose and almost became speech, but something held her back. The name felt too intimate to share, too sharp to test in the middle of this strange night. If Vlad recognised it, she was not ready for the consequence. If he did not, she was not sure she wanted to see that emptiness in his face.

So she swallowed it.

Vlad watched her. "What did you almost say?"

"Nothing."

The silence that followed felt too thin to hold what neither of them was saying. Rachel took another bite of the apple and forced herself to look away from him, but the name remained caught behind her teeth, sharp with meaning she did not yet understand.

Vlad let the moment pass, though the tension in his jaw suggested he had noticed more than she wanted him to. When he spoke again, his voice had shifted back to safer ground.

"You should not go back to work."

Rachel groaned. "Not this again."

"You used your power on a human today."

Her stomach tightened. "Darius told you?"

"He told me enough."

"Of course he did."

"He was concerned."

"He is always concerned. That's becoming a problem too."

Vlad's eyes flickered. "Yes."

Rachel looked at him sharply. "You agree?"

"Darius has a generous heart and too much faith in his own self-control. Around you, that is a dangerous combination."

"Myus said my essence was making him protective."

"Myus was enjoying himself, but he was not wrong."

Rachel touched the dove pendant. "So what? I should avoid everyone?"

"You should learn what you are before you turn half the city into followers and call it an accident."

The Lindon memory returned with sickening clarity. His face softening. His hand lifting towards her cheek.

"I didn't mean to do that," she said.

Rachel wrapped the blanket tighter around herself. "You keep warning me about humans. Darius did too. But my whole life is human. My job, Beth, my parents, my apartment, bills, trains, bad coffee, all of it. I cannot just stop being part of that because you have decided I'm something else."

"I understand your parents are not creatures, or at least not known creatures. That explains your ignorance, though not your existence."

Rachel stared at him. "How do you know about my parents?"

"We made inquiries."

"You have to stop spying on me."

"I am trying to understand what you are." Vlad set the plate aside and leaned forward, his forearms resting on his knees. "There have always been humans who know about us. Some worshipped creatures, some made bargains, some hunted us. With modern science, the hunters are more dangerous than they used to be. Scientists, military projects, private collectors, men with money who believe every miracle can be dissected if they own a sharp enough knife. Creatures disappear, and they are not seen again."

Rachel thought of Darius saying humans were dangerous. She thought of Myus's birds watching from the trees. She thought of Lindon, ordinary and awful, and how easily she had changed him with a touch.

"Wouldn't blending in make more sense?" she asked. "If no one has noticed me before, why would they notice me now?"

"Because before, your essence was hidden. Now it is not."

"I need money," she said, because the ordinary truth was easier to hold than the terrifying one. "I have bills."

"I could buy every one of your paintings."

"You already did."

A faintly sheepish expression crossed his face. "I meant future paintings."

"I don't paint so one arrogant vampire can hoard my work in a private room and analyse it for clues."

"I would not hoard all of it."

"Generous."

"You could work for me."

Rachel laughed before she could stop herself. "Doing what? Social media for vampires? Brand strategy for the undead?"

His mouth curved. "I have duties beyond human capitalism. And I don't need a brand strategy. I can't share more unless you are in. But I can offer safety."

Rachel's laughter faded. "I don't want safety if it means being owned."

"No one said owned."

"Everyone keeps implying protected, guided, watched, fed, hidden, handled. It all sounds very close."

Vlad did not answer immediately. For once, he seemed to consider the words instead of dismissing them.

"You are right," he said.

Rachel blinked. "Sorry?"

"You are right," he repeated. "It has been a difficult few days, and I have been thinking like a soldier trying to contain a threat. That is not an apology for everything. It is an explanation for some of it."

She looked at him carefully, searching for the arrogance, the manipulation, the sharp edge of mockery. There was still pride in him. There would probably always be pride in him. But there was something else too, a weariness that made him look older than his face allowed.

"I don't want to be contained," she said.

"I know."

"And I don't want to wake up in your apartment again."

"Then next time, try not to collapse in my club."

Rachel glared.

His mouth almost smiled. "That was poorly timed."

"Yes."

"I will take you home."

The offer should have relieved her, but something in her hesitated. She looked at the plate, the apple core, the blanket around her shoulders, and then at Vlad standing in the dim room with red still faintly lingering in his eyes. The bond between them was quieter now, but it did not feel like a chain in that moment. It felt like a question neither of them knew how to ask.

"Now?" she said.

"When you are ready."