By the time they reached Saint Wenceslas Cathedral, Prague had started pretending the night never happened.

Morning traffic crawled through narrow streets slick with rainwater. Café windows fogged from fresh coffee and overheated radiators. Tourists gathered beneath umbrellas taking photographs of gothic architecture while police quietly washed blood from alley pavement three districts away.

Cities survived by editing themselves.

Seraphina had always respected that.

The cathedral library occupied the oldest wing of the complex, buried beneath the main sanctuary where few visitors were ever allowed access. Officially, the archives contained fragile theological manuscripts too valuable for public handling.

Unofficially, the Church stored everything dangerous there.

Forbidden relic records.

Hunter bloodline histories.

Accounts of supernatural incidents too politically inconvenient to acknowledge.

And apparently—

evidence someone had been carefully rewriting history.

A priest escorted them through three locked gates before leaving without asking questions.

That alone irritated Seraphina.

Normally Blackthorn clearance required signatures, verbal authorization, and at least one suspicious old archivist glaring at people over tiny glasses.

Today the doors simply opened.

Lucien noticed too.

“They expected us.”

“I noticed.”

“That should concern you.”

“It already does.”

The library stretched endlessly beneath vaulted stone ceilings lined with towering shelves and iron ladders disappearing into shadows overhead. Dust floated through pale cathedral light filtering down from narrow windows near the ceiling.

The entire place smelled like old paper and candle wax.

Seraphina loved libraries.

Not sentimentally.

Practically.

Books behaved more predictably than people.

Most of the time.

She dropped her coat across the back of one chair near the central archive table while Lucien wandered slowly toward a shelf containing medieval plague records.

Watching him inside a cathedral library felt strangely surreal.

Like spotting a wolf sitting calmly inside a courtroom.

“You’ve been here before,” she observed.

Lucien ran one finger lightly along a cracked leather spine before answering.

“Several times.”

“And nobody thought that was a problem?”

“The librarian owed me money.”

Seraphina looked up from the archive catalog she’d started sorting through.

“A priest owed you money.”

“He gambled.”

“With what?”

Lucien glanced toward her.

“The Church used to bet aggressively during papal elections.”

She stared at him for a second longer than necessary.

“You’re joking.”

“I’m really not.”

Unfortunately, he sounded sincere.

A few minutes later, Seraphina spread several ancient files across the central table beneath warm reading lamps while Lucien remained near the upper shelves retrieving volumes no normal person could’ve located that quickly.

“You move through archives like a serial killer,” she muttered while translating faded Latin notes.

“That feels unnecessarily personal.”

“You haven’t even checked labels.”

“I remember where things are.”

“You remember bookshelves from centuries ago?”

Lucien placed another volume beside her elbow.

“I remember most things.”

The answer landed more heavily than he probably intended.

Seraphina glanced briefly toward him.

There was no arrogance in the statement.

Just exhaustion.

Immortality again.

Not glamorous.

Accumulated.

Like carrying too many lives inside one mind for too long.

She looked away first this time, though not because the moment felt intimate.

Because she suddenly found herself wondering what it would feel like to remember six hundred years of loss clearly enough to navigate libraries by grief.

That thought sat uncomfortably beneath her ribs afterward.

The silence between them settled into something unexpectedly functional over the next hour.

Not comfortable exactly.

But efficient.

Lucien searched older plague-era records while Seraphina cross-referenced Church containment doctrine against restricted Van Helsing archives she technically wasn’t authorized to access remotely.

At some point, she realized they had stopped arguing.

That felt suspicious.

Rain tapped softly against the cathedral windows overhead while pages turned steadily beneath warm lamp light.

Lucien eventually returned carrying a stack of records tied together with faded black ribbon.

“I found references to Prague containment operations.”

Seraphina pulled the nearest volume toward herself immediately.

The pages crackled softly with age.

Most entries described disease outbreaks and burial counts from the fourteenth century.

Then she found it.

A symbol sketched hastily into one corner of the parchment.

The hooked sunburst.

Same as the massacre victims.

Same as the iron gate beneath the tunnels.

Her pulse sharpened.

“Here.”

Lucien leaned slightly closer beside her chair.

Too close, technically.

Not enough to touch.

Just enough that she became abruptly aware of the cold lingering around him again.

His attention remained entirely on the page.

“Read the date,” he said quietly.

Seraphina scanned the entry.

“1348.”

“The Black Death.”

She frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. The Order wasn’t formally established yet.”

“No,” Lucien said. “But your bloodline already existed.”

Something unpleasant moved slowly through her stomach.

The records continued for another twelve pages.

Then stopped abruptly.

Not naturally.

Torn.

Seraphina stared at the jagged edges near the spine.

“These pages were removed.”

Lucien’s expression darkened slightly.

“Not recently.”

She examined the paper fibers carefully.

The damage had aged with the manuscript itself.

Centuries old.

Whoever removed the pages did it intentionally long before modern catalog systems existed.

“Why tear out only this section?” she murmured.

Lucien didn’t answer immediately.

Instead, he reached past her toward another record lying open farther down the table.

The movement brought him close enough that she caught the faint scent of rain and old smoke still clinging to his coat.

Strangely human details for something immortal.

He flipped several pages before stopping at another missing section.

Then another.

Then another.

All removed carefully.

Systematically.

Seraphina stared at the growing pattern across the records.

Every missing page connected to:

plague containment

bloodline rituals

Church vault operations

pre-Order relic doctrine

Someone had gutted the archive intentionally.

Not to hide monsters.

To hide history.

“You knew this already,” she said quietly.

Lucien rested one hand lightly against the edge of the table.

“I suspected.”

“And you never tried telling anyone?”

“I did.”

The answer came softer than expected.

Seraphina looked up at him.

Lucien’s gaze remained fixed on the torn manuscripts scattered across the table between them.

For the first time since meeting him, he looked genuinely tired.

Not physically.

Historically.

“The problem with surviving several centuries,” he said after a moment, “is eventually you watch people start treating lies like inheritance.”

The cathedral bells rang somewhere overhead.

Low.

Heavy.

The sound vibrated faintly through the library walls.

Seraphina turned another fragile page carefully.

Then stopped.

At the bottom corner of the parchment sat a handwritten notation in faded ink.

Not Latin.

French.

And unmistakably personal.

L.V.

Lucien noticed it immediately.

So did she.

Slowly, Seraphina looked toward him.

“You wrote in this.”

Lucien’s expression became unreadable.

“A long time ago.”

“What were you doing in Church plague archives six hundred years ago?”

He didn’t answer immediately.

Instead, his fingers brushed lightly against the edge of the torn page, lingering there for half a second too long.

Like touching an old scar absentmindedly.

Finally, quietly:

“Trying to stop them.”

Seraphina studied him across the scattered records.

The candlelight softened the sharp angles of his face slightly, though not enough to make him look less dangerous.

Just more real.

Which, unfortunately, might have been worse.

Then she noticed something else.

Another notation hidden deeper in the spine stitching.

Different handwriting.

Different ink.

A name.

Evelyne Van Helsing.

Her breath caught almost imperceptibly.

Lucien saw the exact moment she found it.

And suddenly the silence between them changed again.