Seraphina's POV
I spun toward the sound.
Empty corridor. Just stone walls and torchlight and the faint smell of candle wax. Whoever had been standing there was gone — completely, silently, supernaturally gone in the way that only vampires could manage.
"How long were they there?" I asked.
Cassia was already moving down the corridor, reaching the spot where the door had clicked shut and pressing her palm flat against the wall beside it. She inhaled — slowly, deliberately, using senses I didn't have. Then her expression did something careful and controlled.
"Long enough," she said.
"Long enough to hear what you said about the poison?"
She turned. "Long enough to hear all of it." She met my eyes. "I couldn't catch the scent properly — someone masked it. Which means they came prepared to listen without being identified." A pause. "That's not casual eavesdropping, Sera. That's deliberate."
I looked at the empty corridor for one more second. Then I made myself turn away, because standing there staring at nothing was a waste of time I didn't have.
"History class is in ten minutes," I said.
Cassia blinked. "You're still going to class."
"Someone just confirmed they're actively planning to poison me and someone else was listening to that confirmation." I picked up my bag. "Yes, I'm going to class. Because standing still makes me a target and moving makes me harder to predict."
Cassia stared at me for a moment. Then: "You are genuinely the strangest human I have ever met."
"Thank you," I said, and walked.
Lucien Devereaux was at the blackboard again when I arrived. Writing. That same precise, printed handwriting. But today the words were different — I could read them from the doorway before I sat down.
Hunter Blood Composition. Properties. Recorded Effects.
I sat down. Read the board again. Felt something cold settle at the base of my spine.
The other students filed in around me. Lucien didn't turn from the board until every seat was filled, and when he did, his mercury eyes swept the room in their usual measured way — landing on me for exactly one beat longer than anyone else.
"Today," he said, "we discuss the biological reality of the hunter bloodline. Not the mythology. Not the propaganda." His gaze moved across the class. "The fact."
He taught for forty minutes. His voice was steady, unhurried, but underneath every word I could feel the weight of someone speaking about something that mattered to them beyond the academic. Hunter blood, he explained, carried a genetic marker — dormant in most descendants, active in very few — that produced a compound vampire physiology couldn't process. Contact with active hunter blood caused immediate physical distress in vampires. Prolonged exposure could incapacitate even the oldest bloodlines.
"This," Lucien said, turning back to the board and underlining two words, "is why the Council ordered their extermination. Not because hunters attacked first. Because hunters existed." He set the chalk down carefully. "We hunted them to extinction." He paused. Then, quietly, to the board: "Or so we thought."
The classroom was silent.
I wrote nothing in my notebook for the last ten minutes of class. My pen sat in my hand and I stared at the page and I thought about my father. About his death that everyone called a heart attack. About Vivienne's debts paid in exchange for delivering one specific girl to one specific school.
About why me. Specifically. Always, specifically, me.
"Miss Ashford."
Every other student had left. I had been very slowly packing my bag, doing the math in my head, arriving at conclusions I didn't want.
Lucien stood at the front of the empty classroom. His hands were clasped behind his back. His expression was the most unguarded I'd seen it — the careful professor's composure partially gone, something rawer and more urgent in its place.
"Close the door, please," he said.
I did. Then crossed the room and stood in front of his desk, and waited, because I had learned in the last week that waiting in silence made people say more than they planned to.
"I need to show you something," he said. He opened a desk drawer and removed a small glass vial — dark, stoppered, older than anything I'd seen yet. Inside was a dried residue, dark red-brown, clinging to the glass. "This is a sample of documented hunter blood. Authenticated. Approximately a hundred and forty years old." He set it on the desk between us. "I need to compare it to a sample of yours."
The silence stretched.
"Why?" I said.
His silver eyes met mine directly. "Because your blood has been described to me by three separate vampires in the last week using words none of them had any logical reason to use. Words like ancient. Like layered. Like—" He stopped. Chose something simpler. "You smell different from every other human I have encountered in three centuries. And I have encountered many."
I held his gaze. "And if I say no?"
"Then I respect that, and you leave, and we both continue pretending this conversation didn't happen." He spread his hands on the desk — open, deliberate. "I am not asking to harm you. I am asking because if what I suspect is true, you are in danger you don't fully understand yet, and I would rather you understand it."
I pulled a pin from my bag — a sewing pin, small, silver, the kind Vivienne used to leave lying around the house carelessly. I used it to prick the tip of my finger. One small bead of red appeared.
I held it over the vial.
One drop fell.
Lucien unstoppered the vial and held it to the light, and I watched his face — watched the exact moment the color left it, watched his absolutely controlled composure come completely apart at the seams for three full seconds before he rebuilt it.
"Impossible," he said. Barely above a whisper.
"What?"
He set the vial down. His hands, I noticed, weren't entirely steady. "The markers are identical." He looked up at me. "Not similar. Not close. Identical." Something moved through his eyes — awe, horror, and underneath both of those, something that looked painfully like grief. "Seraphina. You are a direct descendant of the Ashford hunter bloodline."
The name hit me in the chest like something physical. Ashford. My name. My father's name.
"My father—"
"Was likely a dormant carrier, yes. The gene skips generations frequently." Lucien stood, and for a moment he just looked at me — this long, steady, devastated look, like I was something precious and already broken. Then he crossed the room and checked the corridor in both directions, and closed the door again, and turned back with urgency replacing everything else.
"Listen to me carefully." His hands came to my shoulders — not hard, but firm, grounding. The first time he'd touched me. "If this information reaches the vampire Council, they will order your execution. Ancient law. Hunter bloodlines are to be exterminated on discovery, no exceptions, no appeals." He held my gaze. "If it reaches the wrong people here before that — they won't kill you. They'll keep you. Study you. Use your blood as a weapon." His grip tightened slightly. "Tell no one. Not Cassia. Not Adrian."
"And Kieran?" I asked.
The briefest hesitation. So brief I almost missed it.
"Especially not Kieran."
The words landed wrong. "Why especially him?"
"Because Kieran Salvatore sits on the junior Council. Because his family has enforced extinction law for two centuries." Lucien's silver eyes were completely serious. "Because no matter what he's made you feel since he claimed you, his first loyalty is to his bloodline. And his bloodline wrote the law that says you must die."
The room felt smaller than it had a moment ago.
"How long do I have?" I asked. "Before someone else figures it out?"
"Someone," Lucien said carefully, "may already have."
My blood went cold. "What does that mean?"
He hesitated — genuinely, visibly weighed something — then reached into his inside jacket pocket and placed a folded piece of paper on the desk between us. Old paper, edges soft with age. I unfolded it.
It was a list of names. Twenty, maybe twenty-five. Each one crossed out in red ink. At the very bottom, in handwriting different from the rest — newer, sharper — was a single name.
Seraphina Ashford.
Not crossed out. Not yet.
But circled.
"Where did you get this?" My voice came out very quiet.
"It was slipped under my office door this morning," Lucien said. "Before your class. Before anyone could have known we'd have this conversation." He met my eyes. "Someone already knows what you are, Seraphina. And they want you to know that they know."
I stared at my name on that list.
And then the bell rang for the next class — loud, normal, indifferent — and somewhere in the corridor outside, completely unhurried, came the sound of a single pair of footsteps walking past Lucien's door.
Slow. Deliberate.
Pausing for exactly one second directly outside.
Then continuing on.