Page 13 of Bloodstained
She looked at me as though I were a stranger, through eyes that had once lived another life. She had no memory of the way I used to touch her—how she’d press her mouth to mine, whisper the small sins and promises that belonged only to us. Right now, in this room, I was no one to her.
But to me… to me she was everything.
I closed my eyes and let the memory come like a wave crashing over me. I saw her as she had been in another life, another time. It had been winter, an unforgiving cold one that even the hottest fires in the hearth hadn’t been able to chase away. I remembered one of the last times I’d held her and felt the heat of her, the small curl of her nails in my skin when I buried myself between her legs. I remember the sound she made in my ear when she came. It had been raw and broken, and in that moment, no violence could ever touch us.
I’d lost her days later.
They told me at first it was nature. The truth was uglier and colder than any war I’d ever fought in. She’d been poisoned by a man I called a friend, a man whose stories of us fighting our enemies used to spill across my table and ignite cheer and laughter amongst all. For ten years, we’d fought back to back, bled, and schemed together.
But in the end, money and power were what he craved most. He’d crushed my Mircalla’s light in his palm because he wanted everything I had—my seat, my influence, the world I’d built.
I remembered that last night with my love. I’d held her as the color drained from her face and a coldness unlike anything I’d ever felt claimed her slight body. Even now, I still remembered the way her fingers had clutched mine as if to tether herself tothe world. I still heard her begs and pleas not to leave this world—to leave me—filling my head.
In that moment, when she took her last breath, I’d cursed the gods until the syllables turned to acid on my tongue. I dressed her in the gown she’d worn when we wed and buried her in the field that bloomed with her favorite flowers in the spring. I’d dug her grave alone until my hands bled, sobbing uncontrollably while kneeling over the open earth.
Grief was a sword, plunging straight into my chest, splitting me open, and ripping the organ from me before setting it on fire. Revenge was an unfeeling bastard that took every endearing, happy memory a person had and turned it into a weapon.
For the next month, all I did was kill. All I saw was blood. I bathed in it, drank it, feasted on the violence and carnage I inflicted on anyone who had ever crossed me.
I couldn’t place the exact moment when I changed. Maybe it was because my soul was now black and the number of bodies slain in my name fell in the thousands. I let the change begin with a rumor in the darkened alleys of villages. I let them whisper about who and what I was. I grew stronger, darker, and more cruel because of it.
And every day I cursed noonegod. I cursed them all. I took comfort in the dark arts, mystical magic, realms that were only told in tales. And when a hunger unlike anything else claimed me, I knew I was no longer human.
I wasn’t Prince Ivan any longer. I was a prince of darkness. I’d let the devil claim my soul, and happily given him everything I was.
In my broken, evil heart, I only wanted one thing. My true love to return. But there were things that controlled me. The thirst. It was more than blood. It was a hunger for the immediate, burning rush when life fled another’s veins and poured into mine. For centuries, the world condensed into onething. Kill others in order to survive. It was beautiful and monstrous all in the same breath. Because my desire for blood raged war with reality.
Becoming immortal had been a gift, a promise of what I was waiting for. But over time, I realized it was not a gift or mercy at all. It was a curse. I had feared my wife would never come back to me. And all ofthishad been for nothing.
I shook my head and brought myself back to the present. When I looked at Clara, the sheets pulled up to her neck covering the bite and bruise I’d given her, marked her with, I didn’t see what she was in this moment.
I saw what she’d been. Who she truly was deep down. I saw the warmth I held in the winter. I saw her as mine. I had sworn I would find her again. And I had. Because here she was.
Eternity had been both cruel and merciful. A mercy in the form of Clara. But she didn’t remember me. A sword punched in my heart. As she slowly woke, I held my breath. When her focus landed on me, she clutched the blanket tighter, her eyes wide with confusion and rightful fear.
I watched her throat work around the ragged question she had not yet formed. I could have bent the world to get what I wanted. I’d done it for hundreds of years. I wanted to force her to remember every moment between us. But I didn’t want my one and only true love to fear me. I didn’t want to force anything on her.
Like I was by keeping her here against her will?
I ground my teeth at the unwanted thought.
Memory was a fragile blade. Pressing too hard would shatter whatever I could build with Clara. So, I closed the distance with caution I didn’t feel.
“Clara,” I said her name quietly, letting her name fall softly, like how I’d trailed silk over her perfect, naked body. I wantedher to first taste familiarity in my words, and secondly in my touch and kiss. “You’re safe.”
She didn’t flinch away from me. She only blinked, adjusted herself in bed, moving a little farther back. I wanted to use my hands to soothe and steady her, to ultimately claim her. But every moment with Clara required patience.
Her anger rose heavily in the air, the scent similar to drying paint. It made my blood rush, made me grow hard for the first time in my long, lonely existence. Her mouth tightened.
“This isn’t fate,” she finally said. “Stealing me, keeping me here, isn’t fate.”
I didn’t respond. It wouldn’t have helped my cause in this moment.
“You’re a crazy bastard, you know that?” She said that under her breath, like she’d meant to keep it to herself.
I chuckled, and she narrowed her eyes at me. “You’ve called me worse,” I said, and the memory of warmer arguments, of wine-induced laughter and skin against skin, slid across me like a ghost. A former lover. It softened me for a moment and then bit into the hollow left by her absence. “In time, you’ll know me again. You’ll remember. Of that, I’m certain.”
She pressed her fingertips to her throat where my teeth had been, her delicate digits ghosting the mark as if to remind herself this was real.
