Love You to Death
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.