Chapter Text
The bar sat like a wound in the skin of the city—pulsing with light, alcohol, and desperation. People came here to forget, to escape, to indulge the parts of themselves they buried in daylight. Amelia Grant came for none of those reasons, and yet, all of them.
She hadn't planned to be here. She rarely drank outside the safety of her apartment. She checked her voice messages for a third time. Michael hadn’t returned her last call.
So here she was, nursing a watered-down drink like it held all the answers. After a long shift at the lab, all she wanted was noise – and something stronger than coffee.
The door opened.
She didn’t look at first. Just another patron, another shadow drifting into the haze. But then came the silence—the slight shift in the bar’s atmosphere. Conversations faltered. A few heads turned. The bartender’s hand paused mid-pour. That’s when Amelia glanced up… and saw him. Wild, consuming, unpredictable. He moved with the casual grace of someone who no longer had to pretend to be human.
He saw her watching and smiled. Something about that smile—it should have chilled her. Instead, it lit a fire low in her stomach.
He took the seat beside her. Close. Too close.
“You always stare at people, Doc?” he asked, voice low and smooth.
A beat passed. Then— “Lucien…”
The name came with weight. A soft tremor ran through her limbs, hidden by practiced stillness. Lucien Crown. But this couldn’t be him. Could it?
“It seems you do remember me.” It wasn’t a question.
“Last time I saw you, you were on crutches. You´ve held up surprisingly well.”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. He looked healthy. Too healthy. Vibrant, like lightning bottled in flesh. But beneath that glow, there was something deeply wrong. His skin, almost luminous in the dim bar lighting, was too pale. The veins near his neck pulsed with unnatural force, just beneath the surface. And his eyes—God, those eyes—gleamed with a hunger that had nothing to do with food.
His voice dropped to a murmur. “I don’t doubt that’s all you recall. You looked at me like I was glass. Fragile. Now you’re not sure what you’re looking at, are you?”
She didn’t answer. Because he was right.
“Bourbon, Don Julio 1942”, he said, like naming old ghosts.
He took the glass at last, slow fingers curling around it like it was an old habit. One sip. No reaction. No blink. The kind of stillness that comes from years of needing control.
“Still the only thing that burns the right way”, he murmured, more to the glass than to her.
Then, he let the silence stretch, the faintest smirk touching his mouth. He looked at her, eyes sharp over the rim.
“Well. That – and you”.
Whas that a joke?
Lucien stood then, slow and deliberate. He placed a few bills on the bar, then turned toward her. “You should go home, Amelia. It’s late. Night’s not safe anymore”.
And then he was gone – out in the night, coat trailing behind him like a shadow untethered.
Amelia sat in silence for a long time, staring at the door he has disappeared through. Her glass was still dull.
Her heart was not.