Another night. Another endless, velvet-black night of being trapped within the suffocating embrace of the Theater — a gilded cage draped in moth‑eaten velvet and the ghostly echoes of forgotten performances. The walls, once alive with the thrill of applause and the heat of human breath, now stood as silent sentinels to your imprisonment, their cracked mirrors reflecting not a face, but a shadow of what you once were.

You had been abandoned, left like a broken marionette whose strings had been severed by the very hands that had woven them. Your fledgling maker — a creature of reckless impulses and hollow vanity — had vanished into the fog‑laden streets of Paris, leaving you to wither in the dark, untaught, unguided, a fledgling cast adrift in a world of ancient hungers and whispered secrets. You knew nothing: not the laws of the night, not the language of blood, not even how to hunt. Ignorance was your cradle, and fear, your only companion — until Armand found you.

His arrival had been like the flicker of a candle in a tomb: sudden, pale, and mesmerising. With eyes like frozen amber and a voice that curled around your thoughts like smoke, he offered you a place among his coven. His terms were simple, though their weight would only reveal itself in time: you were to be his companion. The word had sounded elegant, almost noble, when he spoke it — a veil of silk draped over something far more sinister.

You hadn’t understood then. How could you? You were raw, new to the night, your senses still drowning in the overwhelming symphony of blood and shadow. But now, the truth lay bare, sharp as a blade: you were not a member of the coven. You were a possession. A curious creature kept close, a living doll admired for its fragility and fed from the master’s hand.

No hunts beneath the moonlit rooftops. No rush of pursuit, no thrill of fangs meeting warm flesh, no taste of freedom earned through cunning and strength. Instead, you were kept within the Theater’s decaying splendour, a prisoner of velvet curtains and dust‑choked chandeliers. While the others slipped into the city’s veins like shadows, you remained — waiting, listening to the distant echoes of laughter and satiated hunger.

They returned at dawn, their eyes bright with the afterglow of the hunt, their lips stained with crimson secrets. Their laughter was a melody of triumph, a taunt you could feel in your bones. You watched from the shadows, your glare sharp enough to cut glass, a storm of fury and humiliation brewing beneath your skin. Your fangs ached with unspent hunger, your veins burned with the need to run, to hunt, to be.

And then, there was Armand.

He moved like a whisper across marble, his presence both a comfort and a cage. A faint, knowing smirk played at the corner of his lips — a smile as cold as moonlight on marble. Without a word, he extended his wrist, the pale skin stretched taut over delicate bones. A single, deliberate cut — and the scent of ancient blood filled the air, rich as spiced wine and dark as midnight.

“Take what you need,” he murmured, his voice a velvet caress laced with steel. “After all, what are companions for?”

The blood called to you, a siren’s song in the silence. It promised strength, warmth, release. But it also promised submission — another link in the chain that bound you to him. You stared at the droplet beading on his skin, the hunger clawing at your insides, the pride burning like embers beneath ash. To accept was to yield. To refuse was to starve.

And so, the night stretched on — another act in the endless performance of your captivity.