Essence (Nectar 3)

Kyla’s Prologue:I hear him calling me, urging me, but all these particles keep swirling around me and around his voice. He sounds so far away.

It feels a bit like floating. It’s as if I’m weightless and everything around me keeps going from hazy to dark to hazy again. Like someone keeps messing with the lenses of my eyes, bringing things almost, but not quite, into focus.

But every so often his voice rouses me, like a distant whisper, sometimes urging me, sometimes pleading with me.Tristan’s Prologue:Everything is fucked.

Every. Fucking. Thing.

Fucked.Vacant. Her eyes are vacant.

And it’s my fault.

How the hell did this happen?The arrogance drilled into me for ten years meant that I had this blind and stupid notion that I could control everything around me. My arrogance was my downfall. Her downfall. Somehow I managed to fail every test, every trial. Was I so blood drunk? How did it all go so fucking wrong?

Did I underestimate my enemies and overestimate my importance? Was I so full of arrogance about my birthright, my foretold importance, omnipotence?

Was I so up my own goddamn ass that I just had no idea what I was up against, no idea that everyone around me wasn’t just there to keep doing my bidding as they’d done for a decade?

After they gave her to me, it was no longer about me and my wants. They were all about their own agendas.She said,“Maybe all this is what’ll help you learn to lead.”What a way to learn, build character, melt away the arrogance, losing the only thing that truly matters to me. Does this punishment fit my crimes? Probably. I can blame them, I can blame the blood, but it’s all on me. I’m to blame. I failed.

Does it even matter now why?

It all boils down to the fact that I’ve lost her. She’s in front of me but I have lost her. And it’s pretty fuckin’ fitting because I never deserved to have something that good.

There were so many crimes I committed. I felt entitled to take what I wanted. I went against every moral I’d been raised with. Because that’s what vampires are told to do. We’re told to forget everything we know and believe that we’re not only at the top of the food chain but that we’re weak if we don’t take what’s on offer.

And this vampire was told he was at the top of that top. So many violent acts, there’s so much blood, on my hands. She’d fall right out of love with me if she had the full picture.

The one thing I ironically succeeded at was getting her to admit that she loves me. And that was fucked, too, because it meant that she came to trust me. She had instincts all the way along that made her second guess things every step of the way but because she loved me and because I made promises to her she ultimately trusted me to keep her safe.

And I fucking failed her every single time.

And now she’s here, beside me, empty. My little cherry bomb now has vacant eyes, just like all the rest. Kyla is empty. My Kyla who was so full of life, of fire, of fireworks. I can’t feel her. And the silence, the emptiness is loud.

I wish I were empty, devoid of emotion. But no. I’m overflowing with it, spilling over with cold emptiness and regret.

Because of me she got violated by that motherfucking asshole. Because I was stupid enough to think I had my impulses under control, she gets pregnant, and then because I underestimated Adrian Constantin that was ripped away.

That piece of us... of the both of us… I felt it the minute it happened. It existed and it was real.

Before it happened all I could think of was how I didn’t want it because it’d put her at risk but as soon as conception happened I felt the shift and wanted to find some way to protect them both. But now it’s gone. All of it. The life our love created along with everything in Kyla that made her Kyla.

The more I think about what they did, all they did, the more I wish I’d taken my time with Claude, the more I want to get my fingers around Constantin’s heart. I want him to pay for what he’s done. I want him to pay for what I haven’t been able to do.

She’s empty and she’s been fed on by not one but two vampires who wanted to take her from me. Two. Fuck. Almost drained. Cluster fucking fail.

The idea of any other teeth on her drove me to where I wanted out of my skin, wanted to bury anyone who touched her that way, the way that was only supposed to be for me, send them straight to the fiery hot pits at the centre of the earth. And it happened because I didn’t stop it.