Ivy's apartment felt smaller than usual when she finally made it home that night. The one-bedroom place in Lincoln Park wasn't much—hardwood floors that creaked in three different spots, windows that stuck when it rained, and a radiator that clanged like an angry ghost every morning at six AM. But it was hers. Clean, organized, and completely under her control.
Tonight, control felt like a joke.
She dropped her keys on the kitchen counter and stared at the coffee stain on her pants. The evidence of the moment her world had shifted. Three hours ago, she'd been Agent Ivy Novak, specialist in organized crime, woman who had her life figured out. Now she felt like she was twenty again, confused and heartbroken and completely lost.
The photograph was still in her jacket pocket. She could feel it there, a small weight that might as well have been a brick.
She poured herself two fingers of whiskey from the bottle she kept for emergencies. This definitely counted as an emergency. The amber liquid burned going down, but it didn't touch the cold knot in her stomach.
Her reflection caught her eye in the kitchen window. Hair still in its perfect bun, makeup still intact despite everything. She looked professional. Competent. Like someone who could handle whatever the job threw at her.
"Liar," she said to her reflection.
The whiskey sat on her tongue, familiar and bitter. She'd started drinking it in college, because Danny had said it was what real detectives drank in old movies. God, she'd been young. They both had.
She walked to her bedroom, each step feeling heavier than the last. Her apartment was decorated in neutral colors—grays and whites and safe, professional beiges. Nothing too personal. Nothing that screamed "this is who I really am" to anyone who might search the place.
But some things were too important to get rid of, even for someone in her line of work.
Ivy knelt beside her bed and pulled out the small wooden box she kept underneath. It was about the size of a shoebox, made of dark cherry wood with a simple brass latch. Danny had made it in his woodworking class during their junior year, back when he'd been majoring in business and minoring in random hobbies that made him happy.
Her hands shook as she opened it.
The smell hit her first—a faint trace of the cologne he used to wear mixed with old paper and memories. Cedar and something warm and masculine that she'd never been able to identify. Even after ten years, it was still there.
The box held the pieces of Danny Rosen that she'd never been able to throw away. Movie ticket stubs from their first date. A dried flower from the bouquet he'd brought her after her dad's funeral. His Northwestern University t-shirt that she'd stolen and never given back.
And the photographs.
Ivy pulled out the stack of pictures and spread them across her bedroom floor like tarot cards telling the story of who she used to be. Danny grinning at her over a cup of coffee in the campus library. Both of them laughing at something she couldn't remember at a Halloween party where they'd dressed as FBI agents—the irony wasn't lost on her now. Her favorite: the two of them on the beach in Michigan during spring break, Danny's arm around her shoulders, both of them squinting in the bright sun and looking completely, stupidly happy.
She picked up that one with careful fingers. Danny looked so young. Twenty-one, maybe twenty-two. His dark hair was longer then, always falling into his eyes in a way that made her want to brush it back. His smile was soft, genuine, nothing like the predatory confidence she'd seen in today's photograph.
"What happened to you?" she whispered to the picture.
In the photo, he was just Danny. Pre-med student who stressed about organic chemistry and made terrible jokes when he was nervous. The boy who brought her soup when she was sick and stayed up all night helping her study for her criminology finals. Who talked about their future like it was a sure thing, like they'd graduate and get married and have the kind of normal, happy life that people in movies got.
She'd believed him. God, she'd been so naive.
Ivy set the beach photo aside and picked up another one. This one was from the night before he disappeared. They'd gone to dinner at their favorite Italian place—nothing fancy, just a little spot near campus where the portions were huge and the wine was cheap. Danny had seemed distracted that night, she remembered now. Kept checking his phone and glancing around like he was expecting someone.
She'd asked him about it. "You okay? You seem weird tonight."
"Just tired," he'd said, but his smile hadn't reached his eyes. "Big test tomorrow."
Except he hadn't had any tests scheduled. She'd known his class schedule as well as her own.
The memory felt different now, looking back with ten years of FBI training. The signs had been there—the nervousness, the distraction, the way he'd kept touching her hand like he was trying to memorize it. Like he'd already known he was going to leave.
"Son of a bitch," Ivy said softly. She took another sip of whiskey and let the burn ground her in the present.
That last night played in her memory like a movie she'd watched too many times. They'd gone back to her dorm after dinner. Made love slowly, carefully, like they had all the time in the world. Danny had held her afterward, his fingers tracing patterns on her bare shoulder while she drifted in and out of sleep.
"I love you, Ivy," he'd whispered in the dark. "Whatever happens, remember that I love you."
She'd mumbled something back, half-asleep and warm and safe in his arms. It hadn't occurred to her to ask what he meant by "whatever happens." Why would anything happen? They were twenty-one and in love and planning their future together.
The next morning, he was gone.
No note. No text. His roommate said he'd left early, around five AM, with a single duffel bag. His phone went straight to voicemail. His parents, when she'd finally worked up the courage to call them, said they hadn't heard from him either. They were polite but distant, like they were talking to a stranger instead of the girl their son had been planning to marry.
The police had taken a missing person report, but Danny was a legal adult who'd left of his own free will. No signs of foul play. No evidence of anything except a college kid who'd decided to disappear.
"People do it all the time," the officer had told her, not unkindly. "Change of heart, cold feet, family pressure. He'll probably turn up in a few weeks when he's ready to deal with whatever he's running from."
But he hadn't turned up. Not in a few weeks, or a few months, or ever.
Ivy had spent the next year looking for him. She'd checked social media obsessively, called hospitals, even hired a private investigator with money she couldn't afford to spend. Nothing. Danny Rosen had vanished as completely as if he'd never existed.
Eventually, she'd had to accept that he was gone. That whatever they'd had together wasn't strong enough to make him stay. That she'd been wrong about everything—about him, about their relationship, about her own ability to judge people.
The experience had changed her. Made her harder, more careful with her heart. It was part of what had driven her to law enforcement, she realized now. The need to find answers, to solve mysteries, to make sure other people didn't just disappear without explanation.
Except now she had an explanation, and it was worse than anything she'd imagined.
Danny hadn't left because he'd stopped loving her. He'd left because he'd become something else entirely. Something that fed on blood and lived in the shadows and apparently ran criminal organizations.
Ivy picked up the photograph from today's briefing and held it next to the beach picture. Same face, but completely different person. The Danny in the old photo looked innocent, hopeful, human. The Dimitri in the FBI photo looked like he could kill someone and sleep soundly afterward.
How did that happen? How did a pre-med student from suburban Detroit become a vampire crime boss in Chicago?
More importantly—had he chosen it, or had it been forced on him?
She thought about Clarke's briefing. Vampires were real, had supernatural abilities, had been hiding in plain sight for decades. If Danny had been turned into one of them, it would explain the sudden disappearance. Maybe he'd been trying to protect her from whatever he'd become.
Or maybe he'd just decided that his new life was more interesting than the future they'd planned together.
Ivy's phone buzzed with a text. For a wild moment, her heart jumped—what if it was him? What if somehow, impossibly, he knew she was thinking about him?
But it was just her downstairs neighbor, asking if she'd heard the loud music from 3B again. Normal life, normal problems, normal people who didn't have to worry about their ex-boyfriends being supernatural criminals.
She typed back a quick response and set the phone aside. Her hands were steadier now, the initial shock wearing off and leaving behind something harder and more familiar. The feeling she got when a case clicked into place, when the scattered pieces started forming a pattern.
Danny—Dimitri—was her assignment. Whatever he'd become, whoever he was now, she had a job to do. Get close, gather evidence, bring him down. It was just another undercover operation.
Except she'd never been in love with her targets before.
Ivy carefully put the photographs back in the box, all except the beach picture. That one she propped against her bedside lamp, where she could see Danny's young, happy face when she went to sleep.
"I'm going to find out what happened to you," she told the photograph. "And then I'm going to decide whether to save you or destroy you."
The Danny in the picture just kept smiling, like he knew something she didn't.
Which, she was starting to realize, he probably did.
Outside her window, Chicago hummed with late-night energy. Cars honked, sirens wailed in the distance, people lived their normal lives in a city that apparently hosted an entire supernatural community. Somewhere out there, Dimitri Rothschild was doing whatever vampire crime bosses did after dark.
Planning crimes? Feeding on innocent people? Missing the girl he'd left behind ten years ago?
Ivy finished her whiskey and got ready for bed. Tomorrow she'd start becoming Katherine Mills, art appraiser and completely normal human being who definitely wasn't emotionally compromised by her assignment.
Tonight, she'd let herself remember what it felt like to love someone who'd turned out to be a stranger.
As she turned off the lights, one last thought occurred to her. If vampires were real, if they had supernatural abilities like Clarke had said, then maybe Danny had known she was coming for him before she'd even walked into that office.
Maybe this whole assignment was exactly what he'd been waiting for.
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End of Chapter 2