His Name

Vanya's question fell into the narrow space like a dagger driven straight into Victor's chest. She didn't back away, and she didn't show the slightest fear of the 900-year-old vampire radiating an invisible menace.

She leaned forward, her gauze-wrapped hands braced hard on the edge of the desk, closing the distance between them. Her pale gray eyes—the flat color of a winter sky before a storm—were locked on every tiny flicker across his face.

Victor stopped avoiding her eyes. His eyes, usually blazing like dark blood, were completely empty now, somber and full of the bottomless exhaustion of someone who had lived too long in the dark. He looked at the yellow-stained white leather glove lying alone on the wooden desk between them, then slowly let out an icy breath. That breath condensed into a thin mist in the unheated room.

"I have nothing to say in my defense, Vanya," Victor said, his voice rough, stripped of all its usual pride and authority. He shut his eyes tight, as if he had just shed a heavy suit of armor.

"But the truth down in that vault... isn't a simple story you can see from a few scraps of paper. Come with me."

Ten minutes later, in the great hall of the castle.

The great hall opened out like an endless space of darkness and cold stone. Icy air from the snowy mountains slipped through the broken arches, carrying the smell of old pine resin, rotting wood dust, and wisteria gone dry and brittle in antique vases.

Granite statues of past heads of the family stood silently in the corners of the room, their expressionless stone faces seeming to look down on this judgment from which there was no way back.

Victor didn't sit in the high-backed leather chair at the head of the room—where he usually sat like the lonely king of a ruined valley. He stood leaning against the edge of the long oak table in the middle of the great hall, his hands resting loosely in the pockets of his dark maroon brocade robe. Across from him stood Vanya. She stood with her back straight, her leather assassin's gear hugging a figure that was slender but full of explosive strength. The silver blades at her hip moved slightly with each even breath.

And between them, standing right under the tarnished brass chandelier, was Sebastian the butler.

No. To be exact, he was Aldric—the one who carried the blood of the White Lily family, the vassal family that had been bound to Victor's line for centuries.

Aldric didn't kneel, and he made no move to deny anything. He stood there in his crisp black waistcoat, every crease in it perfect down to the last fraction of an inch, the same way he had carefully tended every corner of this castle for the past 200 years. Even pushed back against the wall in front of both his master and the hunter, he kept the propriety, the ruthlessness, and the frightening calm of an old-school manservant.

Vanya took one step forward. The heel of her leather boot struck the stone floor with an echoing clack.

"The 14 files down in that vault," she said, her voice flat, without the slightest waver, yet the weight of every word was so crushing it pressed the air around them down to freezing.

"You cut them open in that vault and drained every drop of their blood to turn it into fuel for your great master... isn't that right?"

Aldric gently raised a hand and smoothed the front of his vest. He lifted his right hand—the hand that always wore the closed black leather glove. Under Vanya's watchful eyes, he slowly pulled the glove off. The skin of his hand, clawed and blackened, crisscrossed with vicious burn scars left by the poison of silver, appeared in the dim candlelight.

He answered in the passive voice, strictly following a servant's rules of speech toward an honored guest:

"No one has been killed by this servant. And that vault has never been a place for holding or executing laborers, Miss Vanya."

Vanya frowned, her lashes narrowing, her eyes full of sharp suspicion: "Then what are the 14 files recording every blood type, the dried blood on the stone, and those labeled blood bags?"

"That blood was bought from House Dumont's underground network,"

Aldric answered calmly, not a ripple of emotion crossing his wrinkled face.

"Where that blood came from was fully known, and it has been bought for the past 40 years. But those 14 laborers never died in the vaults of this castle. That vault was a secret passage from ancient times. They only borrowed it to escape, crossing over to the organization on the other side of the snow mountains to get away from exploitation. The harvested blood... was only part of the cruel price House Dumont demanded of them in exchange for their freedom."

Vanya froze. Her lips pressed into a straight line. She had never imagined that the evil-soaked vault would turn out to be a secret transit route instead of the gruesome slaughterhouse she had pictured.

But that didn't make the story any clearer; it only sank the whole picture into a deeper darkness: where had those 14 laborers gone after they reached the organization on the other side of the mountains? Had they really found freedom, or had they just stepped out of one trap into another blood farm? Their fate was still a completely open question.

"You knew exactly where that guilt-soaked blood came from, knew it was tied to House Dumont, and you still quietly traded for it and brought it back to this castle?" Vanya ground out, taking one more step closer.

Aldric looked at her calmly, then turned his clouded eyes toward Victor, standing silent in the shadows. His voice was even, carrying a passive, bitter tone:

"A servant has no right to ask where the goods come from, miss."

He paused for a moment, his thin chest rising and falling under the waistcoat with heavy breaths:

"The original task Lord Victor gave this servant was to go deep into the great forest and collect the blood of the Nightfrost Aurochs—a pure ancient creature that let him sustain his strength without ever touching a human. But 40 years ago, every ancient creature in the great forest was seized by force by House Dumont and locked away in their underground farms. They monopolized that source of life. There was no other way. To bring aurochs blood back to keep Lord Victor alive, House Dumont's terms had to be accepted: open the underground passage beneath the castle, and cover for 14 escaping laborers passing through it. Only after each successful crossing would House Dumont hand over a matching amount of aurochs blood to be carried home. The blood brought up to Lord Victor for the past 40 years... was never human blood."

Vanya stood there, stunned. The chaotic pieces in her head suddenly turned and snapped together perfectly.

So Aldric had never lied about the kind of blood he brought up to his master. He had only quietly taken on a dark trade deal with the criminal empire of Dumont in exchange for the one fuel that kept Victor alive, to keep his master from being corrupted.

Vanya looked at the old butler in front of her. She looked at the clawed silver burn scars on his hand, at his thin shoulders trembling under the crisp vest. She took one more step forward. Her pale gray eyes had lost the harshness of a hunter and the suspicion of a killer; all that was left in them was the recognition of one equal human being for another.

She spoke, clearly and distinctly, every word echoing through the great hall:

"Aldric."

Just one word. A name.

Aldric's body went rigid.

His maimed, silver-scarred hand shook violently. His clouded eyes, rusted by time, went wide as he looked at the young assassin standing in front of him. For 190 years, he had been stripped of the right to even say "I," treated as a nameless shadow in a dark corner. This was the first time in nearly two centuries that someone had looked him straight in the eye and called him by the real name his parents had given him at birth.

A single cloudy tear rolled slowly from the corner of Aldric's wrinkled eye. It ran across the savage burn scar on his cheek, then fell to the cold stone floor and broke with the faintest sound.

He broke down in tears. A 210-year-old man who had witnessed so many massacres and never trembled before death was sobbing like a child, all because a mortal had spoken his name.

Vanya didn't know what to do with her hands. She had been trained to answer tears with nothing, the way you answer weather. She stood very still and let him cry, and she did not look away, and it seemed to be the right thing, because after a while his breathing slowed.

Victor stood beside the wooden table, his chest choked as if a great stone were pressing down on it. He took one slow step forward, his blazing red eyes full of self-reproach, torment, and bitterness. He looked at his butler, then turned to Vanya:

"Aldric didn't lie to you, Vanya. He really never killed those people. And... I'm the one who, without meaning to, let everything sink this deep into darkness."

Victor paused, his voice rough with bitterness:

"Years ago, I happened to see Aldric in the vault in a fierce argument with a woman. That woman... was his own daughter, who had betrayed the family, run away, and thrown herself into House Dumont's twisted network."

Aldric choked up at once, and for the first time Aldric dared to speak over his master: "You misunderstood, my lord; I was only trying to talk my own daughter out of walking the path of sin"

"I'm sorry, Aldric; I should have asked you straight out back then, but I just assumed you had truly gone wrong, that you had killed people and given me human blood to drink because you wanted to protect your daughter, and since I owed you my life for taking the silver-sheathed stake for me at the battle of Ashborne... I chose to look the other way."

After a moment, Victor went on: "I never pressed you all the way, never wondered where the blood you brought home came from. That carelessness of mine, the 'protecting' and 'repaying' I told myself I was doing... is exactly what let this underground network exist right beneath the castle, and I was selfish enough to think that drinking human blood again and again like that might bring death to me sooner..."

When Aldric heard those tormented words from his master's mouth, he shook his head hard. He raised a trembling hand to wipe the cloudy tear from his cheek. He looked at Victor, his eyes full of the forgiveness, bitterness, and respect of an elder who had watched that child grow up over the centuries:

"Lord Victor... I carry the blood of a vassal family. Our half-vampire blood can't live forever the way your original Pureblood can. I can live a little over 200 years at most, and then this body will age, rot, and crumble to dust like any mortal's. By the life span of our kinds, I am much younger than you... but for nearly two centuries, watching you live alone in this castle, tormenting yourself through countless upheavals... in my heart, I have long thought of you as my own son."

Aldric turned to Vanya, bowed at a full 90 degrees, and said with deep respect: "I apologize to you, Miss Vanya. Even though those 14 laborers chose to escape of their own free will, I am still the one who helped House Dumont's web of crime."

He lifted his head to look at Victor, and a rare, old, relieved smile appeared on his deeply lined face:

"I know you have always wanted to carry the blame for me. You were ready to ignore everything because you owed me your life all those years ago. But I've lived long enough, my lord. I don't want you carrying one more stain because of a worn-out old man like me. I have to go now."

Victor started, his face changing, and took a quick step forward: "Where are you going, Aldric? There's a blizzard out there, and House Dumont won't leave you alone!"

Aldric only smiled faintly. He gently shook his head and gave no answer at all. He straightened the sleeves of his waistcoat. Before he stepped through the great door, Aldric paused for a beat and slowly set a small object from his pocket on the stone shelf by the wall—a silent farewell. His thin back faded slowly into the blinding blizzard and disappeared for good...

Snow blew in through the open doorway after him and drifted across the flagstones in long white fingers. Victor didn't move to close the door. He stood watching the empty dark where the thin figure had disappeared, and for a moment he looked less like a lord of anything than like a man at a train platform after the last train has gone.