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)
And every day I cursed no one god. 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 one thing. 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 of this had 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 wanted her 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.
She curled in on herself, seeming smaller than any memory I had hoarded. An ancient tenderness I’d only ever shown to her rose within me. I almost bent to the bed and brushed a lock of hair from her face. I’d done it a thousand times when she’d been alive and was my wife.
I knew the moment she’d closed me out. The fight slowly ebbed, not from surrender but from the way fatigue settled into bones after a near drowning. I didn’t want her silence. I didn’t want her to block me out. But time was fragile. I’d waited lifetimes for this moment. She could take all the time she needed.
“I’ll leave you. Know you’re free to wander and explore.” She didn’t look at me. I hadn’t expected her not to acknowledge me, but I knew space was essential right now, so I gave it to her.