Panic has a taste. For Min-jun, it sits at the back of the throat—coppery, tinged with adrenaline, a rising tide below that roiling surface of social civility. The party had fractured in seconds. Two shattered goblets on marble, a trembling hostess, somewhere the warble of an alarm. Guests scattered and re-formed in anxious huddles; security men whispered into radios, sweat pooling behind designer collars. Under chandelier light, everything beautiful grew sinister.
Min-jun maneuvered Amal away from the main hall, through a servant's passage thick with the scent of polish and rose potpourri. He didn't let go of her wrist, but neither of them mentioned it. His grip was careful—gentle, but firm enough that she could not mistake him for harmless.
"How did you know?" she asked at last, breaking the silence. Her voice was a husk, suspicion colliding with relief in every stuttering syllable.
He'd rehearsed a thousand lies for nights like this: Doctor's instinct, a lucky guess, something off with the waiter. But his mind drifted to the way her pulse had fluttered, the soft heat against his cold palm. He could almost believe he was something other than what he had become—a monster in a well-tailored suit.
"Guess I'm lucky," he offered flatly. He did not meet her eyes. "People can be careless with what they poison."
She stopped short, yanking her wrist free, cheeks flushed with anger or fear or maybe just resentment that someone else had had to save her at all. "Who are you?" she demanded, voice ragged. "You don't move like a guest."
Min-jun let the silence stretch. Footsteps pounded in the corridor behind them; shouting echoed in the ballroom—security, suspicion, a world away from their calm.
Who was he? A ghost, a shadow, her oldest memory and her worst fear. But none of that could fit in a word, so he offered nothing. Instead, he knelt and picked up a rose fallen from a nearby vase, one petal crushed under someone's heel. He twirled it between his fingers, red as blood and twice as fragile.
"Sometimes, the only beautiful thing about a rose is its danger," he murmured, almost to himself.
Amal stood rigid, the artist's gaze calculating, taking him in anew. "Is that a warning?"
"Does it sound like one?"
Their eyes locked—a thousand lifetimes in the space between heartbeats. If she remembered him from the past, she hid it well. If she suspected what he was, she was braver than most.
Somewhere above, the music started again, a cover for chaos. Min-jun was keenly aware of every heartbeat in the mansion, every shift in the air, the cold pang of hunger he had not come to satisfy but which now gnawed along his nerves. Still, it was not blood alone that called him—it was Amal, alive and flushed, impossibly vibrant in a world made gray by immortality.
He pressed the crushed rose into her hand. "To replace what was broken," he said. "Sometimes art is all about the scars."
She closed her fingers around it, stubbornly refusing to wince at the thorns. "Scars are reminders," she replied, her voice softer, almost sad. "Sometimes they're the only proof you lived."
He shivered. She had no idea how true that was.
Down the hall, police sirens wailed—a distant, urban melody. The poison, the panic, the shattered peace of the evening: all threads woven into a single night neither would forget. Amal tucked the rose behind her ear, defiant, and met his gaze with a look that was almost a challenge.
"So what happens now?" she asked, chin up.
Min-jun weighed his answer, each word a promise and a threat. "Now? Now you get out of here alive. And you remember what real danger feels like." His eyes lingered on her—on the artist's courage, on the familiar stubborn pride. "And maybe," he added, smile sharp as broken glass, "maybe you paint something true for once."
They moved together into the corridor's shadows—the artist and the vampire, each marked by blood and roses, the party left in ruins behind them.
Whatever happened tonight, there was no turning back.