The Rule He Broke

Her:
People always say the same thing when it comes to love. Don't fall for someone else until you learn how to love yourself first. A nice thought. A comforting one. The kind of thing people say when they've never had their entire world fall apart before they've even had the chance to build one. People like me weren't supposed to get the kind of love that changed everything. People like me were supposed to survive.

Then I met Ryder Maddox.
The boy who would break the oldest rule his kind had ever created.
The rule that was never meant to be broken.

Him:
The hardest part about living forever was pretending you hadn't. Humans thought immortality was a gift. They imagined endless years filled with adventure, power, and freedom. They could never have imagined the loneliness. They never imagined watching everyone you ever cared about grow old while you stayed exactly the same. Never imagined learning to say goodbye hundreds of times.

The first rule every vampire learned. The one carved into stone beneath the oldest vampire cities. Never fall in love with a human. Once before, a vampire loved a human. And the world almost burned because of it. The Elders never let anyone forget. They told the story as a warning. They told us humans were a weakness. They told us the vampire had chosen one human over thousands of his own kind. If a vampire became attached to a human...The human had to die. No exceptions. No second chances. For two hundred and seventeen years, I had accepted that. I had followed every rule. I had done everything expected of me.
Until today.
Until Serenity Conners.

He wasn't supposed to fall for her.
She wasn't supposed to know of his existence.