Price of Blood
The city never really slept.
Not on nights when sirens echoed between the walls of buildings, when blue lights painted rain-slicked asphalt in patches of red and blue, and people with too much blood on their hands tried to hide in the darkness. It was a city that slowly ate its own, that dragged people down until they no longer knew if they were still trying to survive or just waiting to crash completely.
Santiago Raines had stopped wondering which applied to him long ago.
On paper, he was a cop. A damn good one, too, even if his boss often pointed out that he had problems with authority, temper, and rules in general. Within the force, there were those who admired him for the results he delivered and those who would have preferred him gone from the department entirely. Especially his own partner, who seemed to be waiting for Santiago to make just one mistake big enough to destroy himself.
And if the truth ever came out, it would be considerably worse than that.
Because behind the uniform was a life no one in the police force knew. A past full of foster homes, drugs, and desperate choices he'd made for money when he was too young to understand how long some things lingered. Things that could still drag his entire life into the abyss if the wrong person got hold of them.
Maybe that was why he kept people at a distance.
Maybe that was why everything around him always seemed to fall apart sooner or later.
His relationship was already starting to crumble before his eyes, and somewhere he knew it was only a matter of time before the rest of his life followed suit.
That should have been enough to keep him occupied.
But Santiago had never been particularly good at simple lives.
Because there were things in the darkness that ordinary people didn't see.
Things that followed a feeling rather than sound. That hid behind human faces, waiting for the right moment to show their teeth.
And Santiago was drawn to them whether he wanted to be or not.
What he didn't know was that there was a reason for it.
That the blood in his veins carried something older than himself.
Something more dangerous.
He was a Tempestas Venandi.
A Hunter.
Born to recognize the supernatural. To kill it.
And long before Santiago even understood what he was, the darkness had already begun to stir around him.
Then Blaze de la Croix entered his life.
Beautiful as sin itself, with snow-white hair, black eyes, and a smile that hid fangs behind his lips.
A centuries-old vampire who should have been his enemy from the very first moment.
Instead, he became Santiago's greatest weakness.
The sparks between them should never have existed. Not between a hunter and a vampire. Not between legacies that had hated each other for generations. But the closer Blaze got, the harder it became for Santiago to distinguish hunger from desire, violence from love.
And as the feelings between them grew, the world around them began to fall apart.
Because Blaze's clan knew exactly what Santiago was.
And if the hunters found out what Santiago had done...
...they would never let either of them survive.
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