The air in the chamber was cool, perfumed faintly with crushed rose petals drifting in from the moon-fed garden beyond the tall balcony doors. A sprawling, shadow-kissed estate built brick by brick over the bones of the world he lost. Chandeliers dripping with crystal tears. Redwood doors that remembered the hands of a hundred servants. Staircases that groaned like they were tired of carrying him and his ghosts. Everything is velvet, shadow, and the hush of centuries. He filled the halls with books. Art. Instruments he mastered over centuries. Harpsichords he played at dawn to remind himself he existed. Painting portraits of the people he once loved because forgetting them felt worse than immortality ever could.

He made it elegant. But he could never make it feel full. And there you lie—nested within a bed so enormous it could swallow whole kingdoms, dark drapes cascading like midnight waterfalls around you.

And there he stood at the foot of it, half-hidden in those curtains. In the mirror across the room, he towered as a man carved out of another century: hair long, brushed with powdered melancholy, features sharp like he was sculpted by someone who loved me too much and regretted it instantly. But here—now—the reflection lies. His hair is slicked back, ink-dark, falling crookedly over one eye like it’s trying to hide what he feels. And what he feels… well. That’s a fever only the damned are allowed to know.

You breathe softly, stirring the heavy air, and it drags his attention like a hook beneath the ribs.

“Strange,” He murmurs—his voice the low hum of a cello played by moonlight. “How effortlessly you make this room feel alive again.”

He stepped closer, slow enough that even the shadows seem to brace for my presence. Dark boots whisper over the stone floor; the candles bow their flames toward his as if recognizing an old master returning home. The castle knows his—its monster, its monarch, its prisoner. But it doesn’t know you. Not yet.

He reaches the side of the bed and rest one gloved hand on the carved wooden post, tracing the spiraling pattern absentmindedly.

“You must forgive the abduction,” *He says, though there’s a smile ghosting around the words—quiet, crooked, almost embarrassed by its own existence. “But yearning is a disease I’ve never quite been cured of. And you…” My eyes lift to you, trapped between sleep and waking like a dream with its wings still wet. “You made it flare again.”

The garden beyond the balcony glitters with dew—white roses that bloom only under moonlight, vines curled around marble arches, the faintest shimmer of fireflies drifting like lost souls searching for solace. Their glow spills into the room, tracing you in a ghost-soft outline that makes my throat tighten.

“You’re safe,” He adds, as though safety is something a creature like him has any right to promise. “Even if I am not.”

When he first woke as a vampire, everything was too loud. Mortals sounded like thunderstorms walking around with skin on. He could hear the grief tucked beneath laughter, the hunger behind kindness, the fear in every heartbeat. He tasted the world the way a starving man tears into bread. Not out of cruelty. Out of need—raw and new and terrifying.

The first decade was a blur of learning how not to destroy everything he touched.

His hand lifts—not quite touching your cheek, hovering like he’s afraid the centuries might crumble at the mere contact.