บททั้งหมดของ The House Beneath the Blood Moon: บทที่ 51 - บทที่ 60

Lucien POV The air didn’t just turn cold. It collapsed. Not a drop in temperature—an absence. A sudden, violent subtraction. Reality hesitated, as if it had briefly forgotten how to exist in the space we occupied. Sound flattened into a dull, underwater thud. Light lost its depth, draining into a sickly, ashen grey. Even the ancient granite of the mountain seemed uncertain—stone wavering between matter and memory. I knew this sensation. It was a phantom limb of my own history. I had felt it during the charcoal fall of Carthage. During the purge of the Black Monasteries, when sanctuaries were scrubbed not just of life, but of remembrance. This was the atmospheric signature of a High Council decree—the precise moment they decided a thing no longer deserved a future. “He’s here,” I said. The words did not echo. They were swallowed. Behind me, Samantha stiffened. She hadn’t sensed him yet—not the way my kind did. Her mind was still racing through cascading logic trees, riding t

Samantha POVThe safe house didn’t smell like Paris. It smelled like ancient secrets—old paper, cold stone, and the ozone-heavy scent of high-end filtration systems.Lucien moved through the dim foyer of the Haussmann-style apartment with the silence of a shadow. He didn't turn on the lights. He didn't need to. His silver eyes caught the stray moonlight filtering through the heavy velvet curtains, glowing with a soft, predatory luminescence that made the air feel thin."Go to the terminal in the study," he said, his voice a low, velvet register that vibrated directly against my ribs. "I need to secure the perimeter."I didn't argue. My body felt like a live wire, humming with the aftershocks of the mountain’s collapse and the sheer, intoxicating proximity of the man beside me. I walked down the long corridor, my boots clicking against the chevron-patterned oak floors, until I found the study.It was a fortress of mahogany and silicon. I sat in the heavy leather chair and flipped the

Samantha POV The drone’s interior was a cramped cockpit of black carbon fiber, vibrating with the frantic hum of electric rotors. Outside, the lights of Paris were a smear of neon and rain against the glass, receding at a velocity that made my heart feel like it had stayed behind on that rooftop. I was shaking. It wasn’t just the adrenaline of the fight. It was the terrifying, incandescent heat still singing under my skin. I felt like a star trapped in a glass jar, waiting to shatter. "Samantha." Lucien’s voice was a low, resonant rumble that anchored me instantly. He was sitting directly across from me, his knees nearly touching mine. He’d shed his tactical gear, and in the dim red light of the cabin, he looked less like a king and more like a man haunted by the woman sitting in front of him. His silver eyes didn't track my magic this time. They tracked me. The curve of my neck, the rise and fall of my chest, the way I was drowning in his oversized shirt. "I can't turn it off,

Samantha POV The Heart of the Sanctuary didn’t hum. It listened. The chamber beneath the manor felt alive in a way no server room ever had—less machine, more predatory intent. Crystalline panels replaced stone, each one threaded with veins of gold-white light that pulsed in slow, deliberate rhythms. The house was measuring my breath, counting the frantic beats of a heart that was currently overclocking. I stood barefoot at the center of the dais, Lucien’s shirt hanging off one shoulder. The fabric was thin, teasing my skin. “So,” I said, my voice shaking with a mix of sass and raw nerves, “just to recap: to stop a homicidal Reaper, a corrupt Council, and my personal stalker with a god complex… I have to permanently bind my soul to a five-hundred-year-old Vampire King who still hasn't told me his favorite color.” Lucien stood at the edge of the circle. He had stripped away the leather and the steel. Broad shoulders, a chest carved from ancient marble, and scars that told stor

Samantha POVThe Council members were frozen in isolated containment zones—each of them trapped inside a shimmering cube of light like a bad hologram with a worse personality.Their bodies flickered whenever the Sanctuary pulsed, as if the house itself kept re-checking the permissions and deciding, Nope. Still not today.Mirelle—High Council, high ego, high volume—slammed her hands against her crystalline barrier until her silver sigils stuttered and sparked. She looked like a corrupted file trying to brute-force its way out.I kept my palm pressed to the dais, feeling the Sanctuary through my skin: a living circuit, a breathing firewall, a hungry old god wearing a house like armor.Lucien stood at my side, sword angled downward, point resting against the glass floor like he was one heartbeat away from turning diplomacy into a historical footnote. The gold in his eyes hadn’t faded since the bond. It wasn’t just pretty.It meant something.It meant the Vampire King had taken my light i