SPLIT

prologue

I know a monster, when I look into it's eyes. 

I know a monster, when the eyes have that sharp glaring look, the look that pierces right through you and feels like they are stabbing thousands of daggers into your skin, setting you on fire and making you beg for the lord himself to just take you away and put you out of your mystery. 

The monster that I knew, had the same piercing eyes. They were blue, like the ocean, on some days. And others, they could be black. It was such a strange and peculiar thing that I had never witnessed happening with anyone else.

I never saw the eyes of the monster turn to black until a day after meeting him. He was on the phone to someone, talking angrily and pacing up and down the kitchen so much that he was burning a line in the tiles on the floor. And I stayed silent, watching as the anger got more and more... frightening. I had never feared for my life so much.

Until he turned around and looked at me with those black eyes. And I ran for my life.

I always thought that Derek had a very strange family. He never really talked about him, even when we had been dating for two years. I always just thought he wasn't a big fan of them.

But the minute I looked into Carson Valdoor's eyes, those piercing ocean blue ones that turned to black like coal.

I knew why Derek never spoke of them.