Chapter 1
RUN WITH ME
Blood & Desire Series — Book Two
Chapter One: The Assignment
The thing about watching other people fall in love was that it looked, from the outside, entirely avoidable.
Rían had watched Lucian and Mara over the course of nine days with the focused attention of someone who had been waiting for it and the professional detachment of someone who had learned, across a hundred and sixty years, that other people’s emotional trajectories were interesting precisely because they weren’t his. He had made notes. He had provided coffee at critical moments. He had told Mara things Lucian wasn’t saying and told Lucian things Mara was too careful to push on and generally operated as the connective tissue of a situation that would have taken considerably longer without him.
This was his role. He was good at it. He had been good at it for a century and a half.
He was, he had decided, constitutionally suited to other people’s love stories. A supporting character by nature and by preference, unbothered by the billing.
He was thinking about this — sitting in the Dusk Clan’s kitchen at seven in the morning, three days after the Lucerna retrieval, with his third coffee and his notebook open to a page that was supposed to contain operational notes but had somehow become a reflection on the nature of contentment — when Caelan walked in and ruined everything.
“I have an assignment for you,” Caelan said.
Rían looked up. Caelan in the kitchen at seven in the morning was unusual. Caelan in the kitchen at all was unusual — he operated on a different schedule than everyone else, more nocturnal, more removed from the domestic rhythms of the building. His presence here, at this hour, with that specific quality of deliberateness, meant something had been decided overnight.
“Tell me,” Rían said.
Caelan poured himself something from the wrong cabinet — he had never learned where anything in this kitchen was, which Rían had always found humanising — and sat across from him with the expression of a man delivering news he’d already fully processed so that others could process it fresh.
“The peace terms with the Ashveil require an exchange,” he said. “A gesture of good faith from both sides. Something significant enough to establish genuine commitment to the process.”
“What kind of exchange?”
“The Ashveil have a secondary artifact. Not the Lucerna — something adjacent to it, related to the original accord. A binding document, essentially, that predates the split between the clans.” He looked at his cup. “It’s been in Ashveil territory for eighty years. Dravec has agreed to return it to neutral keeping as part of the terms.”
“Neutral keeping meaning—”
“Iris Vane.” A pause. “Again.”
Rían absorbed this. “So someone needs to transport it from the Ashveil to Iris.”
“Through three territories that are not ours, not theirs, and not yet fully informed of the peace process.” Caelan looked at him. “The werewolf packs control the eastern corridor. They are aware that something is happening between the vampire clans but they don’t know what, and they are — alert. Any movement through their territory by a vampire travelling alone would be noted and potentially intercepted.”
“So not alone.”
“The Ashveil are sending an escort.” Caelan set down his cup. “Their own representative. Someone Dravec trusts with the artifact and with the political sensitivity of the situation.”
Rían waited.
“Her name is Zara Voss,” Caelan said. “No relation to Lucian — the name is coincidental. She is the Ashveil’s senior field enforcer. She has been with them for—” a pause, “—approximately ninety years. She is, by all accounts, exceptionally capable.”
“And exceptionally—”
“Straightforward,” Caelan said, in the tone of someone choosing a diplomatic word for something that was more than that. “She was one of Dravec’s two at the retrieval. The woman with the silver hair.”
Rían remembered her. Close-cropped silver, the ease of authority, the read of someone who had no patience for anything that wasn’t direct. He revised several things in sequence.
“You want me to collect the artifact from the Ashveil,” he said, “travel through werewolf territory with their senior enforcer, and deliver it to Iris Vane. Together.”
“Yes.”
“With someone who works for the clan we’ve been in a cold war with for eighty years.”
“The cold war is ending,” Caelan said. “This is part of how it ends.”
Rían looked at his notebook. The reflection on contentment looked back at him.
“When do I leave?” he said.
“Tomorrow night.” Caelan stood. “The artifact will be at the Ashveil building by eight. Zara Voss will meet you there.” He moved toward the door and paused, which was his version of an afterthought, though Rían had long suspected Caelan’s afterthoughts were as carefully sequenced as everything else. “She knows the territory. She does not know you. I’d suggest making a reasonable first impression.”
“I always make a reasonable first impression,” Rían said.
Caelan looked at him with three-hundred-and-something years of knowing him. “You make a charming first impression,” he said, “which is not always the same thing.” And he left.
Rían sat with his coffee and his notebook in the quiet kitchen and thought about werewolf territory and a silver-haired enforcer from the opposite side of an eighty-year war and the particular irony of a man who had just finished watching someone else fall in love being immediately handed the specific set of conditions most likely to make it happen to him.
He picked up his pen.
Note to self, he wrote, this is going to be complicated.
He underlined it twice, closed the notebook, and went to pack a bag.
The Ashveil building looked different at eight in the evening than it had in the afternoon light of the peace meeting — sharper, the glass reflecting the city’s dark, the whole thing more itself without the softening of day. Rían stood outside it with his hands in his pockets and his bag over one shoulder and the particular composure of a man who had walked into a great many situations across a century and a half and had learned that the entrance mattered.
The door opened before he knocked.
Zara Voss looked at him with the same quality she’d had in the circular room — the total assessment, efficient, unhurried, complete. She was slightly shorter than he’d registered at the retrieval, or he was slightly taller than he’d thought in that context, and her silver hair was the same and her eyes were grey and her expression was the expression of someone who had been given a description of what to expect and was now comparing it to the reality.
The comparison did not appear to be going strongly in his favour.
“You’re Rían,” she said.
“I am.” He extended a hand. “Pleased to meet you properly.”
She looked at the hand for a moment — not rudely, not performatively, just the pause of someone deciding — and shook it once, brief and firm. “Zara.” She stepped back. “Come in. The artifact is ready.”
He followed her into the building and through it with the awareness of someone moving through unfamiliar territory — not hostile, not yet, but not his. The Ashveil building at night had a different quality than the Dusk’s: more alert, more angular, the kind of watchfulness that came from a clan that had operated in a state of active readiness for a long time.
He noticed three people clock him as he passed and noted their positions without turning his head, which was the kind of thing you learned in a century and a half of moving through complicated spaces.
Zara led him to a room on the second floor — plain, functional, a table with a case on it — and stopped at the table. The case was dark metal, locked, the size of a large book. She looked at it for a moment before she turned to him.
“You understand what this is,” she said. It was not a question.
“A document relating to the original Lucerna accord. Pre-split.” He met her gaze. “Something significant enough that Dravec trusting it to transit means the peace process is real.”
Something shifted in her expression — fractional, quickly contained. “Yes.” She looked at the case. “I’ve been with this clan for ninety years. I have never seen Dravec trust anything this significant to anyone outside it.”
“Including you?”
“I’m not outside it.” The correction was quiet and immediate, the reflex of someone for whom clan loyalty was not a performance. She picked up the case. “The route is planned. Three legs — we cross the first werewolf territory tonight, rest at a neutral point, cross the second tomorrow. Iris Vane by tomorrow night.”
“Twenty-four hours.”
“If nothing goes wrong.”
“Does something usually go wrong?”
She looked at him steadily. “I’ve been doing this for ninety years,” she said. “Something always has the potential to go wrong. The job is managing that potential.”
“Then we’re going to get along fine,” he said. “I’ve been managing potential for a hundred and sixty.”
The look she gave him was not warm. It was not cold either. It was the look of someone setting a provisional assessment aside for revision by evidence — not convinced, not dismissive, withholding judgment until she had enough data.
He found, to his mild interest, that he wanted to be the data.
“Let’s go,” she said.
They took her car — because it was hers, because she knew the route, and because Rían had the practical intelligence to understand that someone who had been given ninety years of field trust by their clan was not going to be a passenger in their own operation and there was no reason to make it a point of contention.
This appeared to be the first thing he did that she noticed, though she didn’t say so. He saw it in the slight recalibration as he settled into the passenger seat without comment, the fractional adjustment that said: not what I expected.
Good, he thought. Keep her adjusting.
The city moved past the windows. She drove the way she did everything, he was already learning — efficiently, with complete attention, no wasted movement. The case was in the back, secured. The route was in her head, not on a screen.
“Tell me about the territory,” he said.
“Three packs control the eastern corridor. The Dusk Clan has a standing arrangement with the first — nothing formal, just a history of mutual non-interference. The second is neutral and will stay neutral if we move through quickly and quietly. The third—” a pause.
“The third,” he prompted.
“The third has been unsettled for six months. New alpha. Still establishing authority. Prone to reading transit as provocation.” She changed lanes with the fluid economy of long practice. “We move through their territory at the boundary — minimal exposure. But if we’re stopped—”
“We explain the situation.”
“We explain the situation to a new alpha who doesn’t know us, doesn’t know the peace process, and is looking for reasons to demonstrate strength.” She glanced at him sideways, brief and assessing. “Can you be unprovoking?”
He considered this. “I can be many things.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s an honest one.” He looked out the window. “I can be unprovoking when unprovocation is the right tool. I can also be other things when they’re needed. I’ve been doing this long enough to know the difference.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“Caelan spoke well of you,” she said, which from her tone meant she was recalibrating again.
“Caelan has known me for a hundred and sixty years. He’s run out of the energy required to speak poorly of me.” He kept his voice light, the way he always did when he was saying something true that didn’t need underlining. “He trusts me. That’s different from speaking well.”
Another pause. Longer.
“Dravec trusts me,” she said. Not a parallel, exactly. More like a statement of position — this is what I am, this is what it means, here is the ground I stand on.
“I know,” Rían said. “I could see it in the circular room. The way he positioned you.” He looked at her profile. “Closest to the plinth. First line of response if anything went wrong.”
She didn’t look at him. But something in her jaw changed — the very slight release of someone who has been correctly seen and has not yet decided how to feel about it.
“We’re twenty minutes from the first territory,” she said.
“Then tell me what I need to know,” he said.
She told him. He listened — fully, without interrupting, without the performed listening that was really just waiting to speak. He listened because she knew the ground and he didn’t and he was not too proud to understand the difference, and because in the specific shape of how she briefed him — clear, layered, nothing wasted — he was learning things about her that she wasn’t aware she was telling him.
The city thinned around them. The lights grew sparser. The road went dark in the way roads went dark when they were moving from one kind of world into another.
Rían settled into his seat and let the information land and thought about twenty-four hours and a woman who was not going to make this easy and felt, in the place where contentment had been sitting three hours ago in the kitchen, something that was not contentment at all.
Considerably more interesting than contentment, actually.
Complicated, he thought, remembering the note.
He hadn’t underlined it enough.
Run With Me — Blood & Desire Series, Book Two
