Chapter 30
Malrik's blood still coated my tongue—copper and salt, thick as regret. The world broke apart. Not the stone corridors around me. Those stood as they always had, torches guttering in their sconces, walls slick with centuries of cold. It was me that shattered.
I hit the floor hard.
Something split open inside my skull. Memories poured out like water from a cracked vessel. Except they weren't mine. Except they were. Except they'd been waiting there all along, patient as spiders in dark corners.
Waiting for me to remember.
My throat burned where the assassin's blade had kissed it. Kael had forced Malrik's blood past my lips to close the wound. Now I was drowning in lifetimes I'd never lived.
"Evelyne?" Kael's voice reached me from somewhere distant. "Eve, can you hear me?"
Wrong. That name was wrong.
"Aurelia." The word left my mouth like a key turning in a lock. Like coming home after being lost for centuries.
The memories slammed into me:
A garden under a sky with no moon. Malrik's hand in mine, bare, warm, impossibly human despite what he was. His breath against my hair. "I don't care what they say. You are my choice. You will always be my choice."
Seris held great power in the Council. Her protected status was absolute. She used spies and resources. Seris tracked the royal bloodline for centuries.
For centuries, the vampire kingdom had pure-blood rulers. These rulers were usually siblings. Malrik and Seris were one such pair. The Council felt safer with Malrik marrying Seris. Seris was Malrik's older sister. They needed a pure-blood heir.
A human bride was a risk. A human bride should only be a political arrangement. She should be a concubine, not a queen. But Malrik insisted on marrying Aurelia. He loved the human. He wanted her to be his queen.
A throne room full of cold faces. Lady Seris too close to Malrik, her smile sharp enough to draw blood. "The human queen thinks she can rule the eternal. How charming."
A hidden room. My hands on my belly, still flat but not for long. Malrik on his knees before me, forehead pressed to my stomach. "A child." His voice cracked. "Our child. They'll never allow it."
Poison, liquid fire in my veins. Seris leaning over me with false concern dripping from her painted mouth. "It's for the best, dear. The bloodline must remain pure." Behind her, shadows. Council members. Conspirators. Murderers.
Then Malrik's scream when he found my body. His voice splintering as he carved runes into stone, blood magic spreading across ancient floors. "Bring her back. Take my humanity. Take my peace. Take my soul. Just bring her back."
The ritual didn't just reach for my soul—it reached into the future, imprinting itself onto bloodlines not yet born. A pattern written in magic and desperation, waiting for the right vessel to manifest.
Then darkness. Centuries of it, waiting in the spaces between.
Until a girl named Evelyne was born wearing my face. Not by chance. By design. The ritual's design.
*
"No." I pressed my hands to my temples. The pressure built behind my eyes like something trying to claw its way out. "No, no, no—"
"Evelyne!" Kael grabbed my shoulders. His mismatched eyes had gone too wide. "Stay with me. The blood—it's moving too fast. You need to breathe—"
I couldn't breathe. How could I breathe when I was two people occupying the same body? When I could remember dying and being born? When I knew I'd loved Malrik for seven hundred years before I ever saw his face?
Malrik was beside me. I felt his tension like a physical thing, felt him moving to shield me from—what? Myself?
"No." My voice came out stronger than it should have. It echoed off the stones like they recognized it. "I don't think I am."
The silence that followed had weight. I heard my own heartbeat—steadier now, stronger. I heard the collective intake of breath from the assembled vampires. I heard fabric shifting as they stepped back.
Then Malrik was there, hands on my face, checking for wounds. "Are you hurt? Are you in pain?"
"I'm fine." I meant it. "Better than fine, actually."
He stared at me. His red eyes searched my face for something I wasn't sure he'd find.
His expression changed.
"Your eyes," he said. Barely a whisper. "They're different."
"Are they?"
"They flashed." Kael was still on the floor, looking like he'd seen something he couldn't unsee. "Went all red and glowy for a second there. Scared the hell out of me."
Malrik's hands went still on my face. I saw hope flicker across his expression. Then fear. Then recognition.
"You remember." Not a question.
I looked at him. This man I'd fallen for despite every rational thought screaming at me to run. I nodded.
"Aurelia," I said simply.
The gasp from the council was audible. Someone—Elder Thane, I thought—actually took a step back. Like I'd suddenly become dangerous.
Maybe I had.
Chapter 31
"The first queen." Lady Seris sounded uncertain for the first time since I'd met her. Afraid. "But that's impossible. She's been dead for centuries. That's just legend for her to comeback. Myth."
"Is it?" I turned to face her fully. And when I met her eyes, I knew her. Knew the face that had smiled while pouring poison into my cup. Knew the hands that had murdered my unborn child. "Because it feels pretty real to me, Seris. Just like it felt real when you betrayed me the first time."
Her face went white as bone.
The memories were sharpening by the second, filling in gaps I hadn't even known existed. I remembered this castle when the mortar was still wet. I remembered the negotiations that had led to the first peace treaty between vampires and humans. I remembered the night I first tasted vampire blood and felt something inside me shift and settle into place.
I remembered dying, too. Remembered the poison. Remembered screaming not from pain but from rage at the betrayal. Remembered using my last breath to curse the one who'd done it. To promise that when the world needed it most, I'd return.
Looked like someday was now.
*
I heard them everywhere. Servants clustering in corners, voices dropping when I passed. Council members having urgent conversations that cut off the moment I entered a room. Even the kitchen staff who'd been friendly before now watched me with something between awe and terror that made my skin crawl.
"She's not human." A maid whispered it to another as I walked past the laundry. "Did you see her eyes that night? Red as blood, they were."
"My grandmother told stories." The other maid's voice was so quiet I almost missed it. "About the first queen. The one who could command vampires with just a look."
"You think she's—"
"I think we're all in trouble if she is."
Yeah, well. Me too.
"Where is he?" My voice came out raw, desperate. "Where's Malrik?"
Kael's expression went dark. "In his chambers. He's been there since the council meeting. Since you—" He stopped. His jaw clenched. "Since you awakened. The curse is attacking him. I can hear him screaming even through the blood wards."
Because I chose him. The realization hit me like cold water. Because the bond reformed. Because I remembered.
I didn't run. Not immediately. I stood there and let Aurelia's grief wash over Evelyne's fear. I saw him clearly now: not the haunted king I'd known for weeks, but the young man who'd pledged eternity under a blood moon. The Malrik whose hands had traced my pregnant belly with such tenderness and terror.
A wave of physical memory hit me. Warmth. Belonging. Seven hundred years of it compressed into a single heartbeat. I swayed. Pressed my hands to my chest. I could almost feel his body against mine, a touch that was both ancient and brand new.
Seven hundred years. Aurelia's voice was my voice. And still he waits. Still he suffers.
I needed to touch him. To feel the reality of his skin, not just the ghost of memory. That longing was a physical ache, sharp enough to steal breath. A desperate need to bridge the impossible distance of time.
The curse wasn't just magic. It was alive. Sentient. It had been feeding on Malrik's isolation for centuries. It thrived on his loneliness, his guilt, his belief that he could never be loved again.
And I threatened everything it had built.
I pushed myself to my feet. My legs shook but held. The sigil on my wrist—the one that had been crimson with binding magic—now pulsed with threads of gold and black. The color of coexistence. The color of choice.
"My queen, you can't—" Kael started.
"I'm not Evelyne anymore," I said quietly, meeting his gaze. "I mean, I am. But I'm also... I'm also the queen who died here three hundred years ago. The queen they poisoned. The queen whose child they tried to erase from history."
Kael went very still. "The child," he breathed. "Aurelia's son. He—"
"Lived." I finished it for him. "They told Malrik the baby died with me, but that was a lie. Just another knife in Seris' collection."
I could see it in Aurelia's memories now—the midwife who spirited the infant away in the dead of night, wrapped in common cloth to hide his royal blood. The false reports of stillbirth delivered to a grieving king. The conspiracy to keep the true heir hidden from a father who would have moved heaven and earth to find him.
My son.
The thought made my chest ache with grief that was three centuries old.
"Where would they have hidden him?" Kael's voice was sharp, urgent. "If he survived—"
"I don't know." I pressed my hands to my face, trying to sort through the flood of memories. "Aurelia—I—we didn't know. She died believing he was gone."
A sound echoed through the corridor then—a scream of such raw agony that it froze my blood in my veins.
Malrik.
I ran.
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