Yesterday Lucien Draven was heir to every vampire house in Europe. Tonight he is bleeding out behind a Brooklyn dumpster — starving, hunted, with his elder brother Silas on the throne and the Crimson Guard shipped across an ocean to finish the job. A human girl named Maya makes the mistake of stopping her truck for him, and almost dies for it when the hunger takes over. Running has stopped working, so Lucien walks into the nearest mob warehouse, breaks its boss in under a minute, and takes his oath instead of his life. Out of loan sharks, gun runners and street crews he builds Nightblood — a syndicate with a prince at the head of it — and starts mailing his brother pieces of the city back. Silas answers with engineered beasts and a hunt through the subway tunnels that costs Lucien the one person who ever treated him like a man. What climbs out of that tunnel is not a prince any more. Thirty episodes end on the roof of the Empire State Building, with Europe's crown offered to a king who no longer wants it.
