Chapter 1

The rain always made me restless.

It drummed against the windows of the laboratory, heavy and unrelenting, like the sky itself was warning me to go home. But I stayed, hunched over the microscope, ignoring the ache in my shoulders. The blue glow of the computer screen painted shadows under my eyes.

Most of my classmates had been smart enough to choose safer projects—topics their professors would approve of, things that made sense: cancer research, DNA sequencing, agricultural genetics. Practical. Predictable.

But not me.

I was obsessed with the strange. With myths. With the fragments of old stories my grandmother used to whisper about blood that wasn’t quite human. “Be careful, child,” she would murmur, her wrinkled hands clutching her rosary. “Some bloodlines carry secrets better left buried.”

I should have dismissed those stories as superstition, but instead, they stuck. They burned. They became questions I couldn’t stop chasing.

And tonight, I had found something.

The blood sample on the glass slide wasn’t normal. I had run the test three times, convinced it was contamination. But the results were the same. An unidentified marker—one that didn’t belong in any database. It was too clean, too deliberate, as if nature itself hadn’t designed it.

I scribbled notes furiously, my heart thudding with a mixture of excitement and dread.

If I was right, this wasn’t just a mutation. It wasn’t even human.

Thunder cracked outside, making me flinch. My reflection in the darkened glass looked pale and drawn, my hair sticking damply to my cheeks. I realized suddenly how late it was. Midnight had passed hours ago.

With a sigh, I packed up my notes, tucking them against my chest like they were treasure. The night guard would already be annoyed that I was still here.

I pulled my jacket tight and stepped into the storm.

The campus was silent. The kind of silence that presses against your lungs, thick and unnatural. Streetlights flickered weakly, their glow fractured by the rain. My sneakers splashed against puddles as I crossed the empty quad.

That was when I heard it.

Footsteps.

At first, I thought it was just an echo of my own. But the sound was too sharp, too deliberate, falling in perfect rhythm with mine.

I slowed. So did they.

I quickened my pace. The footsteps matched.

The hair on the back of my neck prickled. I gripped my notebook tighter, my throat dry. Don’t panic, I told myself. It’s probably another student. Or security. Or… anyone normal.

But when I turned my head, my breath froze.

A man was following me.

He stood half-hidden beneath the swaying branches of an oak, but I could see enough. His eyes glowed faintly, catching the lamplight in a way no human eyes ever could. His posture was too still, too predatory, like a shadow waiting to pounce.

And when his lips parted, I saw the glint of fangs.

My chest seized.

This isn’t real. This isn’t happening. Vampires aren’t real.

But the stories my grandmother told me clawed their way back, filling my head with her warnings. Monsters in the dark. Blood-drinkers who walked among us unseen.

The man stepped forward, the rain sliding over his pale skin. His nostrils flared as he inhaled.

“Your blood…” His voice was velvet and steel, sending a shiver down my spine. “…it isn’t human.”

The words punched the air out of me. I stumbled backward, my notebook nearly slipping from my hands. He shouldn’t know about my research. He shouldn’t even exist.

Before I could think, before I could scream, he moved.

Faster than my eyes could follow, he lunged.

I bolted.

My feet pounded against the wet pavement as I tore across the quad, my breath ragged and panicked. The storm blurred everything into streaks of shadow and light. I didn’t know where I was going—just away. Away from him.

But he was faster. I could feel him behind me, the air shifting as his presence closed in. His footsteps were silent, but his hunger was deafening.

“No!” The cry ripped from my throat, drowned by thunder.

I rounded a corner, desperate, my lungs burning. The library loomed ahead, but I knew I’d never make it inside. My legs trembled, my vision blurred—

And then I slammed into something solid.

Not something. Someone.

The impact jolted me, and my notebook spilled from my hands, scattering pages across the wet ground. I staggered back, blinking up—and the world tilted.

A man stood before me. Tall. Broad-shouldered. His presence swallowed the storm itself.

He wore a long black coat that clung to him in the rain, his hair dark and unkempt. But it was his eyes that rooted me in place—eyes that glowed crimson, ancient and merciless, burning with a power that made my knees weak.

The predator chasing me froze in his tracks. His face drained of color. And then, to my shock, he dropped to his knees.

“Your Majesty,” he whispered, his voice trembling.

Majesty?

I turned my gaze back to the man before me, my stomach knotting. Who was he?

He looked down at me, and in that single moment, I felt as though he saw everything—my secrets, my fears, even the strange pulse of my blood. His expression was unreadable, carved from stone. But then, something flickered in his gaze. Shock. Recognition.

He stepped closer, the rain parting around him like the world itself bowed to his presence. My chest tightened, my breaths shallow.

And then his lips parted. His voice was low, dangerous, commanding.

“You.”

One word. That was all. But it landed like a curse, like a sentence I couldn’t escape.

The rogue vampire on the ground trembled harder, pressing his forehead to the mud as if afraid to breathe in this man’s presence.

But I couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. My notebook lay forgotten at my feet, its precious pages dissolving in the rain.

Why did this stranger—this King, if that trembling vampire spoke the truth—look at me like I was something more than human?

And why, in that moment, did I feel my entire world shatter… only to begin again with the sound of a single word?

“You.”

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