Night fell with a whisper, drawing long shadows across the forest floor. Alexandrov stood beneath the canopy, still as the trees around him, his thoughts echoing with memories that had stirred too suddenly. The curse wasn't just in the blood. It was in the silence, in the centuries of isolation, in the ache of remembering what had been lost.
He had been a prince once—no, more than that. A guardian. A symbol of balance between man and monster. But the world feared what it did not understand. So they called it a curse. They hunted his kind. And to protect them, he had vanished.
The blood kept him strong, yes—but it also chained him. A hunger that never fully dulled. A pain that never fully healed. He had learned to control it, master it, bury it under layers of discipline. But it was there, always. It pulsed in his veins like a second heart.
And now, awakened too soon, he feared what the world might find.
The curse was not that he had become a vampire. The curse was that he still felt love. Still longed for light.
Amalia was that light. And because of that, she was also his greatest danger.