Chapter Seven
IVAN
The following day
The fire burned low, embers breathing out a soft red glow that painted the stones. Yet, its warmth could not quiet the hunger coiling inside me, could not melt the icy chill that settled in my bones centuries ago.
A hunger… for her.
I claimed every spare moment in this room, unwilling to be away from her even when she turned her back to me.
Since I brought her here, Clara had wrapped herself in silence, each unspoken word striking like a dagger against my chest. Yet I endured it because distance was worse.
I would rather suffer her hatred than the emptiness of her absence.
She refused what I offered—food, drink, and comfort.
Her defiance was a blade sharp enough to cut me.
But her stubbornness was an old song I knew well, one I had once loved her for in another life.
Centuries ago she had looked at me the same way, chin tilted in defiance, eyes daring me to bend before she would.
And just as then, I knew she would give in eventually.
She had to. Clara was not foolish; she would not destroy herself just to wound me.
So I stayed, letting the minutes stretch like lifetimes, watching the rise and fall of her chest, the fragile peace of her sleeping face.
I told myself I would leave soon, bring her a meal, grant her the illusion of space.
But the truth was simpler, darker. I could not go.
She was here, and she was mine, and the thought of letting her out of my sight even for an hour felt like tearing my own heart from my body.
The more time she spent here with me would stoke her memory of a time long ago, memories that were cloudy from age and a life spent in this modern world.
A day’s time had passed since I brought her to my home. Our home. She’d been sleeping for hours, and I’d stood here and watched her, hidden in the shadows and relishing that sweet Clara was here once more. Hundreds of years had passed… and she was finally back with me.
She stirred beneath the blanket, fragile in the massive bed, her throat marked where I had claimed her. Even swathed in the shift I had chosen, she seemed bare to me, exposed in ways she did not understand.
Clara was mine. Because the instant my gaze fell upon her, time collapsed.
Her name hadn’t stayed the same. Her face was not identical. And time had altered destiny. The curve of her cheek was softer and the bow of her lips more pronounced. Her hair was paler in this life, longer, and had a wave to it.
But there were things that were still so familiar. Identical to my Mircalla. She smelled the same. And the way she smiled had my blood rushing because memories of her looking up at me with her lips tilted after I’d fucked her until she couldn’t walk was imprinted in my mind.
The recognition tore through me, unraveling the torment I had carried for lifetimes.
My heart had returned to me.
She looked at me as though I were a stranger, through eyes that had once lived another life. She had no memory of the way I used to touch her—how she’d press her mouth to mine, whisper the small sins and promises that belonged only to us. Right now, in this room, I was no one to her.
But to me… to me she was everything.
I closed my eyes and let the memory come like a wave crashing over me.
I saw her as she had been in another life, another time.
It had been winter, an unforgiving cold one that even the hottest fires in the hearth hadn’t been able to chase away.
I remembered one of the last times I’d held her and felt the heat of her, the small curl of her nails in my skin when I buried myself between her legs.
I remember the sound she made in my ear when she came.
It had been raw and broken, and in that moment, no violence could ever touch us.
I’d lost her days later.
They told me at first it was nature. The truth was uglier and colder than any war I’d ever fought in.
She’d been poisoned by a man I called a friend, a man whose stories of us fighting our enemies used to spill across my table and ignite cheer and laughter amongst all.
For ten years, we’d fought back to back, bled, and schemed together.
But in the end, money and power were what he craved most. He’d crushed my Mircalla’s light in his palm because he wanted everything I had—my seat, my influence, the world I’d built.
I remembered that last night with my love.
I’d held her as the color drained from her face and a coldness unlike anything I’d ever felt claimed her slight body.
Even now, I still remembered the way her fingers had clutched mine as if to tether herself to the world.
I still heard her begs and pleas not to leave this world—to leave me—filling my head.
In that moment, when she took her last breath, I’d cursed the gods until the syllables turned to acid on my tongue.
I dressed her in the gown she’d worn when we wed and buried her in the field that bloomed with her favorite flowers in the spring.
I’d dug her grave alone until my hands bled, sobbing uncontrollably while kneeling over the open earth.
Grief was a sword, plunging straight into my chest, splitting me open, and ripping the organ from me before setting it on fire. Revenge was an unfeeling bastard that took every endearing, happy memory a person had and turned it into a weapon.
For the next month, all I did was kill. All I saw was blood. I bathed in it, drank it, feasted on the violence and carnage I inflicted on anyone who had ever crossed me.
I couldn’t place the exact moment when I changed.
Maybe it was because my soul was now black and the number of bodies slain in my name fell in the thousands.
I let the change begin with a rumor in the darkened alleys of villages.
I let them whisper about who and what I was.
I grew stronger, darker, and more cruel because of it.
And every day I cursed no one god. I cursed them all. I took comfort in the dark arts, mystical magic, realms that were only told in tales. And when a hunger unlike anything else claimed me, I knew I was no longer human.
I wasn’t Prince Ivan any longer. I was a prince of darkness. I’d let the devil claim my soul, and happily given him everything I was.
In my broken, evil heart, I only wanted one thing.
My true love to return. But there were things that controlled me.
The thirst. It was more than blood. It was a hunger for the immediate, burning rush when life fled another’s veins and poured into mine.
For centuries, the world condensed into one thing.
Kill others in order to survive. It was beautiful and monstrous all in the same breath.
Because my desire for blood raged war with reality.
Becoming immortal had been a gift, a promise of what I was waiting for. But over time, I realized it was not a gift or mercy at all. It was a curse. I had feared my wife would never come back to me. And all of this had been for nothing.
I shook my head and brought myself back to the present. When I looked at Clara, the sheets pulled up to her neck covering the bite and bruise I’d given her, marked her with, I didn’t see what she was in this moment.
I saw what she’d been. Who she truly was deep down. I saw the warmth I held in the winter. I saw her as mine. I had sworn I would find her again. And I had. Because here she was.
Eternity had been both cruel and merciful. A mercy in the form of Clara. But she didn’t remember me. A sword punched in my heart. As she slowly woke, I held my breath. When her focus landed on me, she clutched the blanket tighter, her eyes wide with confusion and rightful fear.
I watched her throat work around the ragged question she had not yet formed.
I could have bent the world to get what I wanted.
I’d done it for hundreds of years. I wanted to force her to remember every moment between us.
But I didn’t want my one and only true love to fear me. I didn’t want to force anything on her.
Like I was by keeping her here against her will?
I ground my teeth at the unwanted thought.
Memory was a fragile blade. Pressing too hard would shatter whatever I could build with Clara. So, I closed the distance with caution I didn’t feel.
“Clara,” I said her name quietly, letting her name fall softly, like how I’d trailed silk over her perfect, naked body. I wanted her to first taste familiarity in my words, and secondly in my touch and kiss. “You’re safe.”
She didn’t flinch away from me. She only blinked, adjusted herself in bed, moving a little farther back. I wanted to use my hands to soothe and steady her, to ultimately claim her. But every moment with Clara required patience.
Her anger rose heavily in the air, the scent similar to drying paint. It made my blood rush, made me grow hard for the first time in my long, lonely existence. Her mouth tightened.
“This isn’t fate,” she finally said. “Stealing me, keeping me here, isn’t fate.”
I didn’t respond. It wouldn’t have helped my cause in this moment.
“You’re a crazy bastard, you know that?” She said that under her breath, like she’d meant to keep it to herself.
I chuckled, and she narrowed her eyes at me.
“You’ve called me worse,” I said, and the memory of warmer arguments, of wine-induced laughter and skin against skin, slid across me like a ghost. A former lover.
It softened me for a moment and then bit into the hollow left by her absence.
“In time, you’ll know me again. You’ll remember. Of that, I’m certain.”
She pressed her fingertips to her throat where my teeth had been, her delicate digits ghosting the mark as if to remind herself this was real.
She curled in on herself, seeming smaller than any memory I had hoarded. An ancient tenderness I’d only ever shown to her rose within me. I almost bent to the bed and brushed a lock of hair from her face. I’d done it a thousand times when she’d been alive and was my wife.
I knew the moment she’d closed me out. The fight slowly ebbed, not from surrender but from the way fatigue settled into bones after a near drowning.
I didn’t want her silence. I didn’t want her to block me out.
But time was fragile. I’d waited lifetimes for this moment. She could take all the time she needed.
“I’ll leave you. Know you’re free to wander and explore.” She didn’t look at me. I hadn’t expected her not to acknowledge me, but I knew space was essential right now, so I gave it to her.
I left the room and stood outside her door and closed my eyes, reaching out with all my senses.
Outside, the world pressed at the shutters.
Somewhere beyond the forest edge, an animal moved.
I heard it scurrying across the leaf-laden ground.
Inside, the castle breathed a slow, ancient rhythm. It held my secrets in its tight fist.
There were things that needed to be said, truths and stories that she needed to be told.
It was tales of poison coating a cup by a friend’s greedy hand.
I would tell her all of it but never show her where I'd scattered the bones of the man who betrayed us. I’d never admit the evil I’d done after her death.
Her fear of me was something that I’d never stand for.
But first, I wanted the memories that surfaced of us together to be happy, loving, passionate.
I wanted her to remember the wine we’d drunk together while we curled next to each other under the furs and watched the flames eating the wood.
I’d show her the portraits I’d had created of her each century, ones that captured her likeness and transformed them into those times.
I’d sit and stare at them and imagine she’d been there with me as they’d been painted by the artist.
I’d let those little whispers press at the edges of her memory while she connected them together until it all made sense.
My hunger lay coiled and patient, rising only when I knew I had to feed.
Tomorrow, I’d start the slow process of breaking down the centuries that had separated Clara and I.