Page 64 of Blood Vows
Until her.
Until the girl who had looked at me, not with fear or disgust, but with something that felt like understanding. I tried to tell myself in the beginning that it was a weakness. That it was fascination born of proximity, of shared shadows and circumstance. But the truth was far, far simpler…As much as it wasn’t.
I was falling in love with her.
From the very beginning, I’d known it was a mistake. She was supposed to be a pawn, a means to an end. A mortal girl with a pure soul that could tip the scales in my favor and bring my brothers crawling back into the light so I could destroy them. So, I could take from them just as they had taken from me.
And yet, somewhere between her questions and her trembling smiles, I forgot to remember what the end even looked like. She never called me a monster, though I saw the truth reflected in her eyes, that she knew what I was, and still, she refused to flinch away. She looked at me the way no one ever had before. As if the darkness in me wasn’t something to fear, but something that could be understood, even healed. She saw me, all of me, the same way she saw the pain in herself…Something fractured.But not beyond repair, if only someone cared enough to try.
That was when she’d undone me.
No spell.
No curse.
No decades of power could have equaled the force of one small, broken human heart colliding with mine. And when she confessed it, when she stood before me, eyes glistening with tears, telling me she loved all three of us, I should have been furious.
But I wasn’t.
Because the way she said it, it wasn’t division. It wasn’t confusion.
It was truth.
Pure, impossible truth.
She had the heart of a mortal and yet the courage of something far older, far greater. She loved us all because she saw in each of us what we could no longer see in ourselves. And when she spoke those words, I realised just how deep I had fallen.
No power on this earth, no demonic curse, no blood bond, no fractured fate, could have stopped me from kissing her in that storm. The rain had drenched us both, the world around us vanishing until there was nothing left but the taste of her lips, the warmth of her breath, the sound of her heart hammering against mine.
It had felt like eternity condensed into a single, reckless act.
I knew I shouldn’t have done it.
And yet, if I could live a thousand lifetimes, I would find her in everyone just to kiss her again beneath the rain.
However, love…my love… was never going to come without consequence. For when she wandered into the east wing, my heart had stopped. She wasn’t supposed to see that.
Not yet.
Not her.
What she nearly discovered would have destroyed her innocence and damned what little redemption I still had left to offer. So, when I saw her reaching for the curtain, when I saw her fingertips trembling inches from the truth, I wanted to scare her.
No—
I needed to scare her.
Because fear would keep her safe.
Fear would drive her away.
It would make her run and keep running, far from me, far from the curse that still lingered in the shadows of this house. And yet…she didn’t.Even terrified, drenched in rain, trembling with rage and betrayal, she still stood before me, defiant and heartbreakingly human. And I, the monster who had wanted her gone, found myself chasing after her instead. Every instinct told me to let her go.
But every beat of my undead heart defied reason and followed her into the storm. Because she is my undoing.
My damnation.
And perhaps, my only salvation. I had never believed in myths. Not in the kind whispered through our kind’s history, about the Fated, the bond strong enough to tame the darkness that lived within an ancient demon’s bloodline. It was a fairy tale meant for those who still had hope left in them. Hope wassomething I had buried a long time ago, beneath stone and fire and blood.
