BOUND BY MIDNIGHT

The champagne flute shatters a half-second before I register the scream. Not mine. Someone else's, somewhere behind me in the crowd of my own birthday party, and by the time I turn toward the sound, a man in a torn, bloodied dress shirt is stumbling through my guests with a wildness in his eyes that doesn't belong in a ballroom full of crystal and candlelight. "Voss." His voice cracks on my name, hoarse, desperate, like he's run a very long way to say it. "Sera Voss — you need to run, right now, they know you completed nothing yet, they're not going to wait for the Anchoring, they're going to take you tonight—" I don't understand a single word of that sentence. I understand, with far more clarity, that he's bleeding from a wound in his side that's soaking through his shirt in real time, and that the two hundred guests around us have gone utterly, dangerously silent. "Who are you?" I manage. "No time." He grips my wrist, too hard, panic radiating off him like heat. "There's a man here tonight. Grey eyes. He'll tell you he's security. He's not lying, exactly, but he's not telling you the truth either. Trust him anyway. He's the only thing standing between you and what's coming. I tried to warn the last one too late. I'm not letting that happen again—" He never finishes the sentence. The shot comes from somewhere near the terrace doors — not loud, almost polite, a soundproofed weapon doing exactly what it was built to do — and the stranger's grip on my wrist goes slack as he crumples to the marble floor in front of two hundred witnesses who paid a great deal of money to attend a party that has just become a crime scene. I don't remember deciding to scream. I remember the sound leaving my throat and the ballroom exploding into chaos around it, guests scattering, security shouting, someone yanking the wrong breaker switch and plunging half the room into flickering half-darkness. I remember kneeling beside a dying stranger whose name I never learned, pressing uselessly at a wound already past saving, and I remember, very clearly, the exact moment a second shot rings out — this one aimed at me. I don't see what stops it. One second the world is a hail of adrenaline and blood-slick marble, and the next, a man is simply there, between me and the terrace doors, and the bullet that should have found me instead buries itself in his shoulder with a sound like a fist against stone — no blood, no stagger, nothing but a faint grunt of irritation, like he's been mildly inconvenienced rather than shot. He turns to look at me. Dark hair falling over storm-grey eyes. Grey eyes. "You're the one he meant," I breathe, staring between the dying stranger and the man who just stood in front of a bullet meant for me without so much as flinching. "He said trust you. He said—" My voice catches. "He died telling me to trust you." "Then he did his job." The stranger's expression is unreadable, grim in a way that makes my skin prickle. "Stay down." He's moving before I can respond, faster than my eyes can properly track, crossing the ballroom toward the terrace in a blur that shouldn't be physically possible, and I catch only fragments of what happens next — a masked figure by the terrace doors, a struggle too fast and too silent to follow, a second body hitting the floor that doesn't get back up. Security finally floods the room in force, too late to have stopped any of it, and in the chaos that follows — my father shouting orders, guests being herded toward exits, paramedics arriving for a man they can't save — the stranger with the grey eyes reappears at my side like he never left it, entirely unbothered by the bullet wound that should have dropped him. "Your shoulder," I say numbly, staring at torn fabric with no blood beneath it at all. "You should be on the ground." "I've had worse." He crouches beside me, and up close his eyes are unsettling in a way I can't name — old, somehow, in a face that can't be older than mid-twenties. "Are you hurt?" "No. He—" I look toward the dying stranger, now surrounded by paramedics who are already shaking their heads, already too late. "He tried to warn me. About something. About you, actually, though not in a bad way. He said you'd tell me you're security and that it wouldn't be a lie, exactly, but it wouldn't be the truth either." My hands are shaking. I let them. "What did he mean by that?" Something shifts behind the stranger's eyes — calculation, maybe, or the particular exhaustion of a man deciding how much truth a single night can hold. "My name is Kaelen Ashworth," he says finally. "Your father hired me an hour before I walked in tonight, to protect you from a threat he didn't fully explain to either of us. That part is true." He glances toward the dying man, expression darkening. "The part that isn't quite the truth is what I am, and why I was chosen for this instead of any other bodyguard money could buy. That's a longer conversation than we have time for right now, with half your security detail about to start asking questions I can't answer honestly in front of witnesses." "Then answer them honestly to me. Now. Not later." I meet his eyes, steadier than I feel. "That man just died trying to warn me about something. I think I've earned more than a partial truth." Kaelen studies me for a long moment, something almost like respect flickering across his expression, before he finally offers his hand to help me up from the floor. "Fair enough," he says. "But not here. Get your things. We're leaving tonight, and I promise you every answer you want — starting with what that man actually was, and why the people who killed him are only just getting started." I take his hand. I don't yet know that it's the first choice in a chain of them that will end with my blood turned to something not entirely human, my heart bound to a man three centuries older than he looks, and a war I never asked to inherit finally, violently, coming due. But standing in the wreckage of my own birthday party, hand in the grip of a stranger who just walked off a bullet wound like it was nothing, some instinct older than reason tells me there's no version of tonight where I walk away from this untouched.