The neon of the shop sign flickered with a soft electric hum as Liam Thomas turned the key in the front door.
From the bakery across the street drifted the gentle warmth of fresh bread, threading itself through the damp perfume of fallen leaves and pavement washed by a recent mist. Far off, a streetcar's metallic cry split the quiet and dissolved again, while a distant police siren stitched an uneasy line under the otherwise sleeping block—
a reminder that calm is only what we call danger when it keeps its distance.
Alessia appeared beside him as if she had been waiting in the air between heartbeats.
She tucked a strand of dark hair behind her ear with deliberate grace, then laced her fingers with his. The touch did not announce anything grand; it simply affirmed everything.
They walked toward the car together, and with each step the small, secret rhythm between them deepened—
the quiet covenant that forms when love begins to turn into shelter.
At the curb, Liam glanced sideways, wearing that crooked smile that never fully believed his luck.
"Do you want to grab dinner?" he asked, voice low, half playful, half reverent.
"I'd love that," she said, resting a hand over his chest. "But only if this time… you stay."
It wasn't the proposal. It was the weight she placed behind it—
the soft vow concealed within the ordinary.
They drove through Vancouver wrapped in a mesh of fog and light. Towers rose like watchful silhouettes; side streets glowed and faded; traffic lights blinked patiently, as if measuring a pulse larger than theirs. The city seemed to approve of them that night, or at least to look away long enough to let them pass.
Inside the apartment, Alessia slipped off her heels and sank into the couch.
Her head tilted back against the cushion, and a small, almost human exhale left her lips.
Liam ordered food without thinking much about it—anything warm, immediate, uncomplicated. What he wanted was to be near her, to memorize the architecture of her stillness, the way lamplight gathered in her hair and skimmed her cheekbones.
"I don't know how you do it," he said at last. "You look… incredible, even after a long day."
She opened her eyes, amused and sleepy at once.
"Ancient magic," she murmured. "Or very flattering lighting."
She leaned into him—light pressure, careful weight—like someone who has learned how easily beautiful things shatter. Their knees touched. The small contact felt like a door softly closing behind them.
The food arrived. They ate cross-legged on the rug with cartons open between them, sharing bites, trading quips, letting silence carry what words would only bruise.
When Liam laughed at something she said, he bent and brushed his lips against her neck—only a playful graze—and something in her went perfectly, dangerously still.
The stillness began in her breath, then slid down her spine, into her hands.
Turn. Hold him. Drink.
A thought as ancient as hunger.
No. Another thought, just as immediate, but forged over centuries of refusing.
She inhaled, slow and purposeful, and smiled as if nothing at all had passed between shadow and restraint.
Later, they went to bed.
Liam fell asleep quickly—one arm settling across her waist with the unstudied trust of a man whose body has already decided where it is safe.
Alessia lay awake, watching him. She ran her fingers through his hair, light as breath. The peaceful ache in her chest was almost unbearable; she had known battle, hunger, coronation, exile—but not this ordinary, difficult tenderness that asked nothing and changed everything.
How can something so simple hurt so much? she wondered. How can tenderness be more dangerous than thirst?
Liam stirred. His breath shortened; his shoulders tightened; a nightmare stitched itself under his skin.
He gasped awake.
She was already sitting up, too still, too alert, her silhouette cut sharp against the dimness.
He saw her like that—
not a predator, not exactly, but not entirely mortal either.
Fear flickered through him, not because he saw a monster, but because he saw a secret he did not yet have the language to love.
"I… I had that dream again," he whispered, voice raw. "About the woman. Anna Viktorie. She… She was trying to devour me."
The old name landed in Alessia's chest like a blade forged from her own bone.
For a fraction of a second she stepped backward inside herself—then returned with the gentlest smile she possessed.
"Shh," she whispered, touching his cheek. "Rest. I'm here. Tomorrow we'll find help for the dreams. I promise."
He let the promise hold him.
He closed his eyes, and sleep returned slowly, like a skittish animal coaxed by a patient hand.
Alessia did not sleep.
She watched him until the first pale thread of morning probed the edges of the curtains.
…
Daylight bled into the room, thin and intrusive even through the fabric.
It pricked her skin in a hundred quiet ways—manageable, but real. She pulled a blanket around her shoulders while Liam brewed coffee. The domestic hiss and drip of the machine felt like borrowed music from a life that belonged to someone else.
She lifted the cup out of courtesy, not desire. The bitterness touched her tongue and became memory—cafés that no longer existed; winters that smelled of clove and smoke; hands once warm in hers before the world turned and turned again. She set the cup down gently, as if returning a relic to its shelf.
"Why are you always so covered in the mornings?" Liam asked from the sink, rinsing his mug. "I'd love to see you in one of those dresses you wear at night—so… you."
She waited a beat.
"I have a condition," she said quietly. "A skin disorder. Sun exposure… doesn't treat me kindly."
Surprise passed through his face—quick, clean, unaccusing.
"Thank you for telling me," he said, stepping close to press a kiss to her forehead. "It changes nothing. Except that I understand you a little more."
Something unclenched inside her—perilously, wonderfully.
They drove to Liam's apartment to pick up a few things. The city moved around them with its usual choreography: buses exhaling at corners, mothers shepherding strollers, a man playing a saxophone under a bridge for no one and everyone. The world had the audacity to continue.
"It's tiring," Alessia said lightly, eyes on the road ahead. "All this back and forth."
"Should we fix that?" His tone turned curious, teased by possibility.
"Should we?" she asked, the ghost of a smile on her lips. "You tell me."
For a breath, doubt crossed his mind—
Too fast? What if we're wrong?
Then he looked at her profile in the traveler's light: the line of her jaw, the steadiness of her hand resting over his on the gearshift, the private patience in the way she listened to the city. And the answer came as gently as dawn.
"Let's find a place," he said simply. "Wherever you want—so long as it's with you."
She turned her face toward the window so he would not see the way her mouth trembled—
how her immortal heart, quiet for so long it had learned another definition of silence, beat once.
Just once.
Enough.
…
That evening the day slid back into velvet.
They ate the leftovers, laughed at nothing weighty, and pretended that ordinary happiness was a language they had always spoken.
When he bent to kiss her neck again, she didn't freeze this time. She reached for his wrist and anchored his hand over her heart as if to say: Here. Feel what you are changing.
Desire moved through her like a tide that no longer wanted to drown the shore. The beast inside stirred, confused by mercy, then lay down again—close enough to remind her who she was, far enough to let her choose who she might be.
They lay together afterward, saying nothing.
His thumb traced idle circles over the inside of her wrist; her gaze traveled the ceiling as if it held a map to a country she had once ruled and now wished to forget.
Sleep took him first, as it always did—an instinct stronger than his questions.
She watched his lashes tremble, listened to his breath even out, felt the warmth of his arm draped across her waist. The ache returned: exquisite, exacting.
How long can I carry this lie before it turns and carries me?
Remorse pressed small teeth into her soul.
She stroked his hair, and for a moment the quiet felt like prayer.
He stirred again—only a little. She caught his sigh and let it go back to him untouched.
…
Morning returned with its unoriginal persistence.
She wrapped herself in shadow and soft fabric; he made eggs he swore were better than last time. They tried to learn the choreography of a domestic life neither of them had ever performed—opening drawers, closing cabinet doors, misplacing the salt, finding the cat asleep in the laundry basket like a king in exile.
On the drive back across town, the radio offered a soft song that neither of them knew well enough to claim. Traffic slowed. The world's pulse evened. Their conversation wandered, brushed against trivialities, circled back to practical things—utilities, rent, neighborhoods with trees that looked like stories in the fall.
"Let's do it," Liam said suddenly, decisively, as if the idea had ripened without them noticing. "Let's look for a house."
Alessia's hand, resting over his, warmed in his palm.
"Wherever the light is kind," she whispered. "And where the nights are quiet."
He laughed, a small, clean sound that made the car feel like a chapel.
"I can work with that."
She turned her head and looked at him fully—this steady, flawed, luminous man who had not asked for a queen of shadows and had somehow found one anyway.
"Then let's find it," she said. "You and I."