The goblet sits on the table beside me, still half-filled with wine from dinner. Just ordinary wine, red as blood, red as rage.
I don't think. Thinking requires a composure I no longer possess.
My hand closes around the crystal, arm draws back, and the goblet flies through candlelit air like a scream given form.
It strikes him between the shoulder blades, wine exploding across black fabric like arterial spray. The crystal shatters against ancient stone, a thousand pieces catching light as they fall.
The silence that follows feels like the world holding its breath.
He stops. Doesn't turn. Just stands there, wine dripping from his coat onto floors that have seen centuries of blood, centuries of violence, but perhaps never this—a human girl attacking the monster who owns her.
"You're a beast!" The words tear from my throat, raw and bleeding. "A hideous, monstrous beast who keeps women as trophies and calls it marriage! Who builds shrines to the dead whilst poisoning himself to avoid the living!"
Still, he doesn't turn.
But I see it—the way his shoulders tense, the way his hands curl into fists at his sides. The careful control begins to fracture.
"You claim me as property whilst refusing to touch me!" My voice rises, hysteria bleeding through. "What am I to you? Your conscience? Your punishment? Your proof that you're somehow better than the monsters outside these walls?!"
Now he turns. His eyes burn darker than I've ever seen them—not red, not yet, but something worse.
The absolute black of spaces between stars, of voids that swallow light and never give it back.
"You're nothing." He steps back into the room. "A political necessity. A temporary inconvenience until—"
"Until what? Until you finally lose control? Until the wine stops working?"
I laugh, and it sounds like breaking.
"I've seen you in that cellar. Tell me, when you finally succumb to it, will you even remember my name? Or will I just be 'the one after Isabelle'—forever defined by not being her?"
"Stop."
"The replacement bride. The substitute. The one who had the audacity to have a pulse whilst living in a monument to dead love—"
"I said stop."
"She's been dead for fifty years!" The scream tears from my throat. "Fifty years, and you're still dying for her, still killing yourself slowly rather than live without her. And I'm supposed to what—exist in her shadow? Pretend I don't see you visiting her room? Pretend I don't know you'd trade a thousand living wives for one more moment with your precious corpse?"
He moves. Faster than thought, faster than fear. One moment he stands by the door, the next I'm slammed back against the table, the impact driving air from my lungs.
His hands bracket my shoulders, body looming above me, and I react on instinct—bringing my knee up hard toward his ribs.
He catches my leg before it connects, fingers closing around my thigh with bruising force. "Don't."
I try to claw at his face with my free hand, nails seeking those perfect marble features. He snatches my wrist mid-strike, then my other when I swing it toward his throat.
In one fluid motion, he pins both my hands above my head with a single grip, his other hand pressing my hip down when I try to buck him off.
"Stop fighting." His voice comes out wrong, distorted by the fangs beginning to extend.
"Let me go!" I thrash against his hold, but it's like fighting a stone.
He shifts his weight, using his body to cage me completely, and I feel the futility of it—a human girl trapped beneath centuries of predatory strength.
The wood under my back feels cold as winter graves, but he burns hotter—rage or hunger or both radiating from him like fever. My chest heaves with exertion, with fear, with something else I refuse to name.
"You want to know what you are?"
He leans closer, and I can see the wine stains on his coat like blood, can smell the pomegranate poison on his breath.
"You're proof that I am exactly the beast you name me. Every night I don't feed from you, every moment I restrain myself, only proves how much I want to destroy you!"
I feel the tremor running through him—not fear, but the effort of holding back something catastrophic. His grip on my wrists tightens until I know there will be bruises, marks of possession I never asked for.
"Then do it." The words escape before wisdom can catch them. "Be what you are."
His hand moves to my throat, not gripping, just resting there. I feel my pulse hammering against his palm, know he can sense the blood moving through my veins, know he's memorising the rhythm of my heart.
"You have no idea what I truly am." The words come out against my ear, and I feel the brush of fangs and lips against my skin. "What I could do to you. What I think about doing every time you enter a room smelling of life and lavender and impossible hope."
My breath catches, becomes something else. Not quite fear. Not quite desire. Something worse—understanding.
He's dying by degrees to avoid killing me, and I'm taunting him toward the very thing he's poisoning himself to prevent.
"I dream about it," he continues, and his voice has dropped to barely above a whisper. "How you'd taste. How you'd feel. How you'd sound when I finally…"
He stops. Pulls back just enough to meet my eyes, and I see it—the monster fully revealed. Fangs extended, eyes beginning to ring with red, the veins beneath starting to darken.
But also something that looks almost like anguish.
"This is what you married," he says.
The air between us feels electric, charged with violence and want and the terrible possibility that we're both about to do something irreversible.
His gaze drops to my mouth, then to my throat. To the pulse visible beneath skin that suddenly feels too thin, too fragile.
I see the moment his control begins to truly fracture. The way his breathing becomes unnecessary but desperate. The way his hand tightens almost imperceptibly against my throat.
The way he leans in, mouth opening, fangs catching candlelight like promises of beautiful destruction.
His mouth opens—those fangs fully extended, cathedral-sharp, promising communion of the most permanent kind. The scent of pomegranate wine clings to him, but beneath it lurks iron and hunger and the raw edge of a predator remembering its nature.
The veins beneath his eyes spread like ink through water, black corruption mapping itself across alabaster skin. His pupils have consumed everything, leaving only darkness ringed with the thinnest thread of crimson.
This creature before me—this is what poetry and roses attempt to disguise.
This is what the poison keeps chained.
And I'm the one who just unlocked the cage.