Far below the streets, beneath the ruins of an old opera house, a group in bone-white robes knelt around a corpse. Sigils glowed red-hot in the air. One by one, they cut their palms, feeding blood into the circle.
At the center, a creature stirred. Pale, beautiful, and wrong.
Its eyes snapped open—black with slivers of silver.
"Lucian Virelli," it rasped. "The First Hybrid. The Betrayer. It's time he joins the rest of us."
Before he ruled the East End.
Before the black suits, the silver eyes, the fear.
Lucian Virelli was just a boy—too young to bleed, too old to be innocent.
25 Years Ago: Virelli Manor
The Virelli family had always been vampires. Not the poetic kind, but ancient predators wrapped in human silk. His father, Don Maurizio Virelli, ruled the Syndicate with an iron fang. The Virelli name meant respect, blood, and legacy.
At age 13, Lucian had already been trained in the art of silence: how to read a heartbeat from across a room, how to slip a blade between ribs without a sound, how to drink without leaving a mark. He excelled in every lesson, but he hated them all.
"I don't want this," Lucian whispered once, after draining a bound traitor.
His father looked at him like he was defective. "You don't want? Boy, you're born for this."
Lucian never saw the sun, never felt love without a price. But he had one light.
His mother, Celeste.
A witch with fire in her blood and softness in her smile. She was supposed to be a bargaining chip, a political marriage between the vampire court and the Arcanum. But she'd fallen in love—with Maurizio, yes, but more deeply with Lucian.
She taught him to read runes, how to speak to the wind, how to listen to the pulse of magic in the earth.
She also taught him about choice.
But choice ran out when the war began.
The Blood War
It started with a body.
A werewolf, skinned and strung up outside a vampire nightclub.
No one took credit. No one needed to.
The werewolves retaliated, burning Virelli warehouses and slaying vampire foot soldiers by the dozen. Chaos broke out across the city—streets turned to battlegrounds, and the supernatural underworld tore itself apart.
Lucian was 17 when the war came to their doorstep.
He was running messages between safehouses when the ambush came—four werewolves, cornering him in the rain. One lunged. Lucian stabbed him through the heart.
But the Alpha—dying, broken—bit him before collapsing.
The bite should've killed him.
A vampire body can't take the werewolf curse. It rips the soul in half. Drives the mind mad. Shatters the heart.
Lucian lay bleeding in the alley for hours.