Chapter 1

Elena's POV

The blood was draining out of me through the hole in my chest.

I lay there shaking, my mind slipping in and out of consciousness from the pain.

Even now, I couldn't stop replaying that final scene.

Ryan, my beloved husband, now the crowned Vampire Prince, stood in his finest clothes, his arm wrapped around Vicky.

He looked at me with cold, contemptuous eyes.

“You have no use to me anymore,” he said.

Vicky wore the ruby necklace my mother had left me. She was smiling as she drove the knife into my chest.

“Elena, what does it matter that your bloodline is purer than mine?”

I lay helpless on the bed, still bleeding heavily from childbirth, too weak to lift a hand.

“Your child, your husband, your mother's inheritance — all of it is mine now.”

I watched her tighten her grip on the blade and force it through my heart. The pain spread through me until I could barely feel anything at all.

“I told you long ago: stop hoping that someone will come for you. Stop hoping anyone will ever love you.”

Vicky's smile was merciless. She savored every moment of my suffering.

She followed my gaze toward Ryan and pressed herself into my husband's arms, her face soft and pretty.

“Ryan told me after your wedding. He's only ever loved me.”

They kissed, deeply, without a single thought for my blood still on their hands.

I summoned the last of my strength to raise my hand toward him.

I wanted to ask why. What had I done wrong? Why had he used me like this, only to take my life in the end?

I had loved him so completely. I would have torn out my own heart and given it to him.

Had all of it been a lie?

But the hole in my chest kept growing colder, and in the end, I couldn't say a word.

Ryan watched me die with cold eyes, not a trace of the tenderness I had once known remaining in them. Nothing was left but indifference, and deep, undisguised revulsion.

I laughed at myself, a bitter, soundless laugh, and let the pain drag me down into the dark.

So it had been foolish infatuation from the very beginning.

Ryan had never felt even the smallest thing for me. Only ever use.

Mother…

I thought of that gentle, blurred face from my memories and could only smile bitterly.

“I'm sorry, Mother.”

I was stubborn. I chose the wrong path.

If I could do it again, I would never devote my life to someone undeserving so easily…

My consciousness drifted in and out of some vast, formless sea.

I had expected to die there. But instead, voices began pressing in from somewhere nearby.

“Father! Why did Ryan choose her? Elena is just a loveless bastard!”

“Why should she be the one to marry the heir to the throne? I'm the one who has to settle for a common human!”

Father lowered his voice to a sharp reprimand.

“That's enough, Vicky.”

“The Elder Council and the royal family chose her together. This is not something you can simply change because you want to.”

But Vicky wasn't listening.

She threw herself in front of Father and burst into tears, her face the picture of wounded innocence.

“But Ryan complimented my dress before. He even personally walked me home to the human quarter.”

“How could he suddenly choose Elena?”

Stepmother added her voice from the side.

“Darling, Vicky is right.”

“A girl like Elena is entirely unfit to be the bride of the heir to the vampire King.”

“She's never been likeable. If she actually marries into that family, she'll only embarrass us.”

That sharp, familiar voice.

When I opened my eyes, everything was still blurred.

A crystal chandelier, a sitting room carpeted in deep red, a fire burning in the hearth, and the damp, cold smell of rain in the air.

I looked down and saw that I was draped in a black cloak.

It carried the particular chill of a vampire's touch, and yet underneath it, a faint, lingering scent.

My fingertips went still.

Ryan's coat.

Tonight was the annual vampire gala.

The night he had proposed to me in front of everyone. The night I became a vampire's bride.

Memories came flooding in.

At the gala, no one had wanted to talk to me. Father and Stepmother had been busy parading Vicky through the crowd, laughing as they introduced their daughter to the vampire nobility.

While I, the eldest daughter with the truly pure bloodline, stood alone in a corner.

Later, I slipped away to the frozen lake for some air.

The next moment, I felt a force strike me from behind.

I didn't even have time to turn. I plunged straight into the bone-deep cold of the water.

It flooded my nose and mouth.

I fought as hard as I could, but my body only sank further.

I thought of Ryan's face. I thought of the lover I had been secretly seeing, and I stared up at the surface of the lake with every last bit of longing I had.

We had always been forced to meet in secret.

He would appear at my window like a ghost and invite me, with quiet gentlemanly grace, to watch the moon with him.

He would hold me around the waist and tell me I was the person he cared for most in all the world.

I couldn't bear leaving him alone and departing before him..

Just when I had given up and accepted that I would die that night, unwanted and unnoticed, Ryan jumped into the lake and pulled me out.

He lifted me in his arms in front of everyone, soaking wet, and draped his coat around my shoulders.

Then he turned to face the crowd, his voice calm and absolute.

“From this day forward, no one is to harm Elena.”

“She will be my bride.”

In my last life, that was the moment I fell completely, fell so hard I lost my dignity, my judgment, and in the end, my life.

I had believed I was finally, truly chosen.

But I didn't understand until the moment I died.

It wasn't love.

It was a hunter selecting the most useful, the most easily deceived prey.