Sabine walked alone through Seville’s Sailors’ Row at night, dressed in green and enjoying the attention she drew while musing on ten years of freedom since abandoning her mortal life as María. She preferred the taste of women’s blood and lamented that only the memory of food’s flavors remained to her. Approaching a group of sex workers at the docks, she offered to buy company; the older woman refused, but a younger woman accepted and led Sabine into a dark gap between buildings.

In the shadows, the nervous young woman admitted inexperience and fidgeted with a flattened penny charm stamped with a V. Sabine soothed her, then abruptly bit the woman’s throat, drinking until the woman died. Sabine kept the pendant, replacing a long-sold ruby that symbolized Andrés and María, and felt no remorse, calling death a kind of freedom. Returning to the steps to claim the older woman as prey, she found her gone and continued through the night.

On her way to a commandeered merchant’s manse she now called home, Sabine trailed three drunken men, debating whether and how to feed when the unexpected occurred: one man abruptly shed his drunkenness and bit his companion’s throat. As the third man tried to flee, a small, dark-skinned woman emerged from the shadows, comforted him with feigned concern, then tore out his throat and drank.

Sabine watched, enthralled, as the male killer fed, then noticed the woman’s lethal grace. The man, Hector, blocked Sabine’s path, while the woman, Renata, appeared before Sabine with glowing eyes and sweet, unsettling charm. Renata addressed Sabine intimately, seeming to read her unspoken thoughts, and teased, “Go ahead,” as if inviting Sabine to kiss her.

Hector referred to Sabine in the third person, and Renata playfully asked to “keep” her. Sabine asserted she was not a pet, but Renata’s touch and presence exposed Sabine’s deeper longing: satisfaction with Andrés’s death and her immortal freedom, yet a simmering rage at loneliness and the memory of what she left behind with the widow. Renata brushed Sabine’s lips with a brief kiss that tasted of blood—the first kiss Sabine had welcomed.

When Hector called again, Renata withdrew, slipped her arm through his, and they began to leave the alley. At the alley’s mouth, Renata looked back with an inviting smile. Sabine, unmoored by the encounter and drawn by desire for connection, followed them into the night.