Part One: The Chair in the Dark
Beneath Washington D.C.—beneath the grit and glare of the Capitol’s sleepless lights—there were places the sun had never touched. Forgotten tunnels. Bricked-over basements. Chambers that don’t appear on any blueprints. The history of the city, the country, was entombed beneath, like rotten roots.
At the end of an underground corridor, behind a windowed door, the air was thick with mold, rust, and the smell of rancid, dried blood. In the center of it all, bound to a metal chair bolted to the cracked concrete floor, sat a man who had once been known as Runiket Oromawrodir.
His arms ached from the restraints, leather and chain biting into skin that had once been untouchable in the wrestling ring—he was an icon of flesh and fury, a masked luchador viscerally agile for his size, wearing the visage of a demon named Ruin. But now he was bare. Helpless. No crowd. No opponent. Only silence, and her.
Karina.
She moved like smoke around him, never quite in the same place twice. Her voice had the hush of broken glass—the kind of sound that could cut even when it whispered. She hadn’t spoken much—only enough to tell him what she was, what he was about to become: A Nosferatu.
Not by choice. Never by choice.
The chamber reeked of something sweet and sour—metallic and warm. Runiket could hear something shifting behind him. A shuffle of feet. A sob. And then, Karina stepped into view with a machete in one hand, her sneering, bloodied face mutilated, the soft hum of her breath the only warning.
“No one comes into this unbroken,” she said. “And no one gets out unchanged.”
Then came the scream.
He wanted to close his eyes. He didn’t. He made himself watch. Maybe part of him knew—knew what she’d told him wasn’t a lie, knew this would be his first meal, knew the despair that embraced him would be eternal.
The first breath of a new kind of hunger.
One that would never be sated.
