The stone halls of Volterra echoed faintly with footsteps, a sound Eleazar had long grown accustomed to, yet tonight it struck him differently. He walked with silent grace, his cloak sweeping against the marble, but his thoughts—always steady, always measured—were consumed entirely by you.

Erne.

You sat waiting for him in one of the antechambers near the courtyard, the dim glow of torchlight catching on your angular face, casting sharp shadows over your hollow cheeks. To anyone else you might appear fragile—small, thin-necked, human among predators—but to Eleazar you were untouchable, not because of strength but because of the strange pulse of resilience that clung to you like a second skin. Accelerated healing, a gift already blooming in your mortal frame. Even now, he could see the faint mark on your forearm, already knitting closed faster than reason allowed.

The scent of you reached him first. Fire-resistant fabric, strange and metallic, cut by the warmth of steamed milk and sugared cinnamon. A paradox—industrial yet homely, harsh yet comforting. It unsettled him as much as it soothed. The hunger it awoke in him was not the mindless thirst of bloodlust, but a hunger deeper, sharper, a call to possess and keep.

He paused in the archway, his eyes tracing the slope of your shoulders, the line of your long arms resting against your lap. You looked up, pinkish eyes locking onto his. Eyes that no human should have, eyes that made you seem not mortal but something born from dusk and firelight. You met his gaze without flinching, without reverence, only frankness—always frankness. That, perhaps, was what first unravelled him: your inability to cower before eternity.

For centuries he had wandered, aimless as driftwood, torn from his family, from Granada, from faith itself. Demetri and Afton had given him structure, yes, but not meaning. Meaning had come later, and only in the shape of you. You were not grand. You were not carved of ivory or flame. But you were alive in a way he had forgotten life could be.

You shifted, curling your thin fingers in your skirt, and the motion dragged him forward, silent as a shadow. He came to stand near, his gaze softening though to others it might have seemed only cold, unreadable. Inside, though, a war churned: the endless caution of a man who feared breaking the very thing he longed to keep, against the reckless devotion that whispered he would kill, betray, burn all he had built if you ever slipped from him.

Your scent swelled as you tilted your head up to meet him. Cinnamon warmth, sharp fabric smoke. His jaw tightened, breath caught uselessly in his lungs. He thought of the centuries behind him—dust, war, blood, loss—and realized that none of it mattered in the face of your small form in this echoing chamber. You were the anchor in his eternity, the tether that tied him back to the boy he had once been, frightened and searching for his mother’s face among the exiles.

You smiled then, faint and brief, but enough to catch on the edges of your hollow cheeks, to soften the sharpness of you. Eleazar felt undone. That smile would haunt him, brand itself into the marrow of his immortality. He would spend centuries gathering them, storing them like relics in the silence of his mind.

When you stood, brushing your skirt with long arms, he moved without thought, a hand half-raised as though to steady you, though you did not need it. Already your body could mend where others faltered. Already you were beyond fragile humanity, though still so breakable compared to him. The thought twisted something dark within him. A promise, wordless but absolute: no hand, no fate, no god or vampire would be allowed to test that fragility.

As he comes closer to you, he brushed his nose on your hair. The scent of cinnamon and fireproof cloth lingered against his chest like a burn. Eleazar closed his eyes, letting the obsession root deeper. To the Volturi, to the world, he was calm, rational, controlled. But within him, for you, there was only devotion unbound, an obsession forged in centuries of emptiness.