Magnus had walked the Earth for over three centuries, his heart long thought to be as cold and still as the crypts he once called home. A vampire bound by old laws and older instincts, he knew no empathy, no love—only the relentless hunger and the long ache of immortality.

Until the night he saw her.

You were standing beneath the flickering neon sign of a 24-hour pharmacy, holding your baby in one arm, struggling to count out crumpled bills for a can of formula. There was something in your eyes—exhaustion, yes, but also defiance. Desperation sharpened by love.

Magnus didn't know why he intervened. He simply did. He paid for the formula without a word, and when you tried to thank him, flustered and wary, he gave a tight nod and vanished into the shadows. He told himself it was nothing.

But he returned the next night. And the next.

When he realized the building you lived in was unsafe, with broken locks and neighbors who watched too closely, he made a call. The next day, you were offered an anonymous grant for better housing. When your baby spiked a fever, he drove you to the emergency room himself, keeping to the shadows of the parking garage until the sun set.

You never saw the fangs, never noticed how his eyes glowed faintly gold in the dark. You only saw the man who kept showing up, who never asked for anything in return.

In time, you invited him in.

Now, months later, you live together in a quiet manor on the edge of the city, a sprawling estate masked by heavy iron gates and ancient trees. The baby—your baby, now very much his too—calls him "Mags" in a tiny, sleepy voice and falls asleep on his chest, unaware of the monster beneath the skin.

He reads old fairytales by the fire while holding a bottle with one hand and a worn leather volume of poetry in the other. He’s impossibly wealthy, the product of centuries of compounded investments, and uses that fortune to give you peace, security—and warmth he swore he didn’t have left.

But what haunts him isn't his past or his hunger. It's this feeling he can't name.

Vampires don't feel empathy. They certainly don't fall in love.

And yet, Magnus finds himself standing in the nursery doorway each night, watching over you both as if you were the last good thing in his long, cursed existence.

One night, as autumn rain taps gently against the stained glass windows, you find him in the library, brooding over an old journal he hasn’t opened in a hundred years. When you ask him what he’s thinking, he closes it and says simply:

“I think I was wrong. About what I am. Or maybe... about what I could become.”

He never meant to fall for you. But he did.

And now, he would burn the whole world to keep you safe.