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One Betrayal Is Enough

One Betrayal Is Enough

By:  Alyssa JCompleted
Language: English
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Synopsis

Vampire

Winning Back the Wife

Girl Power

Tragic Love

Childhood Sweethearts

Bittersweet

Contract Marriage

Regret

Plot Twists

In the seventieth year of my marriage to Adrian, the whole world still believed we were the most devoted vampire couple alive. In the documentary, he looked at me across old footage that spanned half a century and told everyone, "After I met my wife, I finally understood that even immortality can make you feel there isn't enough time." He confessed his love for me. He said he wanted every tomorrow I had. But that same night, I received a video. In a dim hotel corridor, my husband had a young human woman pinned against the wall, his head bent to bite the side of her neck. She asked him whether he was going home to me that night. Adrian kissed the blood from the corner of her lips and answered gently, "I'm yours until sunrise." Later he knelt in front of me and explained that the woman was only a brief diversion in his long life. She would age. She would die. And I was his only wife, the one he wanted to keep beside him forever. He thought that as long as eternity belonged to me, handing a few nights to someone else did not count as betrayal. But he had forgotten. On the day I agreed to marry him, I told him plainly, I could stand beside him through poverty, war, silver, and death. The one thing I could not accept was a third person entering our marriage. One betrayal, and there would never be a second chance. Adrian did not believe I would really go. He thought seventy years of knowing each other was enough to earn my forgiveness, and he thought we had endless time, enough to start over as many times as he liked. Until I left the divorce papers behind, took everything that was mine, and never looked back. Then a year passed. Ten years passed. A hundred years passed. I built a whole life that had nothing to do with him. And that vampire duke, who would not age and would not easily die, stayed alone in the long night. He could have everything. He would never have my love again.

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Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Fourteen days before our seventieth wedding anniversary, I received the video of my husband's affair.

At the time, Adrian and I were sitting in the screening room at Blackwood Manor, watching a documentary about the two of us.

The footage on the screen had been shot in 1956.

Adrian stood outside St. Mary's Church in a black dress coat, waiting for me. The colors of the old film had faded, but when he looked at the camera his gray-blue eyes were as bright as ever.

Seventy years had passed and his face had not changed at all.

The man sitting beside me still had the same pale skin, the same straight nose, the same eyes that would never age.

Bridget, the director, was clearly pleased with this part.

She had cut photographs from seventy years ago together with our present-day interviews and laid a slow piano piece underneath, and it was enough to make anyone who believed in love cry.

"Duke Blackwood, what did you feel the first time you saw your wife?"

The reporter on the screen asked the question.

Adrian was sitting in the manor's rose garden, and he smiled a little when he heard it.

"I've lived more than three hundred years, and it was the first time I understood that even immortality can make you feel there isn't enough time."

"I wanted to know her past, and I wanted every tomorrow she had."

Live comments flooded across the image.

A three-hundred-year-old vampire duke saying things like that should be illegal.

My grandmother read about their wedding when she was young, I'm married myself now, and they still look exactly like the photographs.

Seventy years! That's an entire human lifetime, and the way they look at each other hasn't changed one bit.

Who was it that told me vampires are cold by nature? The duke has only ever loved Evelyn.

This is what eternal love actually looks like.

Bridget sat in the back row, her cheeks flushed with excitement.

"Your Grace, this is going to be a sensation when it goes live. People online are saying the two of you have given the word eternity a real face."

I looked at the two people leaning against each other on the screen and did not answer.

Adrian thought I was tired, and he reached over to tuck my hair behind my ear.

His fingertips were cool, the temperature every vampire knows best.

"Ten minutes left," he said quietly. "If you aren't feeling well, we can finish it tomorrow night."

"No need."

I shook my head.

He had turned down a great deal of work for this documentary.

Filming had taken half a year, from London to Paris, from the church where we were married to Hartwell Manor. The crew had dug up every public image of us from the last seventy years, and even I hadn't known we had left so many traces behind together.

A photograph from 1989 came up on the screen.

That was the year Adrian took over the family foundation. Reporters had him surrounded at a reception, and he looked past all of them at me, standing in the corner.

Bridget had enlarged the frame and given his expression a close-up.

I had seen that tenderness countless times.

At that moment it was resting on me again.

When the screening ended, the crew left one by one.

Adrian took a call from Brussels. He kissed my forehead and carried his phone out into the hall.

"Give me a few minutes, darling."

The door closed.

The huge screening room went abruptly quiet.

I picked up my phone to answer a message from my estate manager, and an unfamiliar address sent me an email.

No subject line, no text.

The attachment was a video, forty-seven seconds long.

I stared at the strange file for a few seconds, then pressed play.

It had been filmed in a dim hotel corridor.

Adrian had a young woman pinned against the wall, his palm cupping the back of her neck.

She tipped her face up, baring a slender white throat.

A second later he lowered his head and drove his fangs into the skin beside her neck.

She shuddered and held him around the waist, and the sound she made was intimate and satisfied.

Adrian did not let go of her right away.

He drank from her, then lifted his head and kissed away the little smear of red at the corner of her mouth.

That was not feeding.

No vampire treats a blood donor who means nothing to him that way.

At the end of the video the woman leaned against him, laughing.

"Are you still going back to your duchess tonight?"

Adrian bent his head and kissed her.

"I'm yours until sunrise."

The video cut off.

I sat exactly where I was, holding the phone, not moving.

A few minutes later the door of the screening room opened again.

Adrian came toward me, and his gray-blue eyes still held the tenderness I knew so well.

"Did I keep you waiting?"

I switched off the screen, and for the first time I understood that a man can tell you he loves you and wear a completely different face somewhere else.
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27 Chapters
Chapter 1
Fourteen days before our seventieth wedding anniversary, I received the video of my husband's affair.At the time, Adrian and I were sitting in the screening room at Blackwood Manor, watching a documentary about the two of us.The footage on the screen had been shot in 1956.Adrian stood outside St. Mary's Church in a black dress coat, waiting for me. The colors of the old film had faded, but when he looked at the camera his gray-blue eyes were as bright as ever.Seventy years had passed and his face had not changed at all.The man sitting beside me still had the same pale skin, the same straight nose, the same eyes that would never age.Bridget, the director, was clearly pleased with this part.She had cut photographs from seventy years ago together with our present-day interviews and laid a slow piano piece underneath, and it was enough to make anyone who believed in love cry."Duke Blackwood, what did you feel the first time you saw your wife?"The reporter on the screen asked the q
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Chapter 2
Adrian did not notice anything wrong with me.He held my hand the whole way back to the bedroom.Blackwood Manor is more than four hundred years old, the corridors are long, and after dark only the wall lamps are lit. Adrian knew I disliked too much dark, so every lamp was a little brighter than it used to be.He had kept that habit for seventy years."The doctor came this afternoon?" he asked."Yes.""What did the results say?""The same as last month."My answers were short.He stopped walking and turned to look at me."Evelyn, you're upset."Four hundred years of life had made him very good at reading people, and seventy years of marriage had made him especially fluent in my moods.I used to think that was proof we loved each other."Just tired," I said.Adrian frowned slightly but did not press.Back in our room, he took out the medicine I had to take and poured a glass of warmed blood.I don't like blood that has gone cold, and I don't like it served in a clear glass.He remembere
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Chapter 3
In seventy years of marriage, Adrian had told me only two lies that I caught him in.The first was in 1962.He bought a painting I loved and claimed he hadn't bid on it at all, then hung it in my study on the night of my birthday.The second was in 2003.My vineyard ran into cash trouble, and he quietly bought up all the unsold wine and had it disguised as an order from Canada.When the truth came out, I wasn't angry.Both lies existed to make me happy.Over time I somehow forgot that deception doesn't change shape just because the motive behind it does.And this time, what he was protecting wasn't a surprise.It was another woman.After dark I didn't stay at the manor.I drove into London alone and met Helen Grant at a coffeehouse that stays open all night.She is my personal lawyer, and one of the few people the Blackwood family has no hold over."Divorce?"Helen set down her coffee, and for the first time her professional calm slipped."Evelyn, you and Adrian?""Yes.""What happened
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Chapter 4
Claire Moreau was twenty-seven.She was born in Lyon, came to London at nineteen, and started out singing in bars and small theaters.Two years ago she signed with a record label backed by the Blackwood Foundation.A year and a half ago she stood on the stage of the Royal Theatre.Eight months ago she released her first solo album and gained several million followers on social media.Her career read like a road that had been carefully paved for her.And every stone in that road connected back to my husband.I didn't hire a private investigator.Claire is a public figure, and almost everything she had been given could be found in published articles.Adrian had attended three of her performances.Once from the middle of the audience, twice through the theater's side entrance.Every time, the press explained it as the chairman of a foundation supporting a young artist.I had thought so too.Last winter I even met her at a dinner.She wore a silver-gray gown and came over with a glass in h
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Chapter 5
Three days later, Adrian and Claire were in the headlines together.The photograph had been taken at two in the morning.Outside Claire's apartment building, Adrian was getting out of a car in a black hat. Even as a blurred profile, anyone who knew him would recognize him.The entertainment reporter who published it wrote:Duke Blackwood pays a late-night visit to a rising singer. Perhaps their relationship is more than patron and artist.The story wasn't up half an hour before it had more than a hundred thousand comments.Almost nobody believed it.You can build a story out of one profile shot? The duke and duchess have been married seventy years.Claire's label is backed by the Blackwood Foundation in the first place. What's wrong with him going to discuss work?Vampires don't work during the day. Should he hold meetings at noon under the sun?The documentary is about to drop. Somebody is obviously riding the wave.People who make up stories about other people's marriages are disgust
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Chapter 6
My mother, Rosalind, once told me that when she discovered the first betrayal, she also thought it was only an accident.Theodore had already been alive for more than two hundred years.The woman was a nineteen-year-old human maid on the estate.Rosalind fought with him and smashed everything in the bedroom that could be smashed, and she meant to leave the next morning.But one sentence from my father was enough to keep her there."She'll be dead in a few decades, and I'll be with you forever."Back then, my mother believed him.She decided eternity mattered more than a few decades, and that she was the one who had ultimately been chosen.Later the maid grew old and went away, and my father did come back to her.But a second woman appeared soon after, and then a third.Every one of them was young and vivid, full of a warmth my mother had lost long ago.Every time, my father said they weren't important.The relatives took turns comforting her too."He only wants something new.""He's ne
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Chapter 7
Adrian proposed to me in the winter of 1955.It wasn't the first time he had asked, but it was the first time I didn't refuse immediately.He stood by the frozen lake at Hartwell Manor, holding the ring my mother had left me.No reporters, no family witnesses, no roses spread across the ground.I had told him once that my mother hated roses.Because roses were what my father sent every mistress he ever had.Adrian remembered.He had prepared nothing at all. He only asked whether I was willing to trust him once."I can marry you."I looked at him. "But I have one condition.""Tell me.""I won't accept a third person.""This isn't about illegitimate children, and it isn't about whether you'd bring her in front of me.""Kissing, sleeping with someone, drinking from her throat, or any short thing you think isn't worth mentioning. I can't accept any of it."Adrian didn't laugh at me for being as naive as a human, and he didn't tell me that a vampire's life is too long for that.He took my h
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Chapter 8
I didn't follow him to the hotel.Forty-seven seconds of video, two years of door records, Victor's lie, and the room number Claire had sent were already proof enough.Going after him would only leave me standing outside another door, seeing an answer I already had.That isn't confirmation.It's self-torture.After Adrian left, I called Helen."Start getting everything ready."There were a few seconds of silence on the line."You're sure you don't want to wait any longer?""No more waiting."I had waited long enough to hear him repeat his promise out loud, and long enough to watch him walk to another woman right after he said it.Waiting further wouldn't produce a new truth.It would only produce more wounds.Over the next few days, using the anniversary preparations as my reason, I went back through everything in my name.Hartwell Manor, the old house in the south of France, my shares in the vineyard, the art fund, and the private collection in a Swiss bank.All of it was mine before
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Chapter 9
When the plane landed in Paris, sunrise was three hours away.I hadn't told anyone.The apartment is on the top floor of a nineteenth-century building on the right bank of the Seine. Seventy years ago the street was quiet. Now there is a restaurant and a gallery downstairs, and people are still drinking at the curb late at night.I stood across the street and looked up at the lit windows on the top floor.That was the bedroom.Adrian had said he was in London handling work.Claire was in our room.The answer was already clear enough.But I still needed to go inside.My mother's jewelry was in that apartment, along with several family documents and three paintings that had never been exhibited.I wasn't going to leave them beside the bed Adrian shared with his mistress.The building manager had been replaced by a young man.He didn't know me, and only after he checked my identification and the property papers did his face change."Mrs. Hartwell?""That's me.""I'm sorry, I had no idea y
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Chapter 10
Both of them turned to look at me at once.Claire was half sitting against the headboard with nothing but a white sheet wrapped around her. Her hair was loose over her shoulders, and two fresh puncture marks on the side of her neck were still weeping blood.Adrian sat beside her, his shirt open, red still smeared at the corner of his mouth.Our eyes met across the room.The tenderness and ease went out of his face in an instant."Evelyn?"Adrian shot to his feet.He moved so fast that he knocked over the glass by the bed and it fell onto the carpet. The dark red spread through the wool like blood that hadn't finished clotting.Claire sat up too.She clutched the sheet, and her eyes filled first with panic and then with something she couldn't quite hide, something like anticipation.She seemed to have been waiting for this moment all along."Why are you in Paris?" Adrian came toward me.I stepped back and avoided his hand.That one movement froze him where he stood."Don't touch me," I
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