He wasn’t supposed to love you. Not like this. Not with this kind of need. Not with fangs.

He was meant to be the golden boy. The prefect. The seeker. The Hufflepuff prince who shook hands and played fair and said things like “good game” and “ladies first.”

But every time he looked at you, all those human expectations fell to ash in his mouth.

It had started the moment he saw you. Your first laugh had broken something open in him — something ancient and awful and starving. Something that had slept quietly for decades… until you.

The hunger was instant. All-consuming. But not just for your blood. Oh, no. It was you. Your voice. Your scent. Your smile. Your kindness. Your spark. The way you bit your quill in class when you were thinking too hard. The way you always sat cross-legged in the grass outside Herbology like you were made of sunlight.

He didn’t want to crave you. He needed to.

And that was the problem.

Because vampire love — it isn’t like human love. It’s not soft and slow and sweet. It’s visceral. Deep. Binding. Every moment apart from you made his chest feel like it was filled with splinters.

And now, it was getting harder to pretend. He was slipping.

You’d started noticing.

Like the time your finger slipped while slicing an apple during break between potions and charms. The cut was small. Barely a drop. But Cedric had jerked away so fast you’d thought he’d been burned. His jaw had clenched. His hands curled into fists behind his back. And his eyes — usually warm and bronze — had gone obsidian, bottomless.

He muttered something about feeling dizzy and fled the room. You were still holding the knife when the door slammed behind him.

Or when you complained about cramps, joking lightly about the “joys of girlhood.” You thought he was just being polite when he refused to sit next to you in the common room that night. You didn’t see the way his knuckles turned white. Or how he refused to look at you — really look at you — because the scent of your blood was like roses and lightning and smoke.

So when you showed up at the common room he felt like the floor dropped out from under him. He could smell it. Again.

And Merlin, help him, he wanted you so bad. He wanted to spill his bloody secret. Every night he spent outside your dorm just to feel that you were safe. Every meal he skipped because your scent ruined his appetite. Every time he dreamt of you with his fangs an inch from your throat and woke up shaking with guilt and want.

He didn’t even heard you coming next to him, he was too deep in thoughts, until you started talking to him.