Page 31 of Blood Vows
But she wore them like a queen. With grace, with quiet defiance, with a beauty that made my breath falter. Not even the bruises could diminish it. They only made her seem more fragile, more real, more human.
And I hated that I noticed.
I hated that I wanted.
Because no matter what I did, no matter how I tried to snuff out the light she carried, my darkness was drawn to it. Drawn to her.
The greatest shock came the night I caught my reflection in the mirror without my mask. For a moment, I didn’t recognize myself. The blackened tendrils that had long marred my face were fading. The shadows that had once consumed half of me were...receding.I had dropped the mask in disbelief, stumbling back from the mirror as if struck.
‘Impossible,’I had whispered to the empty room, my voice trembling with something dangerously close to hope. For a fleeting second, I wondered if she was draining me of power, but I could still feel it there beneath the surface, alive and pulsing like a living thing. Its steady rhythm begging to be unleashed. Yet when I was with her, that same darkness stilled. It didn’t rage. It didn’t hunger.
It purred.
It wanted her, yes, but not to consume her. It wanted to touch her. To protect her. To comfort. To soothe.
My darkness had never been that way before.
It had never been like this. My darkness had always fed from fear and pain, never from the soft laughter or the gentle smile of another. Yet now it stirred for her. It reached for her.
There were moments I had to drag it back by force, call it home like an unruly creature that refused to obey. It wanted to touch her hair when she passed, to linger in the air around her as though drawn to her warmth. It was no longer the monster that craved destruction, it was something else entirely, something alive and yearning.
The first time it happened, I was startled. The second, I was unnerved. By the third, I realised the unsettling truth…I didn’t know how to control it anymore.
There were times I questioned whether the darkness itself was behind my obsession, manipulating my desire so it could get what it wanted. But even that lie fell apart beneath the weight ofwhat I felt. Because I knew the truth. It wasn’t just the darkness that craved her.
It was me.
The vampire. The man. The broken creature who still lingered somewhere beneath all that rot and ruin. I had never wanted anything so much in all my existence. Not even the dagger, the weapon that had once defined my every purpose. And now the thought of claiming her shadowed every other ambition I had ever known.
Even now, as I held her throat in my hand, pretending to frighten her, the truth burned through me like fire. I wasn’t trying to scare her. I was masking my own fear.
The fear of rejection.
Because why would she ever want a monster like me?
How could she ever love the beast she knew me to be?
If she ever loved me, it would be my undoing.
That much I knew. Because love had never been a salvation for me. It had always been the blade pressed to my throat, a soft whisper before the fall.
I had seen what love did to my mother, how it had twisted her into something else. A broken soul. And I had sworn never to let it claim me too. But then Nessa came along, and suddenly all those old oaths felt meaningless.
Every time she looked at me, it was as if she was stripping away the years I had buried myself beneath, peeling back the layers of hatred and bitterness that had been my armor. It left me exposed in ways I didn’t understand.
It made me weak.
And weakness was something I could not afford. Not now. Not when everything I had waited for was finally within reach. Yet when I closed my eyes, it wasn’t the dagger I saw.
It was her.
Always her.
The curve of her lips when she smiled, the tremor in her voice when she was afraid, the fire in her eyes when she defied me. Just like now. Every moment I spent near her only sank me deeper into this curse I had created for myself. The irony was not lost on me. That I, who had once been the master of darkness, the hunter of men, the one who wielded fear like a weapon, was now enslaved by something as simple as a heartbeat.
Her heartbeat, now held in my hand like a fragile butterfly.
It called to me in the silence, steady and fragile, the only sound that could drown out the chaos in my mind. And I found myself chasing it, needing to be near it, just to prove that something in this forsaken world still lived, still burned.
