Long before Nocturne rose from shadows, before the neon bled into the skies and the city pulsed with blood and empire, there was only stone and silence.
The world Dusk once ruled was buried beneath centuries of memory—a kingdom veiled in frost and moonlight, where vampires lived in isolation, ruled by an iron court and its cold traditions.
And she was the crown jewel of it all.
Olivia of the Winter Vale.
She was everything he was not—warm where he was cold, wild where he was restrained. A beauty carved from starlight, chosen by the Elders as his bride in a marriage meant to unite warring bloodlines.
But love wasn't part of the pact.
Not at first.
They met in the winter gardens, the air laced with snowflakes that never melted. Olivia had refused the ceremonial robes the first time they met, instead appearing barefoot in the frost, her gown soaked from a reckless walk through the river.
"You look like a ghost," Dusk had said dryly.
She tilted her head. "And you look like a prince who's never been kissed."
His silence gave her the answer.
That was how it started—with boldness and fire, and Dusk… intrigued for the first time in centuries.
Weeks turned to months.
They were opposites that should've never fit. But they did. In stolen moments beneath moonlit arches. In battles where they sparred with blades, teeth, and secrets. In the quiet hours where the palace slept and they plotted their escape from a life built on obligations.
They made love the night before the coronation.
And for one night, Dusk believed he could be something other than a king. Something human. Someone hers.
Then came the betrayal.
He remembered the black fog that rolled into the Winter Vale. Wolves—not men, but beasts, with bones that cracked and twisted under moonlight. They weren't supposed to exist. Their kind had been hunted to extinction in the old wars.
But they came.
They came because someone let them in.
When Dusk reached the inner court, it was burning. His soldiers were dead. Blood slicked the marble.
And Olivia stood in the center of it all—her skin glowing, her silver eyes shining with something… inhuman.
Kael stood beside her then, already turned, the new Alpha with blood still dripping from his jaw.
"Why?" Dusk had whispered. "Why would you do this?"
Olivia's voice didn't tremble. "Because I was never yours. I was never theirs. The vampire court promised peace, but it was always built on bones."
"You helped them slaughter our people."
"I freed my kind from the dark," she said coldly. "I chose truth over illusion."
The fight was brutal.
Dusk had never unleashed himself before then. Not fully. But love, he learned, could be a blade sharper than any fang.
He tore through Kael's pack. He watched the world he knew fall into ash. And when it came time to strike her—Olivia, the woman who once kissed snowflakes from his skin—he hesitated.
That's when she struck him. A blade made from moon-forged steel, straight through his heart.
She didn't kill him.
She marked him.
Blood spilled onto the frost, and Olivia murmured the words of an ancient curse.
"I give you forever, Dusk," she whispered. "But not peace. You'll rule… and forget me. Until the day I return and remind you who you truly are."
Then she vanished.
The snow turned red.
Now.
Dusk stood before Mia in their private chamber, his voice lower than she had ever heard it.
"She wasn't a rebel," he said. "She was prophecy. The first wolf who could walk as woman. She chose the wolves over the vampires. And I let her go."
Mia didn't flinch. "You loved her."
"I thought I did."
"And now she's come back. With your blood. With a city of her own. And with wolves who should've died out."
"She never forgot her promise," Dusk murmured.
Mia stepped closer, placing a hand over the center of his chest, where Olivia's blade once struck. "Neither did you."
Silence stretched between them, thick with ghosts.
Then Mia said, "We end this. Together."
But somewhere deep in her chest, a chill stirred.
Because Mia felt it, even if she didn't understand it yet—
The curse Olivia left behind wasn't finished.
It had simply changed targets