(Slow-burn, sensual tension, Kyrell's POV, with Damien watching from the shadows)
---
The forest was too quiet.
Even the leaves seemed to hold their breath.
Kyrell stirred where he lay on the mossy earth, limbs aching with a strange weight, breath shallow. The scent of blood was thick around him—his own, dried and dark. His lashes fluttered open. Shadows blurred his vision. But then…
That face again.
Lucian.
Kyrell blinked, disoriented. The image of him—sharp, cold, burning—overlapped with the dream. No… not a dream. A memory?
Lucian had touched him. Lifted him. There was fire behind his eyes, fury barely leashed, but his hands… his hands had been gentle.
"You shouldn't be alive."
That voice. It rang in his skull like a bell tolling for something long buried.
Kyrell sat up slowly, back against the bark of a blackened tree. The forest smelled of rot and winter. His wrists still bore the pale bruises of leather restraints. And beneath his skin, something else writhed—something cold, broken loose from its chains.
He remembered running.
The Council. The hunters. The blood magic.
He remembered her.
The priestess with teeth like needles and a voice like wind through bones.
The one who said he was tainted.
And Lucian's name… was the last thing he'd screamed before it all went dark.
---
Elsewhere, above the trees—
Damien crouched on a jagged outcrop, cloak pulled around him like wings. He'd found Kyrell's trail three nights ago, tracking him across burned villages and ravaged ground. But what he'd found instead was worse:
Lucian.
A vampire.
And Kyrell was looking at him like salvation.
Damien's grip tightened around his blade. His knuckles went white. From this height, he could see the way Kyrell watched the vampire below him—eyes wide, mouth parted. As if Lucian were a ghost he'd begged to see again. As if he wanted him.
"You don't even know what he is anymore," Damien muttered under his breath.
Lucian stood below, unreadable, every movement slow and deliberate. He didn't speak. But his gaze remained fixed on Kyrell, sharp as obsidian.
Damien hated that he understood it.
He hated that it mirrored the way he looked at Kyrell—like something fragile, something beautiful he could never quite hold.
---
Back in the clearing—
Lucian moved closer. The air shifted.
Kyrell flinched when Lucian knelt beside him. Not from fear—never fear—but from how much he still remembered his touch. The way it had made his skin feel too tight, too hot. The way it burned even now.
"I thought you were gone," Kyrell whispered.
Lucian didn't answer. His thumb traced along Kyrell's jaw, almost without thought.
"You shouldn't have come back for me," Kyrell added.
Still, no answer.
But then Lucian spoke—low, like a growl beneath the wind:
"I never left."
Something uncoiled between them, coiled again. A longing that had no name. Kyrell reached up—fingertips trembling—and brushed them over the edge of Lucian's sleeve. Just fabric. But he felt it everywhere.
They didn't kiss.
They didn't need to.
The moment was heavier than that—thicker with the ache of things unsaid.
---
From the trees—
Damien turned away.
He couldn't watch.
Not when Kyrell looked at Lucian like that. Not when Lucian looked back as if Kyrell belonged to him.