Étienne sat at the bar of the Crimson Veil, glass in hand, his mood hovering somewhere between amused and irritated. Jazz slithered through the room. He’d have preferred Verdi. Or screams.

Across from him, his brother Renoir adjusted his cufflinks with the kind of sluggish annoyance only he could make look elegant.

“The Mississippi Archive? Really? Did Human Horizon think we’d forget three hundred years of blood-bound treaties just because someone torched a filing cabinet?”

Just days ago, Human Horizon had crossed a line no one thought they'd dare — they burned the Mississippi Archive to ash. That was why they were here — to pry secrets from whoever still had blood to spill. René was already gone, hunting. Antoine lingered upstairs. The dirty work fell, as usual, to Étienne and Renoir.

Étienne scanned the room. The glamour was holding, but just barely. A shimmer here. A whisper there. Something in the Veil’s bones was cracking.

“You feel that?” Étienne asked.

Renoir didn’t look up. Étienne’s mouth twitched. Then—

The world buckled.

The first explosion wasn’t a blast—not in the traditional sense. It was as if the building exhaled in the wrong direction. A pulse of pressure knocked the breath sideways in Étienne’s chest. The Veil’s entrance shattered inward, wards breaking into smoke and sparks. Tables caught fire, chandeliers burst, Étienne’s bourbon rippled.

Figures in black tactical gear poured through the ruins of the entrance, Human Horizon — reckless, already dead and just too stupid to realize it.

“Putain de merde,” Étienne growled, already pushing off the barstool.

“They're not fucking serious,” Renoir said, sounding more annoyed than surprised.

Étienne strolled forward, plucking a shattered bottle from the floor. The first agent lunged—and took glass in his ocular implant. Chaos bloomed, spells cracked, chairs broke. One man fired too slow. Étienne ducked, disarmed him, and used the gun barrel to cave in his helmet.

“He bled on me,” Étienne muttered, flicking red from his sleeve. “That was Tom Ford.”

Renoir’s laugh cut through the din as he disemboweled a caster mid-incantation. “You’ve got six identical jackets.”

“Seven,” Étienne corrected, hurling a ward-shard into an agent’s chest. The man combusted politely, flames trapped by his own armor. “Quality merits repetition.”

A glyph struck Étienne’s ribs — shallow, irritating. He turned, grabbed the caster by the helmet, and slammed his head into the bar. Marble cracked.

"Where the hell is Antoine?" Renoir called over the noise.

"Starting to miss him?" Étienne asked, dodging a spell that carved a smoking gash across the floor.

Renoir sneered. “He’s usually the one stopping us from doing exactly this.”

Then the heat shifted. The room shivered, wrong and violent. Étienne froze—just long enough to see the spell detonate. Gold runes bloomed in the air, unfamiliar and far too close.

He didn’t remember falling. Only that he went down furious.

---

Consciousness returned without ceremony. No jolt, no gasp. Étienne lay still, letting the weight of the air confirm what his eyes didn’t need to. The floor was concrete, scrubbed recently, though blood still clung in the cracks. The chains suspending his arms were finely made, silver and precise, their sigils cut to burn just enough. He shifted experimentally. They held.

Someone had put thought into this. No—Human Horizon had.

He opened his eyes. The ceiling was low, cut with narrow channels of glowing runes pulsing in a rhythm meant to pacify. Magic sat dead in his chest like a blown fuse. His clothes were gone, his rings removed. A plastic cup sat beside him, within reach if he dislocated something, half-filled with what passed for blood. It had already begun to oxidize.

Étienne exhaled and almost laughed. After centuries of courts, covens, and revolutions, he was naked in a sterile room, offered mockery in a fucking plastic cup.

He catalogued his injuries with the dispassion of an art critic reviewing mediocre work: bruised ribs (boring), throbbing kidneys (a novel toxin — points for creativity), fangs aching with the insult. His healing wasn’t working. The sigils saw to that.

This wasn’t a prison designed for any vampire. It was designed for him.

Days passed as they always did for immortals — in increments of boredom and spite.

Day Two brought a man in a cheap suit and cheaper cologne, his clipboard trembling in his grip. “Psychological evaluation,” he announced. Étienne tilted his head. “Shall I diagnose you first? Chronic irrelevance. Terminal banality. The shoes alone scream ‘unloved child’.” The man fled.

Day Three stank of desperation. They bled him into crystal vials, pressed glowing runes to his collarbones. “Darling,” Étienne sighed, stretching lazily against his chains, “if you wanted a duet, you need only ask.” He sang a 15th-century drinking song about defenestrating popes.

Day Four arrived with a thaumaturge. Étienne opened his mental gates just wide enough to flood the man’s psyche with visions of Renoir and him skinning a duke alive at Versailles. The caster collapsed, foaming.

By Day Five, interrogators stopped announcing their titles.

By Day Six, they stopped speaking altogether.

Étienne was bored between torture sessions, criticized the room’s acoustics, and refused to drink the blood they offered because it tasted like someone microwaved a corpse in an airport lounge.

Each time they left him alone, he blinked slowly at the ceiling and sang lullabies in dead languages, mostly to piss them off.

The door opened on the seventh day. Étienne kept his eyes closed, tasting the air — antiseptic, static, and beneath it...

A new player.

“Darling,” he drawled, chains clinking as he gestured vaguely, “if you’re here to redecorate, arsenic green for the walls. It pairs well with existential dread.”

They sat on a chair just out of reach, like it was the most casual decision in the world. He looked up, and a feral grin tugged at his lips.

A beautiful little thing.

“Let’s skip the foreplay,” he said, leaning forward until silver links kissed his throat. “Your wards have three flaws. Your guards reek of doubt. And my Mère and brothers are probably already carving through your outer defenses.”

They didn’t flinch. Magnificent.

He laughed, low and dangerous. “Ah, the silent treatment.” He smirked. “Tell me — do they pay you extra to play sphinx, or is the sexual frustration its own reward?”

A muscle jumped in their jaw. Got you.

“Now listen carefully,” he said, voice low but steady. “When I tear this place apart — and I will — I won’t kill you. I’ll keep you. You’ll trade places with me, ma colombe. Not in a cell, but in obsession.”

He tilted his head, watching them the way a predator watches a wound open.

“I’ll make you crave me like air. Need me like pain. I’ll bury myself so deep inside your mind you won’t know which thoughts are yours anymore.” He let the silence stretch. Let the words hang like smoke. “You’ll hear me in every downpour. Taste me in every breath. Think of me when you touch yourself — and hate how badly you want it.”

He leaned back, admiring the way the fluorescent lights gilded their cheekbones and smiled, all fangs.

“And on the night you finally break… I’ll taste you. Not because I’m hungry — because you’ll beg.”