Is My Darling Dreadful Thing Based On A True Story?

I was born into a line of vampire hunters, but I was hopeless at it. I couldn't pass a single trial, couldn't make a single kill, so my family dumped me in the countryside and left me to rot. When they brought me back at eighteen, they packaged me up and handed me to the vampire noble Lucian von Karstein as his lowest blood-slave. I had already made my peace with being drained dry and tortured to death. He turned out to be nothing like what I expected. He built me a villa with good light. Every morning before dawn he went out to the garden and picked flowers still wet with dew, and left them by my pillow. When his family ordered him to kill me, he gave up five hundred years of glory for my sake. He surrendered his power, his title, his castle. He traded everything he had to keep me safe, and in the end he ran with me, away from the whole vampire world. But there was a curse in my blood. Every time I let myself feel something for him, it punished me, gnawing my heart to pieces one inch at a time. So all I could do was call him useless, force him to buy me jewelry, drive him away from my bed, and humiliate him every way I knew how. He ended up living in the garage, hauling cargo to survive, supporting a spoiled, vicious wife who treated him like dirt. One night I crept into his little partition and pulled back his collar. There was a burn the length of my hand, gotten from hauling freight day and night just to buy me a gift. I hid in the bathroom and ran the tap to cover the sound of crying. Dabbing ointment on the wound, sniffling, I asked the thing in my blood: "Curse. When is he finally going to hate me and leave?" The curse looked at the back of his hand, wet where my tears had fallen, then at the faint tremor of his lashes, and sighed. He's going to love you for the rest of his life.

They say that your past is never really left in your past. I used to think that was dumb until I experienced it. Four years ago, I met the Devil. He gave me a chance to flee from him but I refused and ended up shooting him. Unfortunately for me, he returned four years later to claim me as his wife and drag me to Hell. He's going to make sure I pay for shooting him. He's going to punish me in the worst ways possible. He has promised to make me beg for mercy he'll never grant me. But then, he's not the only one hellbent on making my life a living Hell. There's another person causing havoc from the shadows. I would have to choose eventually- be with the Devil I know or side with the Devil I do not know.

She fell in love with the notorious antagonist. On the other hand, his heart beats only for one thing: her destruction. 🔞❗❗Trigger warning: This story contains mature themes, graphic content, explicit scenes, and may be triggering for some readers❗❗🔞

> “Stay still, Little Thorn… I want to taste you slowly.” His voice was velvet and ruin. His mouth, a weapon. And I—fool that I was—leaned closer. Before death wore a suit and called itself a lover, I used to believe in beauty. Before the blood. Before the runes. Before I painted the image that killed my parents—I believed my art could save me. Now I know better. I was just weeks from graduating when the painting came to me like a fever. I didn’t choose it. I didn’t plan it. My hands moved, possessed, dragging symbols I’d never seen and a face I’d never forgotten—his. Eyes red as wine. A crown pierced with thorns. And a girl in the center… me. Offering herself. I signed it with a mark I didn’t recognize. I sold it to a stranger. And days later, my parents were dead—no wounds, no reason, just... gone. The police said stress. I say fate. Now I’m being hunted by a world I didn’t know existed. Vampires with ancient courts and older grudges. Symbols that whisper in my blood. And Lucien D’Aragon—the vampire who says I summoned him with my brushstroke. That I belong to him. He says I’m his prophecy. His ruin. His Little Thorn. But I’m not just prey. Something is waking in me. Something hungry. Something I was never meant to survive. If I give in, I lose everything. If I fight, I might finally learn the truth. About my art. About my bloodline. About what really happened that night. And why he keeps whispering that I was painted for ruin... but made for him.

Do you have any dark secrets? I do. No matter how hot it gets, Mom never allows me to look unkempt in front of other people. Even after I start college, she still makes me wear undershirts when I go swimming. A classmate who can't stand me steals my undershirt and mocks me, saying I look like some pretty boy, all flimsy and effeminate. I refuse to take that lying down and want to duke it out with him. But when he looks at me, it's like he sees something terrifying. He whirls around and bolts. Later, he applies for a leave of absence. My dorm mates plan to visit him and ask me to go along. But the moment I reach the doorway, he grabs a broom and drives me away. "Get out, you freak! You're a monster!" he roars. Then, he turns to my dorm mates. "You'd better stay away from him. Otherwise, you'll be dead before you even figure out how it happened!" What he says completely baffles me, yet his words come true before long. Right before sitting for the grad school entrance exams, one of my dorm mates asks me out to blow off some steam. I go with him and end up drunk. When I wake up, I find him lying in the bathtub, the water dyed red with his blood. His body is already cold.

Nadia Reyes has died twelve times. Different centuries, different methods — same hands, same face, same cold eyes watching her take her final breath. At twenty-seven, armed with soul memories that science cannot explain and a rage that twelve lifetimes of dying has sharpened into something precise, she stops running. She spends eight months engineering an introduction to Dorian Ashvale — the man her soul recognizes as her killer — seduces him deliberately, and marries him with one goal: end the cycle on her terms before he ends it on his. Dorian doesn't remember any of it. He only knows that Nadia feels like a memory he was never supposed to have, and that marrying her is the first decision in his life that has ever felt completely, terrifyingly right. But as Nadia moves closer to executing her revenge, her forensic genealogy skills uncover something that fractures everything — Dorian's violence across lifetimes wasn't chosen. His soul has been hijacked by an ancient predatory entity that feeds on Nadia's interrupted purpose, growing stronger every time she dies before completing something she was always meant to finish. The monster she married didn't kill her. Something far older did — using his hands. As the entity begins to activate, triggering blackout episodes Dorian cannot control, Nadia faces the most dangerous realization of all thirteen lifetimes: she is falling in love with the man she planned to destroy. Book 1 ends when Dorian surfaces from his worst blackout yet to find Nadia bleeding — and looks at her with the eyes of a man who remembers nothing and is about to lose everything.