A Lover Cursed

Flashback to the Old Country

Early 2000's, The Old Country

Summer on the Mediterranean was beautiful. And the night life? A vampire's dream. Everything was alive in this little town, and from her villa dinning room window she could see it all. She had turned off the lights in her house so she could take in the view better, hoping that if she couldn't see the mess of papers on the table that maybe meant they didn't exist. She'd done all she could do this night, and now the only thing there was to do was wait.

How on earth could she still be crying? she thought as she wiped away more tears. The makeup on her face had long since been washed away, and her waves of thick red hair pulled back into a hasty bun and her heels lay discarded at the door by the garage. She shouldn't be crying. This was good news, really. Freedom was always good, always welcome. Verily, she couldn't even name all the emotions in her heart this night. Her mind kept going back to the proclamation she'd received in the mail this morning:

Slave owners are hereby commanded to release any blood slaves in their possession.

That was the verbiage Wrath, son of Wrath, and King across the sea, had used. Slave owner. Reading those words had shaken her to her core. She had never used those words to describe herself, or her parents for that matter. But that was her privilege, wasn't it? That she'd never had to think about it? Consider what it was like for them?

Or for Him?

Her family had never abused him, but only in the strictest sense of the word. Calantha herself had never touched him except when he gave her his vein, and then later when she was healthy enough to offer him hers, it always a platonic exchange. Her father had made the purchase when it became clear that Calantha would not survive without a completely dedicated blood source. Once she had been rescued from that Nazi hell-hole, she returned to her family and was lucky they had taken her back at all. After all, it wasn't unheard of for glymera fathers to turn away daughters who had been violated, no matter the circumstance.

She barely remembered those days herself. Apparently she had laid in her bed near death for months. These days, she thought, there might have been more options. Bone marrow transplants and gene targeted autoimmune therapies weren't a thing back then. But then an associate was "liquidating his shellan's collection," so her father made a purchase.

Leto came into her life and nursed her back to health, and at the time she had neither the strength or the where-with-all to ask where he had come from. And then they had never talked about the past. It was always the future with them. They were always onto the next thing: the next place to travel to; the next good book that came out; the next movie; the next new theater piece that was sure to make the both of them be melancholy for three nights, only to end in emotionally eating all the pasta in the house.

It was all a lie, and only now that it was over could she see that. A stupid fantasy. There was no one on this earth who was really going to be able to accept Calantha the way she was, with all the scars and baggage. Leto had only been required to by virtue of being a piece of property. If he had a chocie? It was likely he would run in the other direction as fast as his legs would take him.

She would have to move out of this house, she decided. They had picked it out together, and there was no way she could abide the silence his absence would create. After she finished medical school and a long research residency, she had decided to move out of her parent's home. So of course she took Leto with her. Why would she not? When she told her father this plan, he only looked at her with an unbearable expression of disappointment and regret. He knew there was no point in telling her no, but not because he thought she would disobey him. Because, why shouldn't she live with a male, platonic or not? There was no hope of her having a normal life with an aristocrat helleren, having aristocrat babies, and going to glymera parties every weekend. His hopes for her were already dead.