THE MONSTER INSIDE ME (#ONC2024)

PROLOGUE

As the night thickened around me, my heart hammered against my ribs, frantic and unsteady. I felt it then—the presence just beyond sight, patient and observant, waiting for the exact moment I would falter. Something had always been there, hovering at the edge of my perception. Watching. Learning.

I have always feared the dark.

To me, darkness was never empty. It was crowded with things that wanted me—things with teeth and hunger and intentions I could never understand. As a child, I hid beneath my sheets, convinced that if I couldn't see them, they couldn't see me. That illusion didn't last long. Monsters do not respect hiding places. They come whether you are prepared or not. That was the first truth I learned.

The dark was not merely the absence of light. It was a mirror. In it, my fears took shape and stared back at me without blinking. Failure gaped like an open mouth. Abandonment wrapped itself around my throat, cold and suffocating. Rejection whispered, endlessly, until silence itself became unbearable.

As I grew older, I understood that my fear was not childish imagination. It had roots. Deep ones. The darkness clung to me like a shroud, its shadows alive with suggestion. Reality blurred there. Shapes shifted. Every footstep, every creak of wood or flicker of light promised something waiting just out of reach—something wrong.

No matter how often I told myself I was safe, the darkness slipped into my thoughts and tightened its grip. The monsters of my childhood had not vanished. They had simply moved in, settling quietly inside my mind. I lived alert, rigid, forever bracing for impact. I could not go on like that. Sooner or later, fear demands confrontation.

That night, someone came to see me.

He was young. Beautiful. Radiant, almost painfully so—full of warmth and light. I hid anyway. I had learned better than to trust what shines.

"Why are you hiding?" he asked gently. "I won't hurt you."

I didn't believe him.

The knife was already beneath my pillow. My hand found it without hesitation. I drove it into his abdomen before he could finish another word.

When I pulled the blade free, blood poured out—bright, steaming, alive. I expected horror. Revulsion. Instead, I felt fascination. The heat of it drew me closer. The scent awakened something ancient and starving inside me. I knelt, trembling, my lips hovering over the wound, resisting for only a heartbeat before surrendering.

The taste was metallic, intoxicating. Power surged through me, violent and exhilarating. Whatever humanity I still possessed shattered in that instant, drowned beneath hunger and ecstasy. I understood then that the monster I had feared for so long had never been waiting in the dark.

It had been waiting in me.

I am Arabella Dagon. I drank the blood of an angel—and I became a monster.