Chapter 8: Chapter 8: The Boy From Ten Years Ago
"You’re Lucian, right?"
Lucian blinked.
The young man with the glasses was staring at him, head tilted, eyes narrowing like he was solving a puzzle. The five children behind him were still huddled in the corner, watching the exchange with wide, frightened eyes.
"It’s nice to see you again, Ryan."
Ryan’s cautious expression cracked, replaced by disbelief, then something that looked almost like relief.
"Dude," Ryan breathed. "It’s really you."
He stepped forward and wrapped Lucian in a hug.
Lucian stiffened. He wasn’t used to being hugged. The last person who had hugged him was Lena, and that had been ten years ago.
He didn’t push Ryan away.
"It’s been like ten fucking years ago," Ryan said, pulling back, a shaky laugh escaping his lips. He pushed his glasses up his nose — a nervous habit, Lucian remembered that — and shook his head. "I thought... after you got adopted, I figured I’d never see you again. And then the zombies came and..."
He trailed off, the smile fading.
Lucian said nothing. His gaze drifted past Ryan to the five children in the corner.
"What happened here?" Lucian asked.
Ryan’s expression darkened. "Rescue teams came two days ago. The Church of the Dawn sent people to evacuate the kids. But they couldn’t take everyone — the zombies were already in the city, the roads were blocked, and..." He swallowed. "Some of the kids didn’t make it to the extraction point. I stayed behind with the ones who got left behind."
"How many did you lose?"
Ryan didn’t answer. His jaw tightened, and he looked away.
Lucian didn’t press. He understood loss. He understood being too weak to stop it.
"I need to go rescue my elder sister," Ryan said after a moment. His voice was quieter now, the bravado stripped away. "She’s at the European All-Star Academy. Clara. She enrolled last year."
The sadness in his voice was raw. Lucian recognized it — the same desperation he felt when he thought of Lena.
But first, the children.
Lucian reached into the shadow pooling at his feet — and pulled out a container. Then another. Then another.
Pasta. Bread. Cheese. Sealed containers of stew that he’d taken from Marco’s Italian Kitchen.
The children’s eyes went wide.
"Here," Lucian said, setting the containers on the floor in front of them. "Eat."
For a moment, no one moved. Then the oldest girl — twelve, dark hair, sharp eyes — reached forward and took a container. She opened it, sniffed, and her face transformed.
"Food," she whispered.
The floodgates opened. All five children surged forward, grabbing containers, tearing off lids, stuffing food into their mouths with the same desperate hunger Lucian had felt in the restaurant. The little boy with the rabbit finally lifted his face — round, tear-streaked, now smeared with sauce — and looked at Lucian.
"Thank you, sir," he said quietly.
The others echoed him, voices muffled by mouthfuls of pasta. "Thank you, sir." "Thank you, sir." "Thank you, sir."
Lucian looked at them. Small, helpless and dependent.
"No need to call me sir," he said. "You can call me Lucian."
The children stared at him like he’d spoken a foreign language. Ryan smiled faintly — the first genuine smile Lucian had seen from him.
"Ryan," Lucian said, jerking his head toward the corridor. "I need to talk to you. Privately."
Ryan glanced at the kids. "Mei, watch them. Don’t open the door for anyone."
The dark-haired girl — Mei — nodded.
Lucian led Ryan to the far end of the hallway, into a corner where the shadows were thickest and the children’s chatter was a distant murmur.
"Do you know where my sister is?" Lucian said without preamble.
Ryan’s expression shifted. "Lena?"
"Yeah."
Ryan was quiet for a moment. Then: "Lena was taken away. About a year after you were adopted."
Lucian’s hand shot out, gripping Ryan’s collar, slamming him against the wall. "By who?"
"I don’t know!" Ryan said quickly, hands raised. "I swear, I don’t know! I was just a kid too. But I remember — I remember it was a beautiful lady in white."
White.
Lucian’s grip loosened. His mind raced — a woman in white, taking Lena from the orphanage a year after he’d been adopted by Louisa. It didn’t match the vampire clans. Vampires didn’t wear white. Vampires didn’t operate in the open during daylight, and an adoption would require daytime interaction.
"Where are the adoption records?" Lucian asked, releasing Ryan’s collar. "Every child who comes through here gets documented. There has to be a paper trail."
Ryan straightened his glasses. "This way."
The office was small, cluttered, and had clearly been ransacked at some point — drawers pulled out, papers scattered, files torn open. But the filing cabinet in the corner was still intact.
They searched for twenty minutes.
Lucian went through every file, every document, every scrap of paper in that cabinet. Adoption records, medical files, intake forms — pages and pages of children’s names, dates, and fates.
Lena Grimaud was not in any of them.
Neither was Lucian Grimaud.
"It’s like we never existed," Lucian said. His voice was flat, but his hands were trembling — a fine, almost imperceptible vibration that he couldn’t quite suppress. "The records are gone. Someone erased us."
The panic was rising. Cold, sharp and suffocating. If vampires had taken Lena — if she’d been fed to some monster like Louisa had done to him —
"I don’t think it was a bad lady."
Lucian’s head snapped toward Ryan.
"What?"
"The woman in white," Ryan said carefully. "I didn’t see much — I was hiding behind a door — but I remember Lena didn’t cry. She went with the lady willingly. And the lady... she was gentle. She held Lena’s hand."
Lucian stared at him.
It didn’t prove anything. But it was something. A thread. A hope, fragile as spun glass.
He filed it away and forced the panic down.
After a moment, he spoke. "Let’s rescue your sister first. Clara, right?"
Ryan looked up. A smile — small, surprised, genuine — spread across his face.
"I’m surprised you still remember."
Lucian’s lips twitched.
"Why wouldn’t I remember? She used to tease me a lot."
Ryan laughed.
"Yeah," he said. "She hasn’t changed."
They stood there for a moment — two young men in a dark hallway, surrounded by dust and silence and the distant sound of children eating.
