Total pages in book: 46
Estimated words: 42637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 213(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 142(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42637 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 213(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 142(@300wpm)
So I stayed, letting the minutes stretch like lifetimes, watching the rise and fall of her chest, the fragile peace of her sleeping face. I told myself I would leave soon, bring her a meal, grant her the illusion of space. But the truth was simpler, darker. I could not go. She was here, and she was mine, and the thought of letting her out of my sight even for an hour felt like tearing my own heart from my body.
The more time she spent here with me would stoke her memory of a time long ago, memories that were cloudy from age and a life spent in this modern world.
A day’s time had passed since I brought her to my home. Our home. She’d been sleeping for hours, and I’d stood here and watched her, hidden in the shadows and relishing that sweet Clara was here once more. Hundreds of years had passed… and she was finally back with me.
She stirred beneath the blanket, fragile in the massive bed, her throat marked where I had claimed her. Even swathed in the shift I had chosen, she seemed bare to me, exposed in ways she did not understand.
Clara was mine. Because the instant my gaze fell upon her, time collapsed.
Her name hadn’t stayed the same. Her face was not identical. And time had altered destiny. The curve of her cheek was softer and the bow of her lips more pronounced. Her hair was paler in this life, longer, and had a wave to it.
But there were things that were still so familiar. Identical to my Mircalla. She smelled the same. And the way she smiled had my blood rushing because memories of her looking up at me with her lips tilted after I’d fucked her until she couldn’t walk was imprinted in my mind.
The recognition tore through me, unraveling the torment I had carried for lifetimes.
My heart had returned to me.
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 to the 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.