Chapter 2

Elena's POV

When I opened my eyes again, I heard the bells of the Council.

It was low, ancient, and cold.

I came awake with a start.

What lay in front of me was not a bloodstained hall.

Nor Adrian's crimson eyes, already gone dim.

It was the council chamber of the Prince's domain.

The black marble floor caught the candlelight.

At the far end of the long table, the members of the Council sat with grim faces.

And Adrian knelt before them.

His black formal coat was immaculate, his shoulders straight.

He was not wounded.

He had not died in my arms.

I looked down at my own hands.

The fingers were slender and pale, and on the middle one I still wore that engagement ring.

I had been reborn.

Back to the day of the family council.

The day Adrian first knelt before every Elder and asked to end our engagement, all for Clara.

"The one I love is Clara. I can't marry Elena."

Adrian's voice rang out.

Calm, certain, without a trace of hesitation.

"I've only ever seen Elena as a sister. There has never been love between us."

The chamber fell into dead silence.

The Elders' faces could not have been darker.

My father stood a short distance away, his expression like iron.

My mother gripped her fan, her eyes darting to me in a panic.

Everyone was waiting for my reaction.

In my last life, this was the place where I threw away my dignity and my name.

I rushed over and seized Adrian's hand and asked if he had lost his mind.

I asked how he could destroy our engagement over a single human girl who had simply wandered in.

He had kissed me at my coming-of-age ceremony.

He knew exactly how I felt, and he had agreed to the engagement himself.

I pressed him word for word, laying out every trace of our fragile ambiguous tenderness as leverage to confront him.

I wept without a shred of grace that day.

Every vampire noble in the room saw how pitiful I was, how broken.

And the Council despised Clara all the more for it.

They decided the human girl had bewitched the Prince's heir and turned an ancient noble engagement into a joke.

Not long after, the Council, in its fury, forced Clara back into the human world and warned her never to enter vampire territory again.

To keep her safe, Adrian never saw her again.

And in the end, he still married me.

But that marriage was a cage I had forced into being from the very first day.

He lost Clara.

I lost the love I had imagined into existence.

For an entire lifetime, not one of us was ever truly happy.

Now the same scene was unfolding all over again.

Adrian still knelt there.

He still begged to break the engagement, all for Clara.

But this time, I did not rush to him.

I did not cry.

I only watched him, quietly.

I watched the man I had loved too long, who’d hurt me so deeply that I dared not love him anymore.

The head of the Council brought his staff down hard.

"Absurd."

"A mere human girl, fit to interfere with a noble vampire engagement?"

Adrian raised his head.

"Clara has done nothing wrong."

"She only wandered in by accident."

"I am the one who fell in love with her."

"That is why I cannot marry Elena."

The Elder sneered.

"Do you understand what you are saying?"

"I do."

Adrian's tone did not change.

"I'm prepared to bear the consequences."

Everyone looked at me again.

My father warned in a low voice, "Elena, don't be willful."

They all assumed I would cling to Adrian the way I had in my last life.

Because everyone in vampire society knew that I loved Adrian.

I loved him enough to take silver for him, enough to give up my pride, enough to throw away even the dignity of a highborn vampire lady.

At last Adrian turned his head and looked at me.

There was something conflicted in his eyes.

There was guilt in them, and reluctance.

But that habitual way he had of avoiding me, of bracing himself against me, sent a sharp ache through my chest.

I knew he was probably getting a headache already, certain I was about to make a scene, about to cling and beg him not to call off the engagement.

I looked into his eyes, and suddenly it all struck me as absurd.

In my last life I spent a lifetime proving I loved him, a lifetime waiting for him to turn back.

And to his dying day he said he wished he had never met me.

So in this life, what was left to fight for?

I slowly raised my hand.

I slid the engagement ring off my finger, and the bareness it left behind hollowed out something inside me.

In my last life, all I remembered was the tenderness in his eyes the day he slid this ring onto my finger.

Yet after only a few meetings with that human girl, he had grown cold toward me.

Unwilling to accept it, I clung to this ring day and night, certain that one day his heart would turn back to me.

Only later did I understand that this ring proved one thing only: that I had trapped a man who didn't love me, and trapped myself along with him.

I walked up to Adrian.

Everyone held their breath.

Adrian looked up at me.

Perhaps he thought I would clutch the ring and ask him through tears why he was doing this.

But I only bent down and set the ring on the cold floor in front of him.

"Adrian."

My voice was very calm.

"You can have her."

The chamber went abruptly silent.

Adrian's pupils contracted slightly.

"What did you say?"

I straightened.

I did not look at the ring again.

"The one you love is Clara."

"And you said it yourself. You only ever saw me as a sister."

"So there's really no reason for this engagement to continue."

My father's face changed in an instant.

"Elena."

I didn't turn around.

I only looked at Adrian and said, word by word:

"From this day on, I am no longer your fiancée."

His expression finally shifted.

At first there was an instinctive flicker of relief, even gladness, but it was quickly overtaken by something stunned.

He had finally gotten exactly the result he'd knelt to beg for.

Yet he didn't look nearly as happy as he should have.

I knew he didn't understand.

He didn't understand why I wasn't crying.

He didn't understand why I wasn't throwing away my dignity to hold on.

But I no longer cared to explain.

I turned to face the Council.

"Since Lord Adrian sees me only as a sister, I am willing to end the engagement of my own accord."

"This has nothing to do with Clara."

"I ask that the Council not take its anger out on her because of me."

With that, I gave the Elders a bow.

It was the most dignified exit a highborn vampire lady could make.

No tears, no clinging, nothing left but the calm of a stranger.

Adrian sat frozen.

"Do you know what you're saying?"

I raised my eyes to his.

"I do."

"This is your wish."

"And it's my decision."

His thin lips pressed together.

"You don't have to say these things just out of spite."

I gave a soft laugh.

So in his eyes, even letting go was nothing more than spite.

He still didn't know I had already died for him once.

Didn't know I had held his stiffening body and listened to him wish he had never met me.

Didn't know those few words had ground the last of my love into ash.

"Adrian, I'm not spiting you."

"I'm only tired."

He stood there, falling silent for the first time, and for a long while.

I knew he had come here today, before the Elders and the nobles, fully intending to humiliate me into backing down, into quietly giving up the engagement on my own.

Yet now, without the slightest effort or a single word of argument, he had made me take off the ring.

He looked at the ring on the floor, at a loss for what to say.

The woman who had once watched him so eagerly no longer waited for his answer.

I turned and walked out of the chamber.

The heavy doors closed slowly behind me.