Seraphina's POV
I knocked over my chair getting up.
The crash echoed across the entire dining hall. Every head turned. Hundreds of pairs of eyes—all of them too bright, too still, too hungry—locked onto me at once, and the silver-haired girl across the table smiled like I'd just done something adorable.
"Easy," she said softly. "Running makes the instinct worse."
I didn't know what instinct she meant. I didn't want to.
I walked. Fast, controlled, every muscle screaming at me to sprint—but I walked, because I knew, somewhere deep and animal in my brain, that running in a room full of predators was the worst possible idea. I kept my chin up. Kept my face blank. Let my feet carry me out through the dining hall doors before any of them could decide I looked too much like dinner to ignore.
The moment I was in the hallway, I ran.
The gate was exactly where I'd left it. Enormous. Iron roses. Permanently, mockingly closed.
I hit it anyway. Both hands, full body weight, throwing myself against the bars like sheer desperation might succeed where physics wouldn't. The metal didn't move. Didn't rattle. It was like pushing against the side of a mountain—the gate didn't even register that I was there.
"I need you to stop doing that."
Elara appeared from nowhere—or maybe from everywhere, she seemed to have that ability—and stood a careful distance back. Patient. Like she had all the time in the world, which, I was now understanding, she probably did.
"Open it." My hands were still on the bars. I couldn't make myself let go. "Open the gate right now."
"I cannot." Genuinely this time. Not won't—cannot. "The academy's protective wards sealed the moment you were registered as a student. They don't distinguish between keeping danger out and keeping students in. It works both ways."
"I didn't register as anything. I didn't sign anything. I didn't agree to anything—"
"You crossed the threshold willingly," Elara said. "In academy law, that constitutes enrollment."
I laughed. It came out wrong—too sharp, too close to something that wasn't laughing at all. "That's not a law. That's a trap."
She didn't deny it. That was somehow worse than if she had.
"Listen to me." She stepped closer, and her violet eyes—so similar to mine it was unsettling—held mine steadily. "Within these walls, you are the most protected human being alive. Every student here has been bound by blood oath to the academy's rules. No feeding without consent. No harm to enrolled students. Anyone who violates those rules faces punishment I promise you they fear." She paused. "Outside these walls, you have no such protection. Whoever your stepmother sold you to—they have people everywhere. If I opened these gates tonight, you would not survive the forest."
The words settled over me cold and heavy.
Vivienne's voice in the dark hallway: I don't care what happens to her after that.
I let go of the bars.
"What do you actually want from me?" I asked quietly.
"To keep you alive long enough to tell you the truth." She picked an imaginary piece of lint from her sleeve. "But that requires trust. And trust requires time." She looked up. "You have a class in fifteen minutes. Vampire Combat. I strongly suggest you attend—it's the only class here that will teach you something immediately useful."
"Useful for what?"
"For surviving." She said it simply, like it was obvious. "Go, Seraphina."
The underground training chamber smelled like cold stone and something metallic. Sweat, maybe. Or old blood—I was trying not to think about which.
Nine vampire students arranged themselves around the room with the casual ease of people who had done this a hundred times. Then they saw me walk in, and nine pairs of eyes went simultaneously, terribly interested.
Professor Blackwell was already there.
I had thought, after the dining hall, that nothing in this school could surprise me anymore. I was wrong. Theron Blackwell stood in the center of the training floor like a landmark—like something that had always been there and had no intention of moving. The scars on his arms caught the light as he turned. Silver-white, burned deep, the kind that didn't fade.
His green eyes found me immediately.
"You're the human," he said.
"You're the third person today to introduce me that way," I said.
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Might have been irritation. Might have been something else entirely. He crossed his arms and looked at me—not the way the dining hall students looked at me, not with hunger. With assessment. Like he was trying to calculate the exact weight of what he was working with.
"You'll die in this class if you're weak," he said flatly.
The hot thing in my chest—the one that had kept me functional through four years of Vivienne calling me worthless, useless, nothing—flared up hard and fast.
"Then I won't be weak," I said.
He looked at me for one long beat.
Then he pulled a wooden practice sword off the wall rack and threw it at my face without any warning whatsoever.
I caught it. Both hands, last possible second, the grip smacking against my palms hard enough to sting. Behind me, I heard at least two vampire students make small sounds of surprise.
"Good." Blackwell was already moving. "Let's test that."
He didn't explain the drill. Didn't demonstrate technique. Didn't ask if I was ready.
He just came at me—and the word fast didn't cover it. I'd seen people move fast. This was something else. One moment he was six feet away; the next his practice sword was coming at my left side, and I threw my arm up on pure panicked instinct and somehow deflected it.
The impact went through my whole body like a bell being struck.
I backpedaled. He followed. I blocked again—clumsier this time, my footwork all wrong, my grip too tight—and blocked again, and again, retreating across the training floor while he pressed forward with calm, mechanical precision.
He wasn't using full strength. I understood that much. If he were, I'd already be through the wall.
The vampire students watched without a sound. Their silence was worse than if they'd been laughing.
Stop retreating, some part of me said—some part that had learned, very slowly, very painfully, that cowering never made Vivienne stop. If you keep running, they never stop chasing.
I planted my feet.
Blackwell's next swing came in from the right. Instead of blocking it, I stepped into it—let it graze my shoulder, ignored the burst of pain, and shoved my elbow hard into the space his movement had opened.
It connected with his ribs.
He stopped.
Not because it hurt him—I might as well have hit a stone wall. But he stopped, and looked at my elbow, and then looked at my face with something new in his expression.
"Interesting," he said quietly.
And then a vampire student—not Blackwell, someone behind me, someone I hadn't heard move—grabbed my wrist.
The grip was ice cold and absolutely immovable.
"Professor's distracted," the student whispered. Her voice was silk. "Nobody's watching right now."
She was wrong. Blackwell turned immediately, his eyes going hard and sharp—
But a second student grabbed my other arm.
And a third stepped in front of me, close enough that I could see the exact moment his irises bled from dark brown to deep, burning red.
"You smell incredible," he breathed.
Blackwell's voice cut across the room like a blade: "Step back. Now."
They did. Slowly. Smiling.
But as I stood there between them, heart slamming, wrist still burning cold where I'd been grabbed—I realized something that made the floor tilt under my feet.
Blackwell had stopped them.
But he'd needed a full three seconds to notice.
Three seconds, in a room full of vampires, was a very, very long time.
And at night, every class was three hours.