Chapter 4 - Lucien

The castle shook.

It wasn’t violent, not enough to knock over a candelabra or rattle stone from the walls, but I felt it. A low, humming pulse through the floor beneath my shoes, like something ancient had stirred in its sleep. The walls of Nerezza House held steady, but the stillness that followed wasn’t natural. Every vampire in the study went quiet. The air thickened, weighted by old magic that didn’t belong to this century.

I rose from my seat and walked toward the arched window, fingers laced behind my back. The tremor had come from the south. My eyes narrowed as I stared across the lawn toward the outer perimeter. The barrier hadn’t flared in decades. I hadn’t felt magic like that since my father summoned the High Council to deliberate on the eastern bloodline trials, and even that had been controlled, purposeful.

This wasn’t. This was raw.

Dorian had already moved before I gave the command, and Evelina wasn’t far behind him. I turned and addressed the rest of the room.

“Cassia, notify Professor Sprueil. Discreetly. I want to know if she felt it in the lower levels. Isolde, check the bloodline records. Look for anything in the last two centuries that references ward reactivity at the Aurelian gate. Anything that mentions residual inheritance.”

Selina made a faint sound behind me, the crystal of her untouched wine glass chiming softly as she set it down. “If this is another Everley incident, I’m going to be annoyed. They keep pushing wildblood witches through the admissions pipeline and pretending it’s innovation.”

I didn’t answer her. My focus stayed on the southern boundary.

Arx would move if it were serious.

And sure enough, minutes later, the reports came through. Dorian’s voice reached me first, relayed through Evelina’s blood-cast whisper.

“A girl crossed the boundary. No House mark. No escort. Human, as far as anyone can tell.”

“A flare that magnitude doesn’t come from a lost hedge witch,” I said.

Cassia leaned against the bookshelf, feigning disinterest. “Then maybe a warlock’s bastard with a buried pact. Could explain the rupture.”

“No,” I said. “The flare was intentional. It didn’t reject her. It recognized her.”

Selina arched an eyebrow. “Recognized her as what?”

Before I could respond, the heavy door creaked open and Professor Batista entered, her presence part shadow, part steel. The entire room stilled. Even Selina stood straighter.

Batista’s eyes landed on me. “The scan has been completed.”

I didn’t move, didn’t breathe.

She continued, her voice sharp as a blade. “The girl’s blood carries Aurelian markers.”

The silence that followed cracked like ice.

Cassia blinked. Isolde dropped the book she was holding. Even Selina looked pale.

“She’s a dragon?” I asked, my voice lower now, more controlled, even as something cold curled behind my ribs.

“That is what the scan confirmed,” Batista said. “Headmaster Arx has allowed her to enroll.”

He didn’t wait for consensus. Of course, he didn’t. I turned back to the window. My reflection hovered in the glass, eyes dark, lips pressed thin.

If it were true, if she was really a dragon, if the House truly woke for her, then everything shifted. All the carefully drawn alliances, all the centuries of positioning, all the unspoken boundaries between species and power, they would bend around her, whether we wanted them to or not.

A dragon had returned. And nothing about that would be simple.

The moment Batista left, I knew I wouldn’t be able to sit still.

There was only so much I could learn from reports and whispers. If this girl truly carried Aurelian blood, I needed to see her. Not from a distance. Not filtered through faculty opinions or layers of political spin. I needed to observe her myself. Cold. Clean. Uninfluenced.

I turned toward the doorway.

“Lucien,” Selina said smoothly, stepping into my path with a slow, deliberate sway of her hips. “You’re not actually planning to go out there, are you?”

I tilted my head slightly, allowing her the illusion of acknowledgment without granting her anything more.

“She’s just a girl,” Selina continued. “A lost little creature caught in the right place at the wrong time. Arx is clearly indulging some fantasy about lost power and forgotten bloodlines, but we both know how unlikely this is.”

“Do we?” I asked. “Because the sigils disagree.”

Selina moved closer, brushing her fingers down the front of my lapel like she was smoothing nonexistent wrinkles. Her voice dropped just enough to be called intimate. “You don’t need to go chasing after anomalies when you already have legacy, power, and position. Let her be Arx’s distraction. You have more important things to focus on. Things here. With us.”

I caught her wrist lightly between two fingers and removed her hand from my chest. There was no anger in my expression, no outward rejection. That would only stoke her pride. Instead, I looked at her the way one might study an artifact that had cracked under pressure, valuable once, but not irreplaceable.

“Selina, if she is what they claim, then her arrival doesn’t threaten my position,” I said. “It solidifies it. Especially if I understand her better than anyone else.”

She didn’t like that answer, but she stepped aside.

Smart girl.

I left the chamber and made my way silently through the castle’s upper corridors. There were vantage points here that most students didn’t know existed. I reached one of them just as the last of the faculty disappeared from view, leaving the girl alone at the base of the stairs to Aurelian House.

I stayed in shadow, watching.

She didn’t walk like someone who knew what she was. She looked... hesitant. Her steps were uncertain. Her hands were clenched into fists at her sides. The uniform she wore was not standard issue, and her posture lacked the quiet arrogance most witches carried. She didn’t even seem to realize where she was standing.

And yet the House recognized her.

The runes beneath her feet lit with golden fire, curling across the stone with graceful precision, as though they had merely been waiting for her weight. The glow shimmered outward in concentric pulses, rippling along the pathway toward the sealed doors.

My breath caught for a moment. Not from awe. From calculation.

I had studied those runes in dusty tomes locked in Nerezza’s restricted archives. They were meant to react only to dragon blood. Not diluted remnants. Not imitation spells. Blood.

Real.

She turned her head slightly, as if sensing something. I stilled, though she wouldn’t see me. She didn’t look like a dragon. She looked like someone who had been pushed too far and made the mistake of surviving. Fragile in form. But something ancient had responded to her. That meant strength, deep, buried, and raw.

The doors began to open.

The groan of stone echoed across the courtyard. Dust and time rolled off the frame as the magic relented to her presence. I watched the light spill across her face, illuminating wide eyes and parted lips. She didn’t expect any of it. That made her dangerous.

Because power without expectation came with no limits.

I leaned back into the shadows, lips curving faintly.

She wasn’t what I had imagined. She was far more interesting.

She crossed the threshold.

I watched from the shelter of the upper parapet, my vision sharpened by generations of predatory instinct, but it was not my eyes that tensed; it was something deeper. Beneath her feet, the sigils that had slumbered in stone for a thousand years came alive in quiet surrender, like the castle itself had been waiting for her. Carved runes flared molten gold as she passed over them, blooming beneath the surface of the courtyard like sunbursts breaking ice. No spellcaster triggered that. No test could replicate it.

This was legacy. Undeniable. Uncontrolled.

And entirely unwanted.

Except that was a lie.

She was a fracture in the glass of everything we had stabilized. Every bloodline treaty, every carefully negotiated accord that had kept the campus, and the world beyond it, from falling into supernatural chaos. We had survived the loss of the dragons, buried their extinction under so many layers of diplomacy and myth that most never questioned it. But now, here she was. In a waitress uniform, of all things. A girl who should have crumpled under the weight of this place, and instead walked through the Aurelian gates like they were hers to claim.

I should have wanted her gone.

I should have demanded it.

But something primal curled low in my chest, hissing against my better judgment. I told myself it was politics. That the bloodlines had earned my attention, that unraveling what she was, and how she was, could give Nerezza an edge no alliance ever had. That perhaps I could guide her, direct her, before the others got their claws into her.

That was the lie.

The truth pulsed behind my ribs in a rhythm I did not appreciate. It had nothing to do with bloodline strategy or clan obligation. It was something I had never experienced and did not welcome. Possessiveness. Obsession. Not over what she could do, but over who she was, and why fate had dropped her into my world like this.

Because she did not belong, her hair was a wild, unbrushed halo. Her hands trembled, her eyes darted, wide and overwhelmed. There was nothing polished or regal about her. And yet the castle accepted her. The sigils answered her blood without question. Even the doors, those damned doors that had sealed tighter than a vault for over a millennium, parted for her like she had never been gone.

It enraged me.

It entranced me.

I could already feel the panic clawing through the political channels. Batista would be sharpening her teeth, calculating the risk. Dana would be throwing confetti. Arx would be sitting in his tower, playing twelve moves ahead. But none of them had felt what I felt. The shift. The tilt in the axis of the university. The way everything listened when she passed.

And I had the sickening sense that none of us would matter much longer.

Not unless we acted now.

She paused briefly on the stairs, turning just enough for moonlight to catch the tired slump of her shoulders and the stubborn angle of her jaw. Her eyes scanned the space as if she expected it all to vanish, like waking from a dream. She was still afraid. Still doubting. Still unaware of what had just changed.

Good.

Let her remain unsure a little longer. Let her stay uncertain until I could learn what made her tick. Until I could figure out how something so small and fragile had shattered a thousand years of silence.

Then, maybe, I would decide what to do about her. Or perhaps I would never get the choice. Because even now, my body was betraying me. I was not watching her for strategy anymore. I simply could not stop watching her.

By the time I returned to the Nerezza dormitory, the castle had already begun to hum with the rumors.

Students crowded the arched corridors in loose clusters, whispering beneath floating sconces and glamour-stained banners. Some murmured about the barrier flaring. Others claimed a girl from the outside had crossed into the grounds and survived. A few even dared to breathe the word dragon aloud, as if saying it might summon something they did not understand.

I didn’t speak to any of them.

I moved through the common wing like a shadow, avoiding the velvet lounges and Selina’s needy glare from the stairwell. She reached out when I passed, too slow, too desperate, but I gave her nothing. My phone was vibrating constantly in my pocket, and once I reached my private rooms and sealed the door behind me, I let it all flood in.

Nine unread messages. Three missed calls. A flagged voicemail from my mother. And more on the way.

They were coming in faster now. Council members, bloodline watchers, old-guard nobles with thin patience and even thinner trust. Screenshots of security logs. Demands for confirmation. Speculation that Headmaster Arx had finally lost his mind. That Everley had orchestrated a stunt. That the scan had malfunctioned.

But beneath the noise, they all wanted the same thing.

Is it true?

Is she one of them?

Is she dangerous?

I could have answered. I could have pulled rank, given them a name and a blood reading, confirmed or denied, and settled the storm. But instead, I let the messages pile up. I set the phone aside and let the silence thicken around me.

They would panic. They would press. But I had seen her with my own eyes. I had felt the shift in the stone.

And I was not ready to share her. Not yet.