The silence inside Valerius’s dimly lit study felt heavy, almost suffocating.
Scarlett sat frozen on the velvet black sofa, her silver eyes locked onto the pureblood king kneeling before her.
His fingers were still loosely wrapped around her wrist, his thumb pressing lightly against the hot, throbbing star-shaped scar.
Every single rule she had been taught by the Hunter Syndicate screamed at her to strike.
He was close.
His throat was exposed.
But as she stared into his bottomless black eyes, she realized something terrifying.
He wasn’t afraid of her blade.
He was dissecting her very existence with his eyes.
”You speak of breaking me, Lord Thorne,” Scarlett whispered, her voice a chilling line of pure ice.
“But a weapon doesn’t break.
It only cuts the hand that holds it too tightly.”
Valerius tilted his head, his gaze holding that same unreadable intensity.
The faint curve of his lips widened just a fraction, but he didn’t use words to claim her.
Instead, his dark eyes simply tracked the slow rise and fall of her chest, as if counting every breath she took in his presence.
Slowly, without breaking eye contact, his cold fingers tightened around her wrist, sliding up just enough to trace the edge of her star-shaped scar with a burning friction.
He didn’t just hold her; his posture shifted, leaning over her until his broad, armored frame completely blocked out the light of the room.
It was a silent, unyielding display of absolute possession.
He was testing her limits, wordlessly showing her that every exit in this world, physical or mental, was now closed by him.
Before the tension between them could snap into something dangerous, a sharp, metallic click echoed from the heavy mahogany desk behind them.
A secure holographic screen flickered to life in the dark room. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
It was a red-coded high priority transmission from the Grandcrest security gates.
The projection showed Julianus Thorne’s elite enforcers positioning heavy kinetic cannons outside the estate’s magical barriers.
But what caught Scarlett’s attention wasn’t the weapons.
It was the shadow standing right behind the enforcer line.
A young man clad in a dark, tactical hunter jacket, his arms crossed over his chest.
He had messy jet-black hair falling over sharp, piercing amber eyes, and a silver ring shaped like a broken arrow glinted on his finger.
Scarlett’s entire body went cold.
The breath caught in her throat, her silver eyes widening in pure, raw shock.
For the first time since her childhood, the absolute flatline of her neural block violently glitched.
A sharp, agonizing flash of phantom pain shot through her skull—the smell of sterile blood, the freezing metal floors of the underground training cells, and the sound of heavy iron doors locking them away from the sun.
Suddenly, a concrete memory ripped through her mind.
She was twelve years old, shivering in the pitch-black solitary chamber after a failed simulation, her hands bleeding.
It was Lucas who had broken the ventilation lock from the outside, sliding a half-eaten ration bar through the rusty grates.
“If we don’t look out for each other, Scarlett, we become nothing but rusted iron,” his young, raspy voice echoed in her head.
She remembered another night, the night of the final lethal evaluation, where they were forced to point their daggers at each other’s throats.
He had looked at her with those identical, fierce amber eyes, whispering, “Don’t hesitate.
If one of us has to survive to burn this place down, let it be you.”
It can’t be him, her mind screamed in panic.
He was supposed to be dead.
They told me he didn’t survive the execution trials of Sector 4.
A suffocating mix of relief and terrifying dread flooded her chest.
The sight of those amber eyes tore open a door in her mind that she had spent years locking away.
Valerius felt the sudden, violent shift in her posture.
His eyes darkened instantly, his gaze tracking her panicked expression to the screen.
For three hundred years, his mind had been a loud, agonizing sea of human thoughts, but next to Scarlett, it was always a dead, beautiful silence.
Except right now.
Through the tight grip on her wrist, Valerius felt a sudden, violent spike of emotional friction.
It wasn’t a thought he could telepathically read, but it was a raw, chaotic earthquake that shook his peaceful silence.
Her mind was making a sound—a sound of profound shock, grief, and unexpressed relief—and it was all because of the human boy standing outside his gates.
The pleasant silence in his head suddenly felt threatened by the ghost of her past.
A dark, territorial anger flared deep within his chest.
He didn’t like that another man possessed the power to shatter her cold facade.
He didn’t like that her absolute focus had shifted away from him.
He slowly stood up, his towering frame casting a long, suffocating shadow over her as he stared at the holographic screen.
He deliberately stepped closer to the projection, his jaw clenching as his expression turned entirely flatpan and dead, locking his pitch-black eyes onto the amber-eyed intruder.
”It seems,” Valerius murmured, his voice dropping into a freezing register that made the ambient air in the room drop by several degrees, “someone from the outside world already knows your true name.”
The past has arrived at the gates.
A ghost from Scarlett’s hidden hunter days stands with the executioners, and his presence has just caused her unbreakable neural block to glitch for the very first time.
Question for the readers: The mysterious amber-eyed boy has breached the inner sanctum of Grandcrest, triggering a deep, emotional shock in Scarlett.
Who do you think this boy is to her, and how will Valerius react when he realizes this human can disrupt the ‘silence’ he is so obsessed with protecting?
> This is a major turning point for the story!