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There was a madness in me.

Not the kind you medicated. Not the kind you caged.

It’s the kind that slipped into a room before I did. That lived in my bones like it’s always been there, waiting.

It didn’t growl or claw. It whispered.

It wore the face of a man. My face. Smiling. Polished. Lethal.

They saw Dorian Vale, the man in the tailored suit. The attorney who made miracles out of monsters. The savior of the damned.

They didn’t see what came after the verdict.

I was born a vampire, but cursed with a human trait, conscience.

A fucked-up balance between logic and bloodlust, wrapped in the skin of someone society trusted.

But the truth?

I didn’t believe in justice.

I believed in vengeance dressed in black robes.

The system protected the wrong people. I used it to find them. To defend them in court.

And then I hunted them in the dark.

Every client I had ever saved is a name I carved into my own ledger.

Anthony Treadwell. Gregory Harriman. Malcolm Deen. I’d stood beside them in courtrooms, lied for them, and shook their hands.

Then I bled them dry.

I killed because the world was cleaner without them. Because guilt deserved consequence.

Because madness needed a ritual.

But I never thought it would lead me to her.

Ember Carr.

My spark in a city soaked with rot.

I saw her for the first time while trailing Kreed.

He played with her the way a serpent coils, patient, slow, knowing exactly how and when to strike for the deepest pain.

She wasn’t part of the plan… until she screamed, and something in me answered.

Instead, it became a hymn. Her words sliced like scalpels. Her fury was measured.

Beautiful.

Dangerous.

She was looking for something she didn’t understand, tracing threads tied to creatures who weren’t supposed to exist. Paranormal beings cloaked in law and human skin.

And she was getting close to me .

I didn’t realize who she truly was until the threads bled red.

The girl Kreed Elias failed to kill. The one left alive after her mother was butchered by something not of this world… Him .

The girl whose blood might unlock the Gate. The one who heard things no one else could.

She wasn’t just persistent. She’s important .

The Veil was thinning. The Gate was twitching. Things on the other side were watching. Waiting.

And her name was whispered like prophecy.

I should’ve left her alone.

But I took her. Brought her into the house where my shadows never sleep. I locked her in the east wing. Not to punish her.

To protect her.

She didn’t know it yet. She thought I was the villain.

And maybe I was.

She hated me with a heat that scorched. But it’s the way she looked at me… like she saw the fracture beneath the mask. Like she could fall through it and shatter, too.

There’s something between us. A current. A tether. A kind of ache that didn’t make sense but felt like truth.

She was fire and fury.

And I was built of every reason she should run.

But she didn’t.

She challenged me. Taunted me. Made me want to be something else, someone almost human. And that’s dangerous.

Because Kreed was still out there.

And he remembered her. He remembered what her mother uncovered about the Gate. About the rituals. About the ones who would use Ember as a key.

He’d come for her again.

And this time?

He wouldn’t miss.

I’d kill him before that happened. Burn the world if I had to.

Even if it meant becoming the madness fully. Even if it meant she’d never look at me the same way again.

Because Ember Carr wasn’t just a girl with a podcast and a wall of red string.

She’s the end of something.

Or the beginning of everything .

And I didn’t know if I wanted to be saved… I just knew I’d rather burn with her than survive without her.