Detective Mira Hale really wasn't a fan of mornings like this.It wasn't the coffee, usually tasting like burnt disappointment, or the recycled air at the precinct that always seemed to carry the faint, peculiar scent of old paper mixed with a weary sort of regret. No, it was the quiet that got to her. The heavy stillness that settled in after a night where far too much had happened, and no one could quite make heads or tails of it yet.She stood by the main board, arms folded tight, her gaze sweeping over the haphazard collection of reports. No faces. No obvious culprits. Just dots on a map, times that didn't quite add up, and words that stubbornly refused to connect into anything resembling a story.Security details unresponsive.A patrol unit vanished.Witnesses saw movement in places they shouldn't have.And not a single body to show for it.James was leaning against a desk not far off, idly scrolling through a tablet with one hand while the other massaged his temple. "Run me thr

Diego quickly understood that power didn't just appear out of nowhere. It had to be coaxed, sometimes even forced. It would press in, whisper suggestions, and wait for a permission he never meant to grant. He stayed precisely where Dominic had positioned him, a step back, a mere shadow, close enough to be seen but not so close as to draw unwanted questions. From this vantage point, the room seemed to reveal itself in stages. Glasses were raised, conversations hushed and then rose again, smiles tightening as they turned towards his father. The mansion itself seemed to pulse around them. Music flowed through the space in a deep, steady rhythm, calibrated to soothe a primal hunger without entirely extinguishing it. Diego felt each note resonate against his skin, a faint tremor vibrating through his very bones. Beneath the music, he could sense dozens of heartbeats, each one distinct, each one solitary. He made a conscious effort to focus on none of them.Then, Aurelian shifted his wei

The music never stopped.That was the first thing Diego noticed.Even as the room subtly changed, postures tightening, voices lowering, glances lasting a fraction too long, the string quartet continued its measured rhythm. A lie dressed as elegance.Dominic stood unmoved at the centre of it all, speaking softly with an elder from the Baltic bloodline. His expression was calm, indulgent.Controlled.But Diego felt it.A tremor, not in the floor, but in the city.Not hunger. Not fear.Movement.It brushed against his senses like a cold current slipping under a locked door.Someone laughed too loudly near the west windows. Someone else stopped drinking.A servant crossed the hall, then abruptly turned back, whispering something urgent to a guard. The guard nodded once and did not return to his post.Diego’s fingers curled slowly.Something was happening outside Dominic’s design.Aurelian Kade leaned near a marble balustrade, watching the room as if it were a theatre. His earlier amusemen

The music grew louder.That was the second lie.Violins surged, cellos deepened, the rhythm swelling as though sound itself could stitch authority back into the air. Servants moved with renewed urgency, hands steady but eyes too alert, smiles held just a breath too long.Dominic wanted noise.Noise meant control.Diego felt the opposite happen.The city pulled again, harder this time. Not closer. Deeper. Signals collapsed inward, not in panic, but in obedience to something else. Routes Dominic had built to loop back into themselves were no longer looping.They were being redirected.Lewis wasn’t cutting power.He was rewriting pathways.Diego opened his eyes.Across the hall, Raphael had shifted closer to Vesna without appearing to move. Aurelian no longer bothered to hide his interest; his gaze tracked the exits, the ceiling, the guards, counting, measuring.Dominic lifted his glass again.“Tonight,” he said, voice smooth and resonant, “reminds us why we gather. Why bloodlines endur

The first scream did not come from the mansion.It came from a district Dominic had written off years ago, too narrow, too old, too inconvenient to control properly. A place where blood moved hand to hand instead of through accounts.It was brief.Cut short.And it never reached the authorities.In the underworld, a new marker pulsed once on Lewis’s map, then dimmed.“Contain,” Lewis said without looking up.The response came immediately. Routes adjusted. Two feral packs shifted course, flowing around the disruption instead of toward it.Pressure, not collapse.He watched the city respond the way a living thing does when it realizes it’s wounded, tightening, compensating, trying to protect vital organs.“Dominic will feel that one,” a voice said nearby.Lewis didn’t answer. He already knew.At the Monaghan mansion, the music continued.That, more than anything, unsettled Diego now.It had lost its rhythm, not in tempo, but in intent. The sound pressed too hard against the walls, as i