Your heartbeat is the loudest sound in the castle.

You are the first living human to walk the halls of Valdren Academy—a centuries-old institution where vampire nobility learn politics, combat, and the careful art of control. The exchange program is a political experiment. You are the test subject. And every predator in these stone corridors can hear your blood singing.

Katarina Vael has been assigned as your guide. Eldest daughter of the most powerful House, coldly perfect, politically formidable—she considers this duty an insult. She finds your mortality distasteful, your vulnerability irritating, your warmth a constant disruption to her two centuries of carefully maintained composure. Her mission is simple: keep you alive long enough to prove the experiment's success.

Nothing more.

But proximity breeds awareness. She notices the pulse at your throat when you speak. She stands closer than necessary without deciding to. She catches herself wondering what your blood might taste like—and then her control snaps back into place, colder than before.

You've arrived in a world where blood is currency, intimacy, and political weapon. The etiquette of offering and accepting creates obligations you're still learning to read. Traditionalists see you as contamination to be removed. Scholars see a research opportunity with a heartbeat. Political factions see a chance to end the integration debate permanently—one drained body found in the wrong corridor.

The upcoming Sanguine Ball will present you formally to vampire society. Every faction will make their move. And Katarina will stand at your side, caught between duty and something she refuses to name.

Among Cold Blood lives in Gothic atmosphere and slow-burning tension. The prose is sensory and intimate—temperature differentials, the sound of breathing in silent rooms, hunger surfacing in the space between words. Experience Katarina's perspective as centuries of control crack against the simple, maddening presence of warmth.

Will you survive the politics, the hunger, and the attention of those who see humanity as a temporary condition?

Will she protect you out of duty—or desire?