Plot Twists Vampire Short Stories & Bias Marriage Novels

It was at our engagement banquet that I finally learned the truth. I wasn't the true heiress of a noble human family. I wasn't the "fated bride" destined to bear a half-blood child for the vampires. I was just the wrong baby someone had brought home from the hospital. A fake. I'd thought that Alexander, the boy who'd risked his life to drag me out of a burning house, the boy I'd grown up beside, would love me the same as always. Instead, in front of everyone, he let go of my hand and looked down at me with cold eyes. "Without that bloodline, do you really think you deserve to stand beside me?" Then he reached out and slid the engagement ring off my finger himself. He turned, and led the true heiress up to the high platform. Everyone laughed at me. The fake heiress, delusional enough to think she could marry the vampire heir. I was thrown out of the only home I'd ever known. The only kindness left to me was Alexander's, a scrap of charity that let me stay at his side as the lowest thing a vampire could keep. A blood slave. And then, later, I died in an explosion. Saving him. Alexander knelt in the blood and lost his mind, screaming at everyone around him to save me. But there was something he didn't know. I hadn't died. Later still, at a vampire banquet, he saw me again at last. I walked past him on another man's arm, smiling. And this time, it was his turn to lose his mind begging me to look back at him.

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.

Adrian and I grew up together. We were the match every old vampire family swore was meant to be. Then he saved a human girl who had wandered into our territory while hunters were closing in. After that, he became someone else. Cold. Distant. A stranger to me. Then he knelt before the Elders and asked them to dissolve our engagement. "The one I love is Clara. I can't marry Elena." The Council was furious. They forced Clara back into the human world and warned her never to set foot in vampire territory again. To keep her safe, Adrian married me anyway, and never saw her again. After the wedding, I gave him everything I had. I miscarried again and again. I nearly died bringing his heir into the world, his heart never turned to me. Three years later, hunters came for us. I fought tooth and nail to save him, yet I still failed. As he died, he held my hand, his voice barely there. "If there's a next life, I hope I never meet you." "All I ever wanted was to let everything go and be with Clara." He died first. My own wounds took me soon after. When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day of the family council. Adrian was kneeling before the Elders, begging them to let him be with the human girl. Everyone expected me to fall apart. But this time, I only slid the engagement ring off my finger and set it down in front of him. "Adrian. You can have her."

I was the only human at the vampire banquet, and the fiancée of the Prince's heir, Lucien. As a child, I once saved Lucien from vampire hunters, and the Prince and his wife chose me for him, sealing our engagement. Everyone envied me. I was merely the daughter of a human nobleman, yet I had the fortune to marry above my station into the Prince's family. To be worthy of him, I worked to make everything perfect. But among vampires, I always seemed slow and clumsy. They moved faster than me, heard far more than I could, and even the simplest vampire customs took me longer to memorize. Every time I reacted a step too slow, Lucien would remind me with a frown. "How are you ever going to be a proper wife like this?" He always said that compared to the girl he grew up with, his former fiancée, I still fell far short. Every single time, I was laughed at without mercy. Lucien would never let anyone hurt me, but he never once defended my dignity. Eventually, I broke off the engagement and decided to marry someone else. Lucien's face darkened. "You're really going to marry this human?" "Yes. Because he has never once called me stupid." Lucien scoffed. "That's your reason?" I nodded. "That's my reason."

On the day of our wedding, my vampire husband confessed that he had a severe emotional disorder. He could barely understand other people's feelings and had no idea how to respond to them. Because I had already fallen in love with him, I chose to accept it. I believed that if I gave him enough time, he would eventually learn how to love me. The day the vampire hunters attacked, I threw myself in front of a bullet meant for him. A bullet struck my arm, and the pain nearly brought me to my knees. Adrian Blackwood only glanced down at the carpet. "Go get that wound taken care of." He frowned. "Don't get blood everywhere." Every vampire in our circles knew my husband didn't love me. I had become the punchline everyone whispered about. But I never blamed him. I truly believed he simply wasn't capable of loving anyone. Until I finally got pregnant and went to surprise him with the news, only to hear his human blood servant laughing on the other side of his office door. "She actually believes you have an emotional disorder?" To my shock, Adrian laughed too. His voice was so gentle I hardly recognized it. "She loves me that much. Of course she believes it." "If it weren't for an heir, I never would have married her." I stood outside the door and looked down at my arm. The scar from the silver bullet was still there, jagged and ugly. There was no point in sharing this surprise anymore. I would take my baby and disappear from his world for good.

I came from a human noble family that had long since fallen on hard times. Five years ago, I found a vampire in the forest, badly wounded by hunters and with no memory of who he was. Cassian and I fell in love. He said he would love me the same way for the rest of his life. Then hunters attacked again, and he took another bullet protecting me. When he woke in the hospital, every one of Cassian's memories had come back. He was the heir of the vampire prince, and he had a fiancee waiting for him. Overnight, the husband who had sworn to protect me forever began looking at me with distaste. I stood outside his hospital room and heard him say it. "Marrying that human was an accident. "I'll divorce her. The betrothal stands." He said that without the accident five years ago, I would never have been good enough for him. I had tried so hard to carry his child, and one miscarriage after another had wrecked my health. With his memory back, he had no tenderness left for me. He only said he would pay me off. I kept watch outside his room and begged him to think it over, and he would not even look at me. Then, at their engagement party, I watched with my own eyes as Cassian kissed someone else, tenderly, as though he could not get enough of her. When he passed me, his eyes held nothing but indifference. That was the moment I finally let go. Later I married someone else. And Cassian stood outside the chapel with red eyes and a shaking voice, saying he regretted it.