Because claiming Tessa would destroy her.
Edinburgh, 1347
I wasn’t always a monster.
Once, I was Ezekiel Black, youngest son of a merchant family, too poor to matter and too proud to admit it.I was twenty-three years old the night I died, walking home drunk from a tavern, singing off-key and thinking about the barmaid who’d smiled at me.
I didn’t see the woman in the alley.
Didn’t hear her move.
One second I was alone, the next her hand was around my throat, lifting me off my feet as though I weighed nothing.Her eyes glowed white in the darkness, the same white mine glow now when the hunger takes over, and when she smiled, her fangs caught the moonlight.
“You’ll do,” she said.
Then she tore my throat open.
The turning was agony.Three days of fever and hallucinations, my body dying and remaking itself cell by cell.When I woke, everything was different.Sharper.Colder.Hungrier.
She was there when I opened my eyes.Margaux.My sire.Beautiful, cruel and utterly inhuman.
“Welcome to eternity,” she purred, running one finger down my cheek.“Now, let me teach you what you are.”
What I was, I learned quickly, was a predator.
Vampires don’t just drink blood, we feed on emotion, on fear, on the rush of adrenaline in prey that knows it’s going to die.The first time I killed, I was so far gone in bloodlust I didn’t realize what I’d done until I was standing over the body of a young woman who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
She looked like my sister.
I ran.
Margaux found me three days later, half-mad with hunger and self-loathing, hiding in a cemetery like some Gothic fucking cliché.
“You’re soft,” she said, disgust dripping from every word.“You’ll never survive if you can’t control yourself.”
“Then teach me,” I snarled.
And she did.
For fifty years, Margaux trained me to be what she wanted: a weapon.She taught me to read auras, to taste emotion on the air, to hunt without mercy.Margaux taught me love was a weakness, that attachment was death, that vampires were meant to be alone.
She also taught me what happened when you broke the rules.
I watched her drain a young man she’d claimed as a lover, watched the light die in his eyes as she took everything from him, his blood, his will, his life.When she finally let him fall, she turned to me with blood on her lips and said, “Never claim a human unless you’re willing to kill them.We always take too much.”
I believed her.
Until I didn’t.
Her name was Catherine.
1897, San Francisco.She was a schoolteacher with soft brown eyes and a laugh that made me feel almost human.I didn’t mean to fall for her.Didn’t mean to let her into the carefully constructed cage I’d built around what was left of my humanity.
But she saw me.
Not the monster.Not the predator.Me.
“I know what you are,” she whispered one night, her hand on my cheek.“And I don’t care.”
