The Last Aria (The Blood Opera Book 2)

The Opera House did not echo the way it used to. It resounded instead—sorrowful, unsettled, as though the walls themselves had learned the shape of loss and refused to let it go.

Avel noticed it most in the evenings, when the last rehearsal ended and the building settled into its older, deeper silence. Not the silence of rest, but of waiting. The kind that lingered rather than closed.

He stood alone at the edge of the stage, coat draped over one arm, watching dust drift through the gaslight. The chandeliers above him had been dimmed to half-brightness, their crystals duller now, less eager to scatter light. The boards beneath his boots still held the faint impressions of bodies that were no longer there—dancers, singers, her.

He could still hear the building breathe. The groan of beams cooling. The soft sigh of curtains settling. What he could not hear—what tore at him more than hunger ever had—was Lyria.

Her pulse had never been loud. It had not demanded. It had not chased. It had existed in quiet defiance of the world, steady and warm, like a promise that did not need to announce itself. He had learned its rhythm without meaning to. Had come to measure his nights by it.

Now there was only silence where it had been.

Avel told himself he would not search. He had loved her enough to let her go. That, at least, was the lie he repeated each night, carefully shaped so it would not crack under repetition.

He stepped forward, boots brushing the edge of the stage where she had once stood during rehearsal, her hands folded behind her back, chin lifted in refusal to bow. He remembered the way she had looked out at the empty hall as if it were already judging her. As if she dared it to try.

He remembered the tension in her shoulders when she thought no one was watching. The way she never quite leaned on anything, even when tired. Strength, held inward.

Avel closed his eyes.

“She would have liked this silence,” he murmured to no one.

Silas lingered in the wings, careful, as he had learned to be. The distance between them had grown measured over the weeks, marked by things he no longer said aloud and questions he no longer asked.

“You should feed,” Silas said quietly, voice pitched so it would not disturb the hall.

Avel did not turn.

“I will later.”

“You said that yesterday.”

“I said I would,” Avel repeated evenly.

Silas swallowed. He had learned which truths were permitted and which were not.

Avel lifted his hand, pressing two fingers briefly to his throat to remind himself it still existed. That the pulse was there.

“I am not starving,” he said calmly.

The lie tasted bitter.

Silas hesitated, then nodded. Fear had made him careful; loyalty had made him stay. When he retreated, Avel remained where he was, staring out into the seats as if she might appear there instead, slipping into a shadowed aisle, arms crossed, watching him with that unreadable intensity.

She did not.

Weeks passed like that.

The city whispered of her absence before he allowed himself to speak her name aloud. A dancer who had not returned. A singer who had vanished. A woman who had unsettled the Opera and then slipped free of it back into the great, grinding monotony beyond its doors.

Avel refused to follow the rumors. Refused to listen too closely when Silas mentioned them. He told himself she would return when she was ready. That she had chosen distance, not disappearance.

At night, he stood at the tall windows of his chambers, looking out over the streets she had vanished into. Carriages passed. Lamps were extinguished. Dawn crept in, pale and unremarkable.

He did not call. He did not reach for the bond he could still feel. It was faint now, distant, like a hand withdrawing through fog. Every time he felt it tug, he loosened his grip. Every time it weakened, something inside him broke quietly, without spectacle.

The first time he snapped at a violinist, the room went still.

The second time he shattered a glass without touching it, Silas did not comment.

By the time months had dragged by, the Opera House itself seemed to sense the imbalance. Lamps flickered longer than usual. Corridors felt narrower. Sound carried strangely, as though music hesitated before committing to the air.

He refused himself any pleasure or relief—not as punishment, but as proof. If she returned, when she returned, he wanted to be able to say he had not filled the space she left with anything else. Not blood. Not comfort. Not distraction.

Only love.

If he could endure this—if he could remain whole on restraint alone—then loving her had not corrupted him. Then he had finally mastered his thirst.

One night, long after the Opera had emptied, Avel stood once more at the edge of the stage.

He imagined her there. Strong. Commanding. Beautiful in a way that did not ask permission.

His chest tightened.

“Come back,” he whispered into the empty hall.

Lyria did not go to him.

She was elsewhere—walking, learning the shape of her own shadow, learning how to take up space without apology. While he was starving himself in devotion.

The city did not ask her permission to exist. It breathed around Lyria as she walked: voices rising and falling in voices she did not know, the hiss of gas lamps and the wet sigh of the river somewhere beyond the streets. This was not the Opera’s curated hush, not velvet and ritual and reverence. This was life, unarranged and unapologetic.

She moved through it with a strange, careful confidence. Not hiding. Not announcing herself. Simply…present.

Caelan kept pace beside her without crowding. He did not guide her by the elbow or angle his body to shield her from the press of the street. He let her choose when to step aside, when to cross, when to stop and watch the world move.

It was a subtle courtesy.

Caelan noted her confident step, the way her eyes stayed fixed forward, untroubled by what lay behind her. She walked like someone who had already accepted the cost of movement—no hesitation, no backward glance to bargain with regret. Her posture was aligned, he