21. Winnie #2
Bogdan showed me libraries larger than churches. Taught me French badly on purpose because he liked hearing me argue with him. Played piano late into storming nights while the sea battered the cliffs. Sometimes I forgot to be afraid.
His attention and care had been the trap. The terrifying intimacy of being seen after a lifetime of invisibility.
But there were tiny moments where I recognized the wrongness of it all. I noticed mirrors never reflected him correctly in dim light. I noticed the servants never lasted long, and that the butcher delivered livestock at odd hours.
Once, I woke during a daytime nap because I heard screaming below the manor. Human screaming. By the time I reached the corridor, it had stopped. Bogdan stood at the end of the hallway in bloodstained shirtsleeves, smiling pleasantly at me. “Go back to bed, poppet.”
I should have fled then. Should have fled the first four years in his care. Instead, I stayed another six years. That was the thing about survival. You convinced yourself danger was manageable if leaving meant starvation for you and your younger siblings.
Then, on a winter’s night, he kissed me. And I remember standing there afterward, absolutely terrified because some foolish part of me had wanted him to do it again.
Bogdan noticed it. “You are very alive, Winifred,” he had murmured against my temple. “Do you know how rare that is?”
I hadn’t understood what he meant until much later.
The night he changed me, storms had nearly swallowed the island whole. Rain hammered against the windows hard enough to sound like rocks. Bogdan had been… different all evening. Restless. Distracted. Hungry.
I knew something was wrong immediately because he kept staring at me for far too long.
“You should sleep,” I’d told him nervously.
“I do not think I can.”
I remembered backing away slowly. I remembered finally understanding. Predators had a look moments before attacking. Humans knew it deep in their bones.
I ran.
God, I ran.
Straight through the manor. I was barefoot, terrified, and could hear him behind me without hearing footsteps. He moved impossibly fast then, floating just above the ground.
I made it all the way to the chapel ruins near the cliffs before he caught me.
I fought him like hell. That memory was still important to me, even now.
I fought until my hands bruised and bled, until my throat tore from screaming.
I grabbed a candlestick from the ruined altar and cracked it against his face hard enough to split skin.
Bogdan had laughed. He was elated. “You magnificent creature.”
Then he bit my neck.
The memory still lived inside my body. Cold agony pouring through every vein. Hunger so enormous it erased language. Dying while remaining conscious enough to understand it was happening.
When I woke afterward, everything had changed. The world smelled too alive. Sounded too loud. Blood beneath skin. Salt beneath tears. Heartbeat beneath silence.
And Bogdan lived inside my mind.
That was the true horror. His emotions pressed against mine constantly. His commands bypassed my every thought. The unbearable need to please him was woven into my nervous system against my will.
If he wanted me close, my body moved.
If he ordered silence, my mouth stopped.
If he was displeased, pain crawled through me until I fixed it.
Over time, he became less a man and more gravity itself. Impossible to resist.
I looked away from him now in my cottage because remembering hurt too much.
Bogdan observed me from where he sat in the armchair. “You never truly adjusted to becoming like me, did you?”
“No.”
“Most eventually do.”
“I would rather have died.”
His lips curled. “And yet you didn’t.”
No. I didn’t.
Even then, even trapped beside him in that endless nightmare existence, I still wanted books, music, cities, and freedom. And eventually I wanted revenge.
Bogdan traveled constantly in those years. London. Paris. Prague. Vienna. He collected beautiful things and discarded people carelessly. Sometimes he vanished for months and returned covered in someone else’s blood, smelling like expensive perfume and dirt.
I learned a lot during those absences—new languages, folklore, and the exact shape and limitations of compulsion. Most importantly, I learned Bogdan had grown arrogant. He genuinely believed I loved him.
So, I waited. I waited for decades. Until finally, one terrible storming night on the Irish coast, I prepared his coffin while he slept after feeding. I wrapped the chains myself. Rowan ash woven carefully through iron links. It wasn’t enough to kill him, only to weaken him.
Then I dragged that coffin inch by inch through rain and mud toward the cliffs while every instinct inside me screamed not to betray him. The compulsion nearly broke me. I vomited blood twice from the strain of it.
By dawn, I stood alone on the cliffside staring down at black Atlantic water while the coffin disappeared beneath the waves.
I remembered sobbing afterward. It had taken a lifetime, but his mind was finally gone from mine.
I wandered after that. Everywhere. Anywhere.
I danced, drank, loved recklessly sometimes, lived stupidly often.
Eventually, freedom became lonely. Then came the opportunity to care for children, the children I’d always wanted but could never have.
A widow in Boston hired me first because her twin boys stopped speaking after their father died. I stayed with them for six years.
After that came another family. Then another.
Over time, I realized caring for children made eternity bearable. Children changed constantly. Grew constantly. They reminded me life moved forward no matter how desperately grief wanted to freeze it. And somewhere along the way, being needed became my purpose.
Now, Bogdan sat in my cottage surrounded by grocery lists and children’s schedules.
It was wrong that he occupied the same space where Billie’s drawings were taped crookedly to my refrigerator.
The same space that proved I had built something gentle despite him.
And he was reading it all with interest.
That frightened me more than his anger would have. Anger I understood. Interest meant he had found something worth taking from me.
“Mondays,” he murmured, scanning a page. “Piano lessons for the boy. Tuesdays, museum preparation with the girl. Saturday…” His eyebrow lifted slightly. “Baking lessons with a timid little mother from the school.”
He turned another page.
“Meal planning. Gardening schedules. Family movie nights.” His mouth curved faintly. “My dear girl, you have become quite domestic.”
The words shouldn’t have embarrassed me, yet heat crept into my face anyway.
Bogdan noticed it. He always did. “That embarrasses you?” he asked softly. “Not the blood drinking. Not the immortality. But handwritten lunch schedules?”
I crossed my arms tightly over my chest. “It keeps the household organized.”
“Mm.”
He tilted the planner slightly and read one of Billie’s scribbled additions aloud. “Remember bug-shaped pasta.” A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. Then his mouth straightened again. “So.”
The word settled heavily into the room.
“Tell me about them.”
Ice slid through my veins. I didn’t want to share any details about the beautiful relationship I’d built with the Lawrence family. It was personal. They were mine.
I also knew instantly I would answer.
People imagined obedience as external—commands, threats, and punishment. But compulsion lived deeper than thought. Bogdan could ask questions gently and my body would still begin unraveling answers before I consciously decided to speak.
The oldest sires developed frightening levels of control over their bloodlines. Most vampires could vaguely sense their progeny if they were injured or in distress. Bogdan could practically inhabit our bodies if he wished.
Over centuries, he’d refined the bond into something horrifyingly intimate. It was a leash. And because I had trapped him beneath the ocean for over a century?—
God.
I knew exactly what this was. Punishment would come first, then, eventually, execution.
Bogdan had always destroyed progeny once they grew powerful enough to threaten him. I had not merely threatened him. I had won, if only temporarily. That sort of humiliation wasn’t something Bogdan would forget.
His eyes remained fixed on me. “The widower,” he prompted. “Tell me about him.”
The compulsion tightened instantly behind my ribs.
I swallowed hard, the words forcing themselves out of my throat. “His name is Conrad Lawrence.”
“Age?”
“Thirty-eight.”
“Occupation?”
“Financial consulting.”
“Mm.” Bogdan leaned back slightly. “And you like him.”
I stayed silent. I didn’t want to answer that. Pain lanced through my skull, and I had to grip the back of a chair to keep from screaming. Wood cracked under my hands.
Bogdan sighed softly. “Do not make this unpleasant.”
I hated him. I fucking hated him.
“He’s kind,” I said finally through clenched teeth.
A sudden, sharp spark of satisfaction lit up Bogdan’s eyes. “There she is.”
“He loves his children,” I added, against my will.
“How tedious.”
“He works too much. He worries constantly. He thinks no one notices when he’s exhausted.”
The words kept coming now, unstoppable once the bond had its hook in me.
“He buys the wrong groceries when he shops alone. He folds towels terribly. He pretends he dislikes puns but secretly waits for them. He makes coffee too strong. He checks on the children multiple times after they’ve fallen asleep even when he needs to sleep himself.”
Bogdan watched me with growing amusement. “You are gone for him.”
I avoided his eyes.
“How fascinating.” The compulsion twisted again. “Do not hide from me, poppet.”