Seraphina's POV
I walked out of combat class with bruises on both arms and a decision hardening in my chest like concrete.
I was not going to the assembly.
The notice had been slipped under my door that morning — All students required to attend the Monthly Grand Hall Assembly, 9 PM, no exceptions — and I had read it, set it down, and decided that "no exceptions" was a rule written for people who weren't already the most interesting thing on the menu.
I made it exactly halfway down the corridor before a hand closed around my elbow.
"You're going the wrong way." It was Cassia — the vampire girl who'd approached me after combat training yesterday, the one with warm brown eyes who seemed genuinely amused by my continued existence. She fell into step beside me without being invited. "Assembly is mandatory. Elara does a head count. If you're missing, she sends prefects, and trust me, you don't want prefects showing up to collect you."
"I don't want to be in a room with three hundred vampires either."
"Fair." She tilted her head. "But you're already in a building with three hundred vampires. At least in the Grand Hall, there are rules."
I thought about the training room. The dark. The red-eyed student breathing you smell incredible two inches from my face.
Rules sounded marginally better than the alternative.
"Fine," I said. "But I'm standing near a wall."
The Grand Hall was the largest room I'd seen in the castle — high ceiling, rows of benches arranged in a wide arc, torches burning along the walls. It was already packed when we arrived. The noise dropped noticeably when I walked in. Not all the way to silence. Just enough to notice.
I found a spot at the very back, against the stone wall, between a support column and Cassia's shoulder. Cassia had appointed herself my unofficial buffer, which I appreciated more than I could say.
Elara spoke from the front — announcements about class schedules, something about restricted areas, a warning about feeding infractions that she delivered with the tone of someone who had given this speech a hundred times and meant every word.
I was almost starting to breathe normally.
Then I heard the heels.
Sharp, deliberate, perfectly timed — click, click, click — crossing the stone floor toward me through the crowd. Students stepped aside without being asked. That told me everything before I even saw her face.
Morgessa Nightshade was the kind of beautiful that felt like a warning. Sharp cheekbones, pale gold hair, dark eyes that had probably never once looked at anything without deciding its value. She moved through the Grand Hall like she owned it — because, I would later learn, she basically did.
She stopped in front of me.
Behind her, four friends arranged themselves in a loose semicircle. Casual. Like they just happened to end up there.
"So you're the human," Morgessa said. She didn't bother lowering her voice. Heads turned. "I've been curious. You don't look special."
"I'm not," I said. "I'm just a student."
She laughed — light, musical, completely without warmth. "Oh, that's precious. A student." She glanced at her friends. They smiled on cue. Then she looked back at me, and the smile dropped into something much more honest. "You're a blood servant, darling. A warm body that someone delivered to the wrong address. You don't get a class schedule. You get a purpose."
"Her purpose," Cassia said sharply, "is protected by academy law—"
"I'm not talking to you, Cassia." Morgessa didn't even look at her. Her eyes stayed on mine. Reading me. Looking for the exact spot where I'd flinch.
I'd spent four years learning not to flinch.
"Say whatever you want," I told her. "I've heard worse."
Something flickered across her face — annoyance, maybe. She'd expected fear, and I wasn't giving it to her. I felt, distantly, the specific satisfaction of denying a bully the reaction they came for.
Then her hand shot out and grabbed my wrist.
Her nails were sharp. One caught the thin skin on the inside of my wrist — a small cut, hardly anything, a paper-cut's worth of pain.
But the smell hit the room like a match dropped in gasoline.
I felt it happen before I saw it — a shift in the air, a collective held breath, the temperature in the room dropping two degrees as three hundred vampires caught the scent of fresh human blood at the same moment. When I looked up, the nearest students had gone absolutely rigid, their eyes flooding from every color to deep, burning crimson.
Morgessa's own eyes had changed. Her lips parted. The fangs were there — white, curved, real — and she was leaning toward my wrist with the slow inevitability of something that had never once been told no.
"Let's see what all the fuss is about," she whispered.
"Enough."
One word. Quietly spoken.
The entire Grand Hall went still.
I had not heard that voice before. But something in it — the absolute zero temperature of it, the total absence of anything that could be called a request — made my spine straighten on instinct.
He stepped out of the shadows near the far wall like he'd been standing there the whole time. Maybe he had been. Midnight hair. Ice-blue eyes, currently burning faintly crimson like everyone else's, but controlled — held on a leash so tight you could feel the effort from across the room. Tall, unhurried, moving through the crowd like water moving around stones.
Kieran Salvatore looked at Morgessa the way you look at something you've already decided to remove.
"Release her." Still quiet. Still that same absolute tone.
Morgessa's grip on my wrist loosened — not all the way, but enough. "She's just a human, Kieran. She's not—"
"I won't say it again."
The grip disappeared. I pulled my wrist to my chest.
Kieran's eyes moved to me. Just for a second. Something passed through them — recognition, almost, something complicated and fast that was gone before I could name it.
Then he looked back at the room. At every vampire student watching with hungry, crimson eyes.
"She is under my protection," he said. Loud enough for the whole hall. "Every person in this room heard that. Anyone who touches her, feeds from her, or harms her in any way answers to me. Directly."
The silence that followed was a different kind than before. This one had weight to it. Fear-shaped weight.
Morgessa's face had gone dangerously, perfectly still. The expression of someone who has just been publicly humiliated by the one person whose opinion matters to them.
Kieran turned to me and extended one hand. "Come with me."
I looked at his hand. Then at Morgessa. Then at the three hundred crimson-eyed vampires between me and every exit.
I took his hand.
Cold. His skin was cold as the iron gate, cold as the mountains. But his grip was certain — steady in a way nothing at Moonveil had been since I arrived.
He led me through the crowd. Students stepped back from him automatically, a clean path opening ahead of us like he was moving through water.
When we were clear of the hall, I pulled my hand back. He let me.
"Thank you," I said. The words felt inadequate and also slightly wrong—like gratitude wasn't quite the right response to being claimed in front of hundreds of people. "But I don't need a protector."
"You needed one ten seconds ago."
I couldn't argue that. I hated that I couldn't argue that.
"Why?" I asked instead. "You don't know me. Why do you care what happens to me?"
He was quiet long enough that I thought he wouldn't answer. Then — still not looking at me, his jaw tight, his eyes aimed somewhere down the dark corridor:
"You smell like someone I knew. Someone I failed to protect." A pause. "I won't make that mistake again."
It should have sounded like a compliment. Like kindness.
Instead, standing in the dark corridor of a vampire castle with his words still hanging in the air between us, a thought landed in my head quietly and with horrible clarity:
He didn't say he was protecting me because he cared about me.
He said he was protecting me because of someone else.
I'm not a person to him. I'm a second chance.
And second chances, in my experience, were only valuable until they stopped being useful.
I looked at the hand he'd extended to lead me away from danger, and I wondered — with the particular cold instinct that four years of Vivienne had sharpened in me — whether the most dangerous vampire in Moonveil Academy had just saved me from Morgessa.
Or simply decided I belonged to him instead.