Seraphina's POV
I didn't sleep after seeing Elara in the rose garden.
I lay there running through every conversation she'd had with me, replaying each careful word, each perfectly timed answer, and asked myself the question I should have asked from the beginning: what does she actually want from me?
By sunrise — a sunrise I couldn't see because every window in the Salvatore estate faced away from the east, which felt deliberate — I had decided one thing.
Until I knew whose side Elara was on, I would treat her exactly the way I treated Vivienne. Politely. Carefully. With both eyes open at all times.
Survival rule number one: the people who smile while handing you safety are usually the ones holding the cage door.
History of the Blood Wars met in a circular classroom on the second floor, stone walls lined with old maps and older paintings. I arrived early — partly to get a seat near the exit, partly because being late in a school full of vampires felt like a bad survival strategy.
I was the first student there.
The professor was already at the front.
I had expected, after Theron Blackwell's particular brand of terrifying, that Moonveil's other professors would follow the same pattern. Dangerous. Scarred. Blunt as a hammer.
Lucien Devereaux was none of those things.
He stood at the blackboard with his back to the door, writing something in handwriting so precise it looked printed. Silver-white hair tied neatly at the base of his neck. A dark waistcoat, a book open on the desk beside him that looked older than most countries. He moved with a kind of quiet grace that was completely different from Kieran's cold authority or Theron's physical force — this was something softer. Sadder. Like watching someone go through motions they'd performed so many times that beauty and grief had become the same motion.
He turned when I sat down.
His eyes found me immediately. Mercury-silver, the color of still water on a cloudy day. And the expression on his face when he saw me — it lasted less than two seconds before he controlled it — was not hunger. Not curiosity.
It was recognition.
Like seeing a face he knew from somewhere he couldn't quite place. Or somewhere he'd been trying to forget.
"Miss Ashford," he said. Quietly. Like my name meant something to him.
"Professor," I said.
He looked at me for one moment longer than was strictly necessary. Then turned back to the board.
The lecture was about extinction.
Specifically: the vampire hunters. A bloodline of humans — rare, genetically distinct — who had existed for centuries alongside the vampire world, powerful enough to fight them on equal ground. Lucien taught it the way someone describes a war they personally survived — careful, precise, with grief packed so tightly underneath every word that you could feel its shape without seeing it directly.
"The last recorded hunter died in 1887," he said, his back to the class. "The vampire Council declared the bloodline extinct. Officially, the hunter era ended that year."
He paused. A pause just slightly too long to be natural.
"Officially," he repeated. Then moved on.
The vampire students took notes without reaction. This was old history to them. Settled. Done.
I wrote the word officially in my notebook and underlined it twice.
After class, while other students filed out, Lucien said: "Miss Ashford. A moment."
The remaining students exchanged glances on their way out. I stayed.
He waited until the room was empty. Then he crossed to the door, checked the corridor in both directions with the particular care of someone who knew exactly how good vampire hearing was, and closed it.
When he turned back, the careful professor's composure had shifted into something more direct. More urgent.
"I'm going to say something that I need you to hear clearly," he said. "The hunters were not monsters. Every history book in this library will tell you they were genocidal, bloodthirsty, a plague on vampire civilization. That narrative was written by the people who hunted them to extinction." His silver eyes held mine steadily. "The hunters were protectors. They kept our kind from becoming tyrants. Without them, the vampire world has no check on its own power. No conscience. Nothing to answer to."
My pen had stopped moving. "Why are you telling me this?"
"Because you need to understand what was lost when they died." He held my gaze. "And you need to be careful, Seraphina. More careful than you realize. There are people in this academy watching you with great interest, and not all of them have your wellbeing in mind."
"Including the headmaster?" The words came out before I'd decided to say them.
Something shifted in his expression — sharp, fast, carefully smoothed back down. "What makes you ask that?"
"Call it instinct."
He studied me for a long, still moment. "You're more perceptive than they expected." He said it quietly, almost to himself. Then, louder: "Be careful. Trust slowly. And come to class prepared tomorrow — we'll be discussing hunter physiology. You'll want to pay attention."
He opened the door and held it, a clear dismissal.
I walked out with the distinct feeling that he'd told me something enormous while technically saying almost nothing.
Combat training was a different kind of education entirely.
Theron Blackwell had clearly decided, since our first session, that near-death experiences were the fastest teaching method. Today he put me against the training dummy first — warm-up, supposedly — then against a vampire student twice my size, then made me run the obstacle course at the far end of the chamber three times while he timed it.
By the time he called me to the center floor for direct sparring, my legs felt like water and my lungs were making complaints.
He came at me without preamble. He always did. I'd stopped being surprised by it.
I lasted four exchanges before he put me on the floor — a single leg sweep, economical and devastating, my back hitting the mat hard enough to knock the air out completely.
I lay there staring at the ceiling. Breathing.
"Get up," Blackwell said.
"Give me a second."
"Your enemy won't give you a second."
I got up.
He swept me again. Faster this time, a different angle. I hit the mat and immediately rolled — something I'd worked out during the previous sessions, that rolling was faster than standing when you were winded.
When I came up, he was watching with those forest-green eyes. "Better," he said.
"Why do you push me harder than the others?" I demanded, breathing hard. "They're vampires. Supernatural. I'm human. It's not fair—"
"No," he said. "It's not." He crossed his arms, and for a moment something moved behind his eyes — old, heavy, private. "That's exactly why I push you harder. Every other student in this room will heal any injury in minutes. You won't. Every other student has strength and speed you'll never match." He paused. "So you don't get to train like them. You have to be smarter. Faster in your thinking. Better prepared." Something in his voice dropped lower. "I won't let you come to my class and die because I went easy on you."
He held out his scarred hand.
I took it. He pulled me up with a gentleness that was completely at odds with everything else about him.
"Again," he said.
"Again," I agreed.
Walking back through the corridor to the Salvatore estate that night, I tried to organize what I knew.
Lucien Devereaux, who taught extinct hunter bloodlines and looked at me like a ghost had walked in and sat in the front row.
Theron Blackwell, who trained me harder than students twice my strength because he was afraid for me specifically.
Kieran Salvatore, who claimed me in front of three hundred vampires because my blood smelled like a woman he'd loved two centuries ago.
Three vampires. Three different kinds of too-much-attention.
Three men who all seemed, in their separate ways, to know something about me that I didn't.
I pushed open the estate door and stopped.
Adrian was in the entrance hall. His expression when he saw me was carefully neutral — the specific neutrality of someone who has information and is deciding how much of it to hand over.
"Good training session?" he asked.
"Productive." I studied him. "Adrian. Does Kieran know why I was really invited to Moonveil? The actual reason, not the story about my blood being rare?"
Adrian went very still.
"Because Lucien Devereaux just taught me an entire lecture about extinct hunter bloodlines," I continued, watching his face, "and spent most of it looking at me like the extinction might have been slightly exaggerated."
Adrian's jaw moved once. Then: "You should talk to Kieran."
"Is that your way of saying yes?"
"It's my way of saying—" He stopped. Looked at the ceiling briefly. Then back at me. "Talk to Kieran. Tonight. Before your History professor decides to tell you first."
He walked away before I could ask another question.
And in the silence he left behind, one thought rose to the surface and stayed there, cold and certain as the iron gate:
Everyone here already knows what I am.
Everyone except me.