Venomous Attraction

Delicately Dangerous

The transformation had been agony. Adrien remembered the searing pain, the fire in his veins as Lucienne drained his life and replaced it with something dark and unnatural. He had screamed, begged for death, but she had held him through it all, her touch both cruel and tender.

When it was over, he had awoken to a world forever changed. His senses were sharper, his strength unnatural, but his heart no longer beat. The sunlight he had once loved burned his skin, forcing him into the shadows. The forest, once vibrant and alive, now seemed cold and alien.

“You are mine now,” Lucienne had told him, her golden eyes gleaming with satisfaction. “Together, we will be unstoppable.”

Adrien had hated her in that moment, but he had also been bound to her—by blood, by power, by the cruel twist of fate that had made him what he was.

The centuries to follow were a blur in their vampiric froze stage of age.

Lucienne had taken him under her wing, teaching him the ways of their kind. She reveled in destruction, using her immortality as a weapon, while Adrien resisted the pull of his darker instincts. He had fed when he had to, but only enough to survive, never enough to kill.

This difference had always been a source of tension between them. Lucienne viewed mortals as playthings, their lives insignificant in the face of eternity. Adrien, however, still clung to the remnants of his humanity, even as centuries passed and the world changed around him.

They had parted ways in the late 19th century, after a bitter argument that ended with Adrien walking away from her for the first time. He had spent the years since wandering from place to place, never staying too long, always looking over his shoulder. Lucienne had vowed to find him again, to bring him back into her fold, and Adrien knew she would never stop hunting him.